Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America 0773543805, 9780773543805

Table of contents :
Cover
Volume One
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures and Tables
Preface and Acknowledgments
Note on the Writing System Used in This Book
1 Introduction to the Book: Ethnobotanical and Ethnoecological Knowledge across Time and Space
Part One: History
2 Into the Past: Ancient Relationships among People, Plants, and Environments
3 Reflections on Plant Names in Understanding the History of People-Plant Relationships
4 Change, Loss, and Adaptation of Plant Traditions
Part Two: Development
5 Plants as Food: Development, Diversity, Dissemination
6 Plant Use in Technology over Time and Space
7 Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions
Appendix 1: Major Sources of Information for the Book
Appendix 2: Names of Selected Native Plant Species in Indigenous Languages of Northwestern North America
Appendix 3: Names of Two Introduced Plants (Turnip and Potato) in Indigenous Languages of Northwestern North America
Notes
Volume Two
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures and Tables
Preface
Part Three – Integration and Management
8 Moving for the Harvest: Seasonal Rounds and Plant Knowledge
9 Cultural Institutions Related to Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Practice
10 Trade and Exchange: Sharing Plant Products and Ethnobotanical Knowledge across Geographical and Cultural Space
11 Management and Sustainability of Plant Resources and Habitats
Part Four – Underlying Philosophy
12 Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge
13 Worldview and Belief Systems in Ethnobotanical Knowledge Systems
14 Ancient Pathways and New Pathways for Retaining and Renewing Botanical and Environmental Knowledge Systems for the Future
Notes
References
Index of Plant Species
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
X
Z
General Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y

Citation preview

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge Volume One

M c Gill-Queen’s Native and Northern Series (In memory of Bruce G. Trigger) Sarah Carter and Arthur J. Ray, Editors

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

When the Whalers Were Up North Inuit Memories from the Eastern Arctic Dorothy Harley Eber The Challenge of Arctic Shipping Science, Environmental Assessment, and Human Values Edited by David L. VanderZwaag and Cynthia Lamson Lost Harvests Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy Sarah Carter Native Liberty, Crown Sovereignty The Existing Aboriginal Right of Self-Government in Canada Bruce Clark Unravelling the Franklin Mystery Inuit Testimony David C. Woodman Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1841 James R. Gibson From Wooden Ploughs to Welfare The Story of the Western Reserves Helen Buckley In Business for Ourselves Northern Entrepreneurs Wanda A. Wuttunee For an Amerindian Autohistory An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic Georges E. Sioui Strangers Among Us David Woodman When the North Was Red Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia Dennis A. Bartels and Alice L. Bartels From Talking Chiefs to a Native Corporate Elite The Birth of Class and Nationalism among Canadian Inuit Marybelle Mitchell Cold Comfort My Love Affair with the Arctic Graham W. Rowley

14 The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7 Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council with Walter Hildebrandt, Dorothy First Rider, and Sarah Carter 15 This Distant and Unsurveyed Country A Woman’s Winter at Baffin Island, 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

1857–1858

W. Gillies Ross Images of Justice Dorothy Harley Eber Capturing Women The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West Sarah A. Carter Social and Environmental Impacts of the James Bay Hydroelectric Project Edited by James F. Hornig Saqiyuq Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women Nancy Wachowich in collaboration with Apphia Agalakti Awa, Rhoda Kaukjak Katsak, and Sandra Pikujak Katsak Justice in Paradise Bruce Clark Aboriginal Rights and Self-Government The Canadian and Mexican Experience in North American Perspective Edited by Curtis Cook and Juan D. Lindau Harvest of Souls The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632–1650 Carole Blackburn Bounty and Benevolence A History of Saskatchewan Treaties Arthur J. Ray, Jim Miller, and Frank Tough The People of Denendeh Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories June Helm The Marshall Decision and Native Rights Ken Coates

26 The Flying Tiger Women Shamans and Storytellers of the Amur Kira Van Deusen 27 Alone in Silence European Women in the Canadian North before 1940 Barbara E. Kelcey 28 The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher An Elizabethan Adventure Robert McGhee 29 Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture Renée Hulan 30 The White Man’s Gonna Getcha The Colonial Challenge to the Crees in Quebec Toby Morantz 31 The Heavens Are Changing Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity Susan Neylan 32 Arctic Migrants/Arctic Villagers The Transformation of Inuit Settlement in the Central Arctic David Damas 33 Arctic Justice On Trial for Murder - Pond Inlet, 1923 Shelagh D. Grant 34 The American Empire and the Fourth World Anthony J. Hall 35 Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay Stuart Houston, Tim Ball, and Mary Houston 36 Uqalurait An Oral History of Nunavut Compiled and edited by John Bennett and Susan Rowley 37 Living Rhythms Lessons in Aboriginal Economic Resilience and Vision Wanda Wuttunee 38 The Making of an Explorer George Hubert Wilkins and the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1916 Stuart E. Jenness 39 Chee Chee A Study of Aboriginal Suicide Alvin Evans

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Strange Things Done Murder in Yukon History Ken S. Coates and William R. Morrison Healing through Art Ritualized Space and Cree Identity Nadia Ferrara Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing Coming Home to the Village Peter Cole Something New in the Air The Story of First Peoples Television Broadcasting in Canada Lorna Roth Listening to Old Woman Speak Natives and Alternatives in Canadian Literature Laura Smyth Groening Robert and Francis Flaherty A Documentary Life, 1883–1922 Robert J. Christopher Talking in Context Language and Identity in Kwakwaka’wakw Society Anne Marie Goodfellow Tecumseh’s Bones Guy St-Denis Constructing Colonial Discourse Captain Cook at Nootka Sound Noel Elizabeth Currie The Hollow Tree Fighting Addiction with Traditional Healing Herb Nabigon The Return of Caribou to Ungava A.T. Bergerud, Stuart Luttich, and Lodewijk Camps Firekeepers of the Twenty-First Century First Nations Women Chiefs Cora J. Voyageur Isuma Inuit Video Art Michael Robert Evans Outside Looking In Viewing First Nations Peoples in Canadian Dramatic Television Series Mary Jane Miller Kiviuq An Inuit Hero and His Siberian Cousins Kira Van Deusen

55 Native Peoples and Water Rights Irrigation, Dams, and the Law in Western Canada Kenichi Matsui 56 The Rediscovered Self Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice Ronald Niezen 57 As affecting the fate of my absent husband Selected Letters of Lady Franklin Concerning the Search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

1848–1860

Edited by Erika Behrisch Elce The Language of the Inuit Syntax, Semantics, and Society in the Arctic Louis-Jacques Dorais Inuit Shamanism and Christianity Transitions and Transformations in the Twentieth Century Frédéric B. Laugrand and Jarich G. Oosten No Place for Fairness Indigenous Land Rights and Policy in the Bear Island Case and Beyond David T. McNab Aleut Identity Tradition and Modernity in an Indigenous Fishery Katherine L. Reedy-Mascher Earth into Property Aboriginal History and the Making of Global Capitalism Anthony J. Hall Collections and Objections Aboriginal Material Culture in Southern Ontario, 1791–1914 Michelle A. Hamilton These Mysterious People Shaping History and Archaeology in a Northwest Coast Community Susan Roy

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Telling It to the Judge Taking Native History to Court Arthur J. Ray Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada Echoes and Exchanges Edited by Anna Hoefnagels and Beverley Diamond In Twilight and in Dawn A Biography of Diamond Jenness Barnett Richling Women’s Work, Women’s Art Nineteenth-Century Northern Athapaskan Clothing Judy Thompson Warriors of the Plains The Arts of Plains Indian Warfare Max Carocci Reclaiming Indigenous Planning Edited by Ryan Walker, Ted Jojola, and David Natcher Setting All the Captives Free Capture, Adjustment, and Recollection in Allegheny Country Ian K. Steele Before Ontario The Archaeology of a Province Edited by Marit K. Munson and Susan M. Jamieson Becoming Inummarik Men’s Lives in an Inuit Community Peter Collings Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America Nancy J. Turner

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America

Volume One The History and Practice of Indigenous Plant Knowledge

Nancy J. Turner

McGill-Queen’s University Press | Montreal & Kingston | London | Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 ISBN 978-0-7735-4380-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-8539-3 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-8540-9 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the McLean Foundation. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Turner, Nancy J., 1947–, author Ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge : ethnobotany and ecological wisdom of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America / Nancy J. Turner. (McGill-Queen’s Native and northern series ; 74) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: Volume one. The history and practice of indigenous plant knowledge – Volume two. The place and meaning of plants in indigenous cultures and worldviews. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4380-5 (v. 1 : bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4380-5 (v. 2 : bound).– ISBN 978-0-7735-8539-3 (v. 1 : ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8540-9 (v. 1 : ePUB).– ISBN 978-0-7735-8539-3 (v. 2 : ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8540-9 (v. 2 : ePUB) 1. Indians of North America – Ethnobotany – Canada, Western. 2. Indians of North America – Ethnobotany – Canada, Northern. 3. Traditional ecological knowledge – Canada, Western. 4. Traditional ecological knowledge – Canada, Northern. 5. Indians of North America – Ethnobotany – Northwestern States. 6. Traditional ecological knowledge – Northwestern States. I. Title. II. Series: McGill-Queen’s Native and northern series ; 74 E98.B7T87 2014   581.6’3097

C2014-900602-0 C2014-900603-9

Set in 10/13 Gentium Plus with Sina Nova, Cyntho Pro, and Cyntho Slab Pro Book design and typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital Botanical illustrations by Hein Nouwens/shutterstock.com, based on Meyers Konversations-Lexik, 1897

Co n t e n ts

Volume One Figures and Tables ix Preface and Acknowledgments xv Note on the Writing System Used in This Book xxxi 1 Introduction to the Book: Ethnobotanical and Ethnoecological Knowledge across Time and Space 3 Part One | History 2 Into the Past: Ancient Relationships among People, Plants, and Environments 43 3 Reflections on Plant Names in Understanding the History of People-Plant Relationships 117 4 Change, Loss, and Adaptation of Plant Traditions 191 Part Two | Development 5 Plants as Food: Development, Diversity, Dissemination 263 6 Plant Use in Technology over Time and Space 335 7 Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions 415 Appendix 1: Major Sources of Information for the Book 467

Appendix 2: Names of Selected Native Plant Species in Indigenous Languages of Northwestern North America 473 Appendix 3: Names of Two Introduced Plants (Turnip and Potato) in Indigenous Languages of Northwestern North America 507 Notes 515 Volume Two Figures and Tables ix Preface xiii Part Three – Integration and Management 8 Moving for the Harvest: Seasonal Rounds and Plant Knowledge 3 9 Cultural Institutions Related to Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Practice 51 10 Trade and Exchange: Sharing Plant Products and Ethnobotanical Knowledge across Geographical and Cultural Space 101 11 Management and Sustainability of Plant Resources and Habitats 145 Part Four – Underlying Philosophy 12 Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge 231 13 Worldview and Belief Systems in Ethnobotanical Knowledge Systems 297 14 Ancient Pathways and New Pathways for Retaining and Renewing Botanical and Environmental Knowledge Systems for the Future 351 Notes 413 References 441 Index of Plant Species 503 General Index  513

viii | Contents

F i g u r e s a n d Ta b l e s

Figures Unless otherwise indicated, photographs have been taken by the author. P -1 Yukon River after the spring breakup, Dawson City, YT , May 2010 xvii P -2 Northern tundra landscape, similar to that possibly encountered by the earliest peoples in North America (photo by Robert D. Turner) xviii P -3 Great, or Leichtlin’s, camas (Camassia leichtlinii) xx P -4 Nodding onion (Allium cernuum) xxi 1-1 Major vegetation zones of northwestern North America, based on ecological regions of North America as defined in the North American Environmental Atlas (Commission for Environmental Cooperation 2009) (map by Dr Nancy Mackin) 9 1-2 Languages and cultural areas of northwestern North America, based on Alaska Native Language Center (2011), Driver (1969), Helm and Sturtevant (1982), Krauss and Golla (1982), Poser (2008a, 2008b), Suttles (1990b), Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia (1994), D.E. Walker (1998), Yukon Executive Council (2011), and Yukon Native Language Centre (2011) (map by Dr Nancy Mackin) 11 1-3 Western redcedar (Thuja plicata), a species closely associated with the Northwest Coast cultural area 15

1-4 Tsilhqot’in elder Helena Myers harvesting edible cambium from chendi (lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta), 1990 (photo by her daughter Linda Smith) 17 1-5 Paper birch (Betula papyrifera) 25 1-6 Birch-bark roll, probably between 500 and 1,500 years old, from an archaeological site at Kamloops, BC (courtesy of George Nicholas and Kamloops Indian Band) 26 2-1 Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) leaves and tubers 44 2-2 Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) tubers, approximately 3,500 years old, from the Pitt Polder archaeological site in Katzie territory (photo by Tanja Hoffmann, reproduced with permission of the Katzie First Nation) 44 2-3 Bog cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos), a key plant resource of the Katzie and other First Nations of the Fraser Valley, BC  46 2-4 Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis), an edible fruit whose pollen occurs in early coastal palaeoecological sites 49 2-5 Seaside strawberries (Fragaria chiloensis), likely one of the early coastal plant resources of the Alaska and Haida Gwaii regions 54 2-6 Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) bed along the coast of Haida Gwaii, an important marine alga for First Peoples and the foundation of a key coastal ecosystem 73 2-7 Bulbs and bulblets of northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis), disturbed by grizzly bear digging, Kitlope Valley, BC  76 2-8 Keatley Creek archaeological site above the middle Fraser River, BC , showing pithouse depressions 93 2-9 Twined spruce-root hat found with the frozen body of a young man, in the Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį (Long Ago Person Found) archaeological site, from a glacier at the headwaters of the Tatshenshini River, BC , about 300 years old (Yukon government photo by Sarah Gaunt, Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, reproduced with permission) 105 3-1 Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule), growing in Gitga’at Ts’msyen territory 118 3-2 Tsilhqot’in elder Mabel Solomon holding the peeled budstalks of cowparsnip (Heracleum maximum), an important springtime green vegetable widely used in the study region 124

x  |  Figures and Tables

3-3 Cones and seeds of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) (photo by Robert D. Turner) 135 3-4 Hazelnut (Corylus cornuta) (photo by Robert D. Turner) 136 3-5 Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) 143 4-1 Haida potatoes, said to be genetically similar to the “Ozette” potato of Washington, originally introduced to Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island 199 4-2 Sweetflag (Acorus americanus) in the Salmon River estuary, Shuswap Lake, Neskonlith Secwepemc territory, showing a portion of the rhizome 204 4-3 Plum trees spreading out in an old orchard at a traditional campsite on the central coast of British Columbia 206 4-4 Tsilhqot’in family travelling by horse and wagon on the road to Bella Coola, near Hanceville, BC , 1959 (photo by Maurice Chandler) 208 4-5 Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), whose leaves were adopted for smoking, alone or with tobacco, along the Northwest Coast in the fur trade era 212 4-6 Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii), a native perennial clover, noted by James Douglas in July 1842 when he arrived at what was to become the city of Victoria 230 5-1 Coastal root vegetables from Kingcome Inlet, BC  267 5-2 Herring spawn on hemlock boughs (photo by Robert D. Turner) 267 5-3 Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) 268 5-4 Dried bulbs of yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum) 284 5-5 Nlaka’pamux pack basket, which belonged to Annie York of Spuzzum, BC (photo by Robert D. Turner) 284 5-6 Wapato patch along the Columbia River near Portland, OR , at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge 285 5-7 Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa), showing cut away rootstock and frond (photo by Robert D. Turner) 294 5-8 Salal berries (Gaultheria shallon) 297 5-9 Stl’atl’imx elder Edith O’Donaghey, 1988, with medium-sized coiled cedarroot berry-picking basket (photo by Robert D. Turner) 299

Figures and Tables  |  xi

5-10 Rolled-up dried berry cakes, prepared by Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (photo by Robert D. Turner) 301 5-11 Whipping soapberries (Shepherdia canadensis) into a frothy confection, Nass Valley, BC (photo courtesy of Diana Smith and Deanna Nyce, director of Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a) 304 6-1 Haida celebration at the Haida Heritage Centre at Kaay Llnagaay, BC , 2008, with many people wearing traditional cedar-bark (and spruce-root) hats 337 6-2 Ditidaht elder and cultural specialist John Thomas holding a yew-wood root-digging stick he carved 348 6-3 Mary Thomas harvesting pin cherry (Prunus pensylvanica) bark for use as decoration for the rims of her birch-bark baskets (photo by Robert D. Turner) 354 6-4 Bentwood box of western redcedar wood with lid made by Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation 360 6-5 Snowshoes of steamed and bent Pacific yew saplings, made by Alec Peters, Lil’wat, of Mount Currie, and strung by Nellie Wallace Peters (photo by Robert D. Turner) 362 6-6 Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), a major fibre plant of the Interior Plateau 372 6-7 Sam Mitchell, Stl’atl’imx plant expert, of Xaxl’ep, demonstrates the twisting of “rope willow” (Salix exigua) for making rope 374 6-8 Mabel Joe, Nlaka’pamux of Shulus, with a berry-drying mat she made of common reed grass (Phragmites australis) from Nicola Lake, BC  376 6-9 Cattail basket for wapato, made by Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas, in the style of her grandmothers 378 7-1 Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), the quintessential medicinal herb 416 7-2 Balsamroot, or spring sunflower (Balsamorhiza sagittata) (photo by Robert D. Turner) 430 7-3 Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas preparing to harvest red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) for medicine 442 7-4 Saanich elder Elsie Claxton preparing the ingredients for her “ten-barks” medicine 461

xii  |  Figures and Tables

Tables 2-1 Early plant food resources of northern coastal and Arctic North America available to ancient coastline and Beringian travellers of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene times 61 2-2 Potential early plant (nonfood) resources of northern coastal and Arctic North America available to ancient coastline and Beringian travellers, based on more recent usage of these plants by Indigenous peoples of Kamchatka, the Aleutians, Alaska, and northern British Columbia 70 3-1 Names for highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule) derived from the ProtoSalish term t’əls 121 3-2 Selected examples of descriptive plant names 128 3-3 Selected examples of plant names reflecting uses 130 3-4 Selected examples of plant names reflecting associations with animals 131 3-5 Borrowed and cognate names for Lysichiton americanus (skunk-cabbage) between some Coast Salish and Wakashan languages 144 3-6 Borrowed and cognate names for Lysichiton americanus (skunk-cabbage) between Interior Salish, Ktunaxa, and some Wakashan languages 145 3-7 Frequency of plant taxa for species or closely related groups in languages of northwestern North America 151 3-8 “Top 25” plant species named in Indigenous languages and major dialects in northwestern North America, with the number of languages that record their names, as well as distributions of the plants 152 3-9 Comparing and contrasting factors involved in naming plants across three levels of naming frequency for plant species and closely related groups of species in northwestern North America 156 3-10 Examples of Tsilhqot’in plant names with cognates in other Dene (Athabaskan) languages 175 3-11 Tsilhqot’in plant names that are apparently unique to Dene (Athabaskan) (i.e., not occurring in other Dene languages) or restricted to Tsilhqot’in and neighbouring Dakelh 177 3-12 Affiliations of Secwepemc plant names 182 3-13 Proto-Salish plant names incorporated into Wakashan languages 185

Figures and Tables  |  xiii

5-1 Examples of traditional plant foods of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America 270 5-2 Regional variation in numbers of major food plant species and closely related taxa that are named in northwestern North American Indigenous languages 282 5-3 Proto-Salish, Proto-Interior-Salish, and Proto-Coast-Salish terms for food plants 317 5-4 Types of equipment used in harvesting and processing plant foods in northwestern North America 320 6-1 Examples of plant materials used in Indigenous technology in northwestern North America 339 6-2 Materials preferred for wooden implements and other wooden items used in northwestern North America 364 6-3 Objects woven or made from fibrous plant materials used in northwestern North America 368 7-1 Examples of medicinal plants used by Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America 420 7-2 Food, medicine, and poisonous plant species (including algae, fungi, and lichens) in the ethnobotanical lexicons of twelve Indigenous language groups of British Columbia, with examples of plants assigned to various categories 435 7-3 Applications of aromatic plants based on a survey of twelve language groups in northwestern North America 453

xiv  |  Figures and Tables

P r e fac e a n d Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

These two volumes began literally decades ago when, after working with and learning from elders in a few different Indigenous communities, I started noticing similarities in their use and knowledge of plants and in the beliefs and values that people associated with plants across geographic and cultural space. How did these similarities arise? Were they the result of coincidence, common origin, independent development of knowledge, or some type of exchange across communities, territories, and linguistic boundaries? The more I learned and compared peoples’ knowledge of plants and environments, the more intrigued I became. This fuelled my research for the next forty years. In the spring of 2009 I travelled with my husband, Bob, from Victoria on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to Dawson City in Yukon Territory, at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers. We drove to Port Hardy on the northeastern coast of the island and then took a ferry through the Inland Passage, past the coastal communities of Bella Bella (Heiltsuk Nation) and Hartley Bay (Gitga’at Nation), to Prince Rupert on the northern coast of British Columbia. From there, we drove along the Skeena River to Hazelton and northward along the shores of Dease Lake and Good Hope Lake to Whitehorse and finally to Dawson. Bob had been awarded a writer’s fellowship in Dawson, and we stayed there for nearly three months in the little house where Canadian author Pierre Berton had lived as a boy. Our trip from Victoria to Dawson took us first along the coastal plains and low hills of Vancouver Island’s east coast, through groves of bigleaf maple, arbutus, and Garry oak, tall forests of Douglas-fir and grand fir, and dense secondgrowth alder woods, all with a mirrored backdrop of island and mainland mountain ranges. By sea we travelled through multitudes of islands and channels

edged with steep headlands, rocky bluffs with myriad waterfalls and long sandy beaches, countless estuaries of rivers and creeks, and shorelines flanked with dark patches of kelp paralleling the shore just beyond the surf. All along, rugged snow-covered mountains accompanied us, clothed on their lower reaches by seemingly endless forests of dark spruces, hemlocks, and drooping-boughed cedars. In places the mountains plunged into the ocean so abruptly that one could envision how the massive continental glaciers of the Pleistocene, fifteen to twenty millennia past, had gouged and sculpted the bedrock inexorably into the long, deep troughs that formed the channels and fjords so characteristic of the coast. From the mouth of the Skeena River, our journey took us eastward through the Coast Mountains, along the cottonwood-lined river valley, and through rocky canyons into the cedar and hemlock forests of the Interior Wet Belt. Turning north, we traversed the vast expanses of northern conifers – relatively small, slow-growing white spruce and lodgepole pine spires, interspersed with vast tracts of muskeg harbouring ranks of dense dwarfed black spruce. Almost everywhere across the north, clusters of sparse white and grey trunks of birches, aspens, alders, and willows added contrast to the dark conifers. Within the span of five days and four nights on our northbound trip, we passed through nine major vegetation zones, counting the intertidal, each with its own unique complement of hundreds of species of plants and animals. Having begun writing this book, I was ever mindful during our travels of just how important these species, in each and every place, have been to generations of humans, starting perhaps as early as 14,000 or more years ago. I couldn’t help but imagine, as I gazed on the beaches, the mountains, the river valleys and lake shores, the muskegs and forested hills, how those people who had been there before us must have viewed these places as they searched for food, shelter, and a life for their families. Even the most seemingly remote places, if they were the least bit sheltered and had water nearby, had likely served at some time as a campsite or place in which to take refuge. Some locations – especially at the confluence of creeks or places where streams entered a lake or flowed out into the ocean – served as habitual camping places, and a few eventually became the sites of more permanent settlements, villages, and towns, many of which we passed through. The peoples of ancient times shared not only the same places but also some of the same types of experiences of the natural world. People dozens of generations before us witnessed, as we did, the abrupt seasonal transition of the north – from cold, icy winter, with frozen rivers, biting winds, conifers covered with mounds of snow, and the bare, stark trunks of the deciduous trees, to warm spring, with its tender lime-green leaves, drooping catkins releasing clouds of pollen in the slightest breeze, blooming prairie crocuses with their soft mauve-coloured petals, and the brilliant array of wild roses under the trees. For

xvi  |  Preface and Acknowledgments

P -1  |  Yukon River after the spring breakup, Dawson City, YT, May 2010.

thousands of years, people of the northern regions have watched the dramatic breakup of ice on the river (figure P -1) and experienced the summer solstice. On this trip, we met members of several communities of Dene (Athabaskan) speakers, as well as Tlingit and Haida from Alaska, and stopped to visit Indigenous elder friends – my teachers in ethnobotany – at Tagish, Iskut, Prince Rupert, and Qualicum. In all, we traversed the territories and visited communities of at least seventeen distinct First Nations language groups, each with its own history of origin and occupancy, its own names for the places, plants, animals, and features of the landscapes of its home place, and its own complex knowledge of these entities – a reflection of the dynamics and diversity of the geography, culture, and human-environment relationships of this entire region. Our trip

Preface and Acknowledgments  |  xvii

P -2  |  Northern tundra landscape, similar to that possibly encountered by the earliest peoples in North America.

north reinforced the ideas that I had been developing and around which this book was shaped, looking back to a time at the end of the Pleistocene glaciation when the landscape was probably similar to the way it appears in parts of the Yukon (figure P -2). Over many years of working with and learning from Indigenous botanical and environmental experts in British Columbia and beyond, I have come to see patterns in the knowledge and botanical information we were documenting. Commonalities – some obvious, some more veiled – have emerged in the names and applications of plants, in processes of harvesting, preparing, manipulating, and applying plants and their products, in stories and beliefs about plants and environments, and in ways of tending and managing plant resources and habitats. However, thinking about these various similarities and differences was sometimes like looking into a maelstrom. The linkages are so intricate and complex, diverse and numerous. They present (or, more often, obscure) themselves

xviii  |  Preface and Acknowledgments

through multiscalar lenses of time and geographic space, reflecting not only linguistic and cultural diversity but also geographical, ecological, and botanical variation. How can one find and sort out such patterns, much less understand the reasons for them, how they developed, and what the implications are? The challenge of such a task is daunting. Yet the “big picture,” the meta-analysis, and the discernment of such patterns are significant. For example, which species or groups of species may have been first encountered by First Peoples entering coastal North America? Which technologies were borrowed from outside the region, and which were developed within the area? Where did they originate? How did knowledge about particular plants – their application as food or medicine, for instance – become more widely shared? Were some features discovered and developed independently by two or more groups of people? Just one example of the complications associated with comparing names, distributions, and ethnobotanical knowledge for different plants is seen in the application of the Salishan term qwlawl and its variants. According to Kuipers (2002), qwlawl is an ancient term (glossed by him as “edible tuber”) apparently used by the original Proto-Salishan people before they dispersed from their original homeland, which was evidently in the lower Fraser Valley (Kinkade 1989; Kinkade and Mattina 1996), across the lands and waters that are occupied by the diverse peoples of the Salishan language family today. Contemporary speakers of Salishan languages have applied this name in its more recent variants to edible blue camas (Camassia quamash, C. leichtlinii) in places such as the Saanich Peninsula and the Olympic Peninsula where these species occur.1 Others identify related, or cognate, forms of the term as nodding onion (Allium cernuum), a species with an edible bulb having a wider distribution than camas within the study area of northwestern North America and tending to be used as a food more than camas by the northern Interior Salish peoples (Turner 1995, 1997a).2 In discerning which plant – nodding onion or camas – was the original referent for the Proto-Salish name, comparing Salishan history of migration with the distribution of the species gives some clues. As well as occurring on Vancouver Island southward, camas (Camassia quamash) (figure P -3) is distributed across the central and southern Interior Plateau, including the Kootenays of southeastern British Columbia, but is rare in the south-central region of the province3 and southward into the northwestern United States. Both camas and nodding onion have ranges that extend from the south of the region – Washington and Oregon – into British Columbia, but nodding onion is significantly more widespread.4 Camassia populations evidently migrated northward to Vancouver Island from a southern coastal refugium at some time following the Pleistocene deglaciation, with high-elevation barriers to the east-west flow (Tomimatsu, Kephart, and Vellend 2009). Nodding onion (Allium cernuum) (figure P-4) may have survived in glacial refugia farther north since it occurs today

Preface and Acknowledgments  |  xix

P -3 (above)  |  Great, or Leichtlin’s, camas (Camassia leichtlinii). Flowers 1–2 cm across. P -4 (facing page)  |  Nodding onion (Allium cernuum).

in northern British Columbia and hence may have been more readily available to the Proto-Salish and other peoples in the Early and Mid Holocene (between about 11,000 and 5,000 years ago). It is perhaps significant, however, that both camas bulbs and nodding onions have been typically prepared by cooking the bulbs in underground pits, or earth ovens, helping to convert their main carbohydrate, inulin, into a sweeter, more easily digestible form: fructose (Thoms 1989; Turner 1995, 1997a; Turner and Kuhnlein 1983; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Yet it seems that the pit-cooking technology used for both of these edible bulbs originated farther south, possibly in south-central North America, perhaps entering the study region via the Willamette Valley, and was evidently associated mainly with camas bulbs, although some onion species may also have been pit-cooked in the Early Holocene, between about 11,000 and 7,000 years ago (Lepofsky 2004; Thoms 1989, 2008a, 2008b, 2009). It is still speculative, but indications are that the original qwlawl was probably Allium cernuum. Then, as Salishan peoples moved to Vancouver Island from their lower Fraser Valley Proto-Salish homeland, a semantic shift in the term took place and people started using it for Camassia, perhaps

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simultaneously with the adoption of pit-cooking technology in the region, a process that allowed the eventual intensification of camas on Vancouver Island (Thoms 1989, 2008a, 2008b, 2009) and of Allium in some areas of the Interior Plateau (Peacock 1998). There are compelling lessons to be learned from Indigenous knowledge systems as a whole. They can provide new insights into how environmental knowledge and human relationships with other species can be developed, adapted,

Preface and Acknowledgments  |  xxi

expanded, applied, and renewed. From the practical and philosophical lessons of cultural paradigms different from those of mainstream, industrialized, “Western” society, humanity may be better able to come to terms with our fractured relationships with the environment that have led us into planetary peril. The processes of knowledge acquisition and transmission and the values underlying relationships with other humans and nonhuman species and entities may in fact be key in our global efforts to stem environmental destruction. These volumes represent my endeavour to look beyond the details of individual plants and their uses within specific cultures and localities in order to determine the overall patterns and processes of their development, application, and adaptation. From this information, I have attempted to understand – insofar as it is possible to do so for someone from outside these cultural norms – the underlying values, perceptions, and perspectives that have guided and directed the botanical and environmental knowledge and practices of the Indigenous peoples of this region. The trip that we took from Vancouver Island to the Yukon and back, the places we visited and experienced, and the people we met from diverse Indigenous communities were both a starting place and an ending place for this project. It was one of dozens of different trips, undertaken within a span of over fortyfive years, during which I have had the privilege of learning from Indigenous plant specialists, all experts in their own territories and communities. Together, all of these experiences, shared with family, friends, colleagues, students, and teachers, represent a lifetime of intense enjoyment that has come from being a part of something much bigger, more important, and more vital than any one individual. For this experience and opportunity, I am forever indebted to so many – more than I could ever name here. However, at the very least, I need to acknowledge those who have directly contributed to this work. First, to my teachers and friends from various First Nations communities whose knowledge and experiences fill these two volumes go my deepest thanks and appreciation. Many of these people will become familiar to those who read through the chapters because of particular stories and insights that they have shared and with which they are identified. A significant number of these people have been major collaborators in ethnobotany projects we have undertaken together and are co-authors of various ethnobotanical books, chapters, and papers, many of which are cited in the References. In other cases, although people may not be named in the text, they have nonetheless contributed their knowledge and wisdom in real and substantial ways, as reflected in general information and observations throughout, in both the text and the tables. Although most of these people have passed away over the decades since I started my ethnobotanical journey, I still think of them with affection and respect and consider them still to be part of my life and the lives of their families and communities. Therefore, I have not specified here those people who have passed

xxii  |  Preface and Acknowledgments

away but have simply listed them, with appreciation, along with many teachers and experts who are still living. Some of these people are still relatively young but are nonetheless wise in their understandings of environmental and botanical traditions, and I have learned important lessons from each and every one of them. My deepest thanks and acknowledgments go especially to (in alphabetical order of their family names, with place names followed by Indigenous affiliations in parentheses): Primrose Adams and all of her family (Massett; Haida); Arthur Adolph and Marilyn Adolph (Xaxl’ep; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Maggie Adolph and Roger Adolph (Xaxl’ep; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Bob Akerman (Salt Spring Island; Hul’qumi’num); Agnes Alfred (Alert Bay and Qwiqwasutinuxw; Kwakwaka’wakw); Gerald Amos and Morris Amos (Kitamaat; Haisla); Alestine Andre (Tsiigehtchic; Gwich’in); Bernadette Antoine and Gordon Antoine (Coldwater; Nlaka’pamux); Dr Jeanette Armstrong, Richard Armstrong, and Willie Armstrong and Lillie Armstrong (Penticton; Okanagan-Colville); Dr E. Richard Atleo (Chief Umeek) (Ahousaht; Nuu-chah-nulth), Dr Marlene Atleo (ʔeh ʔeh naa tuu kwiss) (Ahousaht; Nuu-chah-nulth), and Shawn Atleo (A-aap wa-iik) (Ahou­ saht; Nuu-chah-nulth); Dr Aimee August (Neskonlith; Secwepemc); Cecelia Au­ gust (Sechelt); Hilda Austin (Lytton; Nlaka’pamux); Irene Billy (Xaxl’ep and Nes­ konlith; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc and Secwepemc) and Janice Billy and Nora Billy (Xaxl’ep; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Diane Brown (Gwaganad) (Skidegate; Haida); Frank and Kathy Brown (Bella Bella; Heiltsuk); Cheryl Bryce (Songhees; Lekwungen); Andy Cahoose and Anna Cahoose (Ulkatcho; Dakelh); Julia Callbreath and Charley Callbreath (Prince Rupert; Tahltan); Wilfred Cassam (Ulkatcho; Dakelh); Captain Gold and Mrs Captain Gold (Bernice) (Skidegate; Haida); Cyril Carpenter and Jennifer Carpenter (Bella Bella; Heiltsuk); Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim) (Quwut’sun; Hul’qumi’num’); Dominic Charlie (Squamish); Minnie Charleyboy (Tsilhqot’in); Janet Charters (Nlaka’pamux); Dr Allis Pakki Chipps Sawyer (Beecher Bay; Straits Salish and Ditidaht); Elsie Claxton, Dr Earl Claxton Sr (YELḰÁTŦE ), Belinda Claxton (Selliliye), Earl Claxton Jr, and other Claxton family members (Tsawout; Saanich Straits Salish); Helen Clifton, Chief Johnny Clifton (Wahmoodmx), and Chief Albert Clifton (Wahmoodmx) (Hartley Bay; Gitga’at, Ts’msyen); Agnes Cranmer (Alert Bay; Kwakwaka’wakw); Florence Davidson, Claude Davidson, Robert Davidson, Reggie Davidson, and their many family members (Massett; Haida); David Dawson and Flora Dawson (Kingcome; Tsawataineuk, Kwakwaka’wakw); Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (Kingcome and Qualicum; Tsawataineuk, Kwakwaka’wakw); Garlene Dodson (Skeechestn; Secwepemc); Tuffy Doss (Xaxl’ep; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Archie Dundas and Elizabeth Dundas (Hartley Bay; Gitga’at, Ts’msyen); Belle Eaton (Hartley Bay; Gitga’at, Ts’msyen); Bill Edwards (Ts’kw’aylaxw; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Dr John Elliott (STOLȻEȽ ) (Tsartlip; Saanich); Dr Larry Emerson (Navajo); Chief Bill Erasmus (Gwich’in); Jenny Erickson (Sechelt); Nancy Flett (Spokan); Trudy Frank

Preface and Acknowledgments  |  xxiii

(Ahousaht; Nuu-chah-nulth); Chief Earl Maquinna George and Josephine George (Ahousaht; Nuu-chah-nulth); Katherine Grevelle (Cranbrook; Ktunaxa); Guujaaw (Massett and Skidegate; Haida); Roy Haiyupis (Ahousaht; Nuu-chah-nulth); Ken Hall, Shirley Hall, and Simon Hall (Kitamaat; Haisla and Hanaksiala); Kathleen Hans and Golie Hans (Skidegate; Haida); Rosie Hans (Bella Coola; Nuxalk); Willie Hans (Bella Coola; Nuxalk); Mary Hanson, who provided information from her grandmother, Edith McDougall (Gitxsan); Elizabeth Harry (Sliammon); Maude Harry and Richard Harry (Tsawout; Saanich); Chief Ernie Hill Jr (Sn Axe’et), Lynne Hill, and Marjorie Hill (Hartley Bay; Gitga’at, Ts’msyen); Ubill Hunlin (Xeni Gwet’in; Tsilhqot’in); Mary Hunt (Bella Bella; Heiltsuk); Fran Hunt-Jinnouchi (Fort Rupert, Quatsino, Victoria; Kwagiulth, Gusgimukw, Kwakwaka’wakw); Troy Hunter (Ktunaxa); Dr Ron Ignace (Stsmél’ecqen) and Dr Marianne Ignace (Skeetchestn; Secwepemc); Maddie Jack (Anahim Lake; Ulkatcho, Dakelh); Mandy Jimmie and Nora Jimmie (Nicola Valley; Nlaka’pamux); Abel Joe (Quwuts’un; Hul’qumi’num); Mabel Joe (Shulus; Nlaka’pamux); Ida John (Wik Tna A Seq Nakoo) (Chawathil; Halkomelem); Agnes Edenshaw-Yeltatzie-Jones (Massett; Haida); Ida Jones and Chief Charlie Jones (Queesto) (Pacheedaht; Ditidaht); Roy Jones Sr (Skidegate; Haida); Christine Joseph (Wata) (Fort Rupert; Kwagiulth, Kwakwaka’wakw); Chief Floyd Joseph (Squamish/Skwxwú7mesh); Manny and Linda Jules (Kamloops; Secwepemc); Julia Kilroy (Coldwater; Nla­ ka’pa­mux); Martina LaRochelle (Lillooet; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Eliza Leon (Ul­ katcho; Dakelh); Margaret Lester (Mount Currie; Lil’wat, Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Martin Louie (Inchelium; Okanagan-Colville); Patrick Lulua (Xeni Gwet’in; Tsilhqot’in); John Macko and Mary Macko (Kingcome; Kwakwaka’wakw); Ida Matthew (Simpcw/Chuchua; Secwepemc); Willie Matthews (Chief Weah) and Emma Matthews (Massett; Haida); Pete McCoy (Ktunaxa); Garry Merkel (Tahltan); Neawana Michell (‘Lémyaʔ) (Lillooet; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Verna Miller (Ashcroft; Nlaka’pamux); Dr Louis Miranda (Squamish/Skwxwú7mesh); Sam Mitchell (Xaxl’ep; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); David Moody and Sam Moody (Bella Coola; Nuxalk); Chief Johnny Moon (Kingcome and Tsawataineuk; Kwakwaka’wakw); Joan Morris (Sellemah) (Songhees; Lekwungen); Dawn Morrison (Neskonlith; Secwepemc); Dr Woody Morrison (Haida); Helena Myers (Yunesit’in; Tsilhqot’in); Andy Natrall (Squamish/Skwxwú7mesh); Doug Neasloss (Klemtu; Kitasoo/Xai’Xais); Deanna Nyce, Harry Nyce Sr, Harry Nyce Jr, and Emma Nyce (Gitwinksihlkw; Nisga’a); Edith O’Donaghey (Shalalth, Lillooet; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Alice Paul and Lawrence Paul (Hesquiaht and Hotsprings Cove; Nuu-chah-nulth); Cecil Paul Sr and Cecil Paul Jr (Kitamaat; Haisla and Hanaksiala); Christopher Paul Sr and Philip Paul (Tsartlip; Saanich); Reggie Paul (Sechelt); Dr Desmond Peters Sr (Ts’kw’aylaxw; Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Alec and Nellie Peters (Mount Currie; Lil’wat, Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Larry Pierre (Penticton; Okanagan); Louie Phillips (Lytton; Nlaka’pamux); Curtis Rattray (Dease Lake; Tahltan); Kim RecalmaClutesi (Oqwilowgwa), Chief Budd Recalma, and Chief Mark Recalma (Qualicum;

xxiv  |  Preface and Acknowledgments

Kwakwaka’wakw); Goolie (Margaret) Reece (Hartley Bay; Gitga’at, Ts’msyen); Ernie Rice (Hul’qumi’num’); Baptiste Ritchie (Mount Currie; Lil’wat, Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc); Daisy Roberts (Alert Bay; Kwakwaka’wakw); Chief Don Roberts (Kitsumkalum; Ts’msyen); Annetta Robinson, Jimmy Robinson, and Marven Robinson (Hartley Bay; Gitga’at, Ts’msyen); Colleen Robinson and Gideon Robinson (Hartley Bay; Gitga’at, Ts’msyen); Dr Samuel Sam and Greg Sam (Tsartlip; Saanich); Stanley Sam (Ahousaht; Nuu-chah-nulth); Tom Sampson (Tsartlip; Saanich); Irene Seguin (Gitwinksihlkw; Nisga’a); Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth) (Campbell River; Qwiqwasutinuxw and Mamaliliqela, Kwakwaka’wakw), who also shared teachings of her grandmothers, Agnes Alfred and Daisy Roberts; Charlie Mack Seymour (Mount Currie; Lil’wat, Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Chief George Shaughnessy (Maxwxwadziy) (Victoria and Alert Bay; Kwakwaka’wakw); Dr Margaret Siwallace (Bella Coola; Nuxalk); Della (Rice) Sylvester (Hul’qu­ mi’num’); Diana Smith (Nisga’a); Linda Smith (Yunesit’in; Tsilhqot’in); Mabel Solomon, Gilbert Solomon, and Maryanne Solomon (Xeni Gwet’in; Tsilhqot’in); Anna Spahan (Tsartlip; Saanich); Mack Squinas (Ulkatcho; Dakelh); Nellie Taylor (Skeetchestn; Secwepemc); John Thomas (Pacheedaht and Victoria; Ditidaht); Dr Mary Thomas and all of her family (Neskonlith; Secwepemc); Dr Judith Thompson (Edōsdi) (Prince Rupert; Tahltan); Abner Thorne and Theresa Thorne (Quwuts’un; Hul’qumi’num); Selina Timoyakin (Penticton; Okanagan); Linda Tollas (Skidegate; Haida); Felicity Walkus (Bella Coola; Nuxalk); Pauline Waterfall (Hilistis) (Bella Bella; Heiltsuk); Gloria Cranmer Webster (Alert Bay; Kwakwaka’wakw); Ruth Welsh (Tagish; Gwich’in); Dr Ellen White (Snuneymuxw; Hul’qumi’num); Elroy White (Bella Bella; Heiltsuk); Frank Whitehead and Mary Whitehead (Cranbrook; Ktunaxa); William White (Xelimuxw and Kasalid) (Chemainus and Snuneymuxw; Hul’qumi’num); Eileen William and Roger William (Xeni Gwet’in; Tsilhqot’in); Jean Williams (Soda Creek; Xat’sull, Secwe­ pemc); Leo Williams (Cranbrook; Ktunaxa); Dr Lorna Williams (Victoria and Mount Currie; Lil’wat, Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc); Mabel Williams (Skidegate; Haida); Violet Williams (Pauquachin; Saanich and Hul’qumi’num); Barbara Wilson (Kii’il­juus) (Skidegate; Haida); Emma Wilson and Solomon Wilson (Skidegate; Haida); Chief Ernie Wilson (Niis Wes) (Skidegate; Haida); Bea Wilson, Johnny Wil­son, and Chris Wilson (Kitamaat; Haisla and Hanaksiala); Chief Ron Wilson (Git­kin­juu­was) (Skidegate; Haida); Mildred Wilson (Hartley Bay; Gitga’at, Ts’m­ syen); Evelyn Windsor (Bella Bella; Wuikinuxv and Heiltsuk); Nancy Wyncoop (Sinixt); Mary Yeltatzie-Swanson (Massett; Haida); Annie York (Spuzzum; Nla­ ka’pa­mux); George Young (Skidegate; Haida); Ada Yovanovich (Skidegate; Haida); and Zalmai (“Zeke”) Zahir (Lushootseed). I also want to acknowledge the families of all of these people, many of whom have been wonderful and generous friends to me and my family: the Claxton family of Tsawout; the Clifton, Hill, and Robinson families of Hartley Bay; the Davidson family of Massett; the Nyce family of Gitwinksihlkw; the families of

Preface and Acknowledgments  |  xxv

Margaret Siwallace, David Moody, and Edward Moody of Bella Coola; the Myers family of Stone and Nemiah; Ida Jones’s and John Thomas’s family, mostly of Vancouver Island; Mary Thomas’s family of Neskonlith; and the Thompson family of Prince Rupert. I also wish I could mention all of the younger people, many of them students, who have learned alongside myself from their own elders about the world of plants and their cultural values. These include (among many): Isabel Adams, Dolores Bebbington, Tom Child, Nicholas Claxton, Jennifer Clifton, Kyle Clifton, Jaalen Edenshaw, Gwaai Edenshaw, Thelma Harvey, Cam Hill and Eva Ann Hill, Louise Hilland, James Jones, Leigh Joseph, Tim Kulcheski, Alice Mountjoy, Harry Nyce Jr, Christopher Paul Jr and Philip Kevin Paul, Elliott Reece, Marven Robinson, Teri Jo Robinson, Ashley Sandy, Dawn Smith, Goldie Swanson, Bill Tallio, John Bradley Williams, Kyla Wilson, and so many others. Many other colleagues and friends are acknowledged for their interest, support, and inspiration. Quite a few of them may not even realize that they have influenced this book. There are many others. In particular, however, I would like to thank (in alphabetical order): Dr E.N. (Gene) Anderson, Dr M. Kat Anderson, Dr Margaret Anderson, Doug Andrew, Dr John Thor Arnason, Marguerite Babcock, Dr Kelly Bannister, Dr Brenda Beckwith, Dr Marcus A.M. Bell, Dr Fikret Berkes, Dr Kathryn Bernick, Dr Sonya Bird, Randy Bouchard, Richard Boyce, Dr Cecil Brown, Dr Charles R. Brown, Dr Carla Burton, Dan Cardinall, Dr Barry Carlson, Dr Catherine Carlson, Dr Debra Carr, Dr Adolf Ceska and Oluna Ceska, Fiona Hamersley-Chambers, Dr Kimberlee Chambers, Phil Charles, Dr Jim Chatters, Karen Chester, Wendy Cocksedge, Dr Brian D. Compton, Dr Tom Connolly, John Corsiglia, Kathy Cowen, Juliet Craig, Dr Gary Crawford, Stuart Crawford, Dr Dale Croes, Dr Alain Cuerrier, Dr Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, Dr Iain Davidson-Hunt, Alison Davis, Dr Wade Davis, Dr Douglas Deur, Fiona Devereaux, Dr James Dickson, Dr Karen Dillman, Sybil Diver, Dr Ken Downes, Dr Ian Edwards, William Grant Thomas Edwards, Dr Barbara Efrat, Dr Steve Egesdal, Dr John Enrico, Dr Hardy Eshbaugh, Dr John Esling, Dr Jon Erlandson, Dr Karen Fediuk, Dr Richard I. Ford, Dr Stephanie Forsyth, Dr Kay Fowler, Dr Brent Galloway, Ann Garibaldi, Dr David Grubb, Melissa Hadley, Dr Sharon Hargus, Dr John Harper, Dr Jeff Hart, Dr Richard Hebda, Dr Thom Hess, Dr Ian Higgs, Tanja Hoffmann, Amy Hofman, Dr Eugene Hunn, Dr Marianne Ignace, Dr Ron Ignace, Dr Mandy Jimmie, Dr Luisa Maffi, Dr Leslie Main Johnson, Dr Timothy Johns, Amanda Karst, Michèle Kay, Michael Keefer, Dr Dorothy I.D. Kennedy, Dr Susan Kephart, Dr Joseph Kess, Dr M. Dale Kinkade, Kate Kittredge, Dr Harriet V. Kuhnlein, Dr Aert Kuipers, Dr Trevor Lantz, Dr Janet Leonard, Dr Dana Lepofsky, Dr Robert Levine, Dr Sandra Lindstrom, Priscilla Lockwood, Dawn Loewen, Dr John Lutz, Dr Cheryl Mack, Dr Al Mackie, Kjerstin Mackie, Dr Quentin Mackie, Dr Richard Mackie, Dr Nancy Mackin, Dr James Markham, Dr Robin Marles, Dr Anne Marshall, Clint Marshall, Dr Gary Martin, Ian Martin, Dennis Martinez, Dr Ian Mauro, Bob May, Dr Will McClatchey, Dr Rick McClure, Rua McCallum, Dr James McDonald, Carla

xxvi  |  Preface and Acknowledgments

Mellott, Dr Charles Menzies, Dr Andrew Miller, Dr Paul Minnis, Dr Don Mitchell, Dr Henrik Moller, Dr Timothy Montler, Dr Mary Morris, Dr Madonna Moss, Dr Larry Morgan, Dr Petra Mudie, Dr Gary Paul Nabhan, Dr Chinatat Nagashinha, Dr Henk Nater, Dr George Nicholas, Sharon Niscak, Celia Nord, Dr Maurice (Lee) Oates, Geoff O’Grady, Aliana Parker, Dr Sandra Peacock, Dr Sinclair Philip, Dr E.C. (Chris) Pielou, Dr Andrea Pieroni, Dr William J. Poser, Jen Pukonen, Dr John Rath, Dr Scott Redhead, Dr Keren Rice, Dr Bruce Rigsby, Dr Kanin J. Routson, Dr John Ross, Dr Khyla Russell (Kaitohutohu), Dr Leslie Saxon, Dr Denis St Claire, Dr Bruce Smith, Linda Smith, Dr Gloria Snively, Dr Jim Stafford, Dr Janet Stephenson, Lisa Strecker, Dr Wayne Suttles, Dr David Suzuki, Dr Fumiaki Taniguchi, Dr Iain Taylor, Dr Roy Taylor, Dr Brian Thom, Dr Laurence C. Thompson and M. Terry Thompson, Dr Brian Thom, Dr Alston Thoms, Dr Thomas Thornton, Dr Jan Timmers, Donn Todt, Dr Neil Towers, Dr Ron Trosper, Robert Tyhurst, Dr Suzanne Urbanczyk, Dr Jan Van Eijk, Dr Patrick von Aderkas, Dr Wendy Wickwire, Dr Marty Weinstein, Dr Dai Williams, Dr Douglas Williams, Dr Jim Williams, Dr Alfred Wong, and Dr Sandy Wyllie-Echeverria. I have had a wonderful group of graduate and undergraduate students with whom I have enjoyed many learning experiences in the field, at conferences, and especially with our First Nations’ teachers. One of our groups we call “Adam’s School” because our main teacher is Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla). We have spent many memorable times with Chief Adam, his wife, Kim RecalmaClutesi (Oqwilowgwa) (also a major knowledge keeper and cultural advisor for us), his close relatives Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith and Chief George Shaughnessy, their good friend Bill White, and their families. Aside from myself, the students of Adam’s School have included Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Amy Deveau, Leigh Joseph, Dr Lee Glazier, Melissa Kingan Grimes, Abe Lloyd, Kate Proctor, Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria, and our close colleague Dr Douglas Deur, among others. Dr Dana Lepofsky also joined Adam’s School as an archaeobotanist and archaeoecologist with a deep interest in traditional management systems, especially in marine habitats, such as the luxwxiwey (“clam gardens”). I have treasured these times we have spent together, learning from Adam, Kim, Daisy, George, and Bill, discussing ideas, and planning projects that will help to document and maintain the elders’ deep and critically important primary knowledge and experiences (see Turner and Lepofsky 2013; and Deur et al. 2013). Many other graduate students, past and present, have been part of my ethnobotanical learning journey, and I want to thank each and every one. I have also enjoyed and deeply appreciated my discussions and interactions over many years with Dr E. Richard Atleo (Chief Umeek) and Dr Marlene Atleo, having benefited on many occasions from their wisdom and ideas. Much of my research over the years has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC ), and I am deeply grateful for this support, which has enabled me and a number of my students to travel

Preface and Acknowledgments  |  xxvii

and work collaboratively with many Indigenous communities. In particular, my SSHRC -supported research, “Dynamics of Traditional Ecological Knowledge Acquisition and Transmission” (Standard Research Grant, 2005–08), focused on ethnoecological knowledge transfer and acquisition among Haida, Nisga’a, and Ts’msyen and neighbouring peoples of northwestern British Columbia, in collaboration with Dr Nancy Mackin, and gave me the opportunity to consider the complexities of how such knowledge is learned, transmitted, and adapted over time and space. Another project that inspired me to think about patterns in ethnobotany and ethnoecology was the interdisciplinary Major Collaborative Research Project called “Coasts Under Stress” (under project director Dr Rosemary Ommer; see Ommer et al. 2007), supported by the SSHRC and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which investigated the effects of environmental and economic restructuring on the health of individuals, communities, and the environment of coastal communities of both the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of Canada. This work supported ethnobotanical research with members of the Gitga’at Nation of Hartley Bay, as well as comparative research with Haida and Nisga’a for myself and my students. I am extremely grateful for the Killam Research Fellowship, from the Killam Foundation, administered through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which allowed me two years (2008–09) away from my regular teaching schedule to focus on writing this book. Dr Eric Higgs, at that time director of the School of Environmental Studies (SES ) at the University of Victoria, not only encouraged me to apply for this fellowship but also allowed me this time away from teaching, despite the extra work it left for him and my other colleagues in the SES . I am grateful to Eric and all of the SES faculty members, as well as my graduate students, for this generous gift. I also wish to thank the University of Victoria administration for supporting this leave. During this time, not only was I able to travel to and live in the Yukon for three months with my husband, Bob, but I also visited New Zealand through a William Evans Visiting Fellowship at the Centre for Research on Agriculture, Food and Environments at the University of Otago, where I met and was inspired by many of the faculty and students. I also travelled and lectured extensively in the United Kingdom, together with my colleagues Dr Gary Martin and Erin Smith, and visited Gary’s home in Marrakech, Morocco, all of which provided me with additional ideas and inspiration for the completion of this book. In the summer and fall of 2011, I was able to take the time to make revisions to the manuscript through a research chair position, the Hakai Chair in Ethnoecology, provided by a grant to the University of Victoria from the Tula Foundation, thanks to the generosity of Dr Eric Peterson and Christina Munck. I am deeply grateful to them for their ongoing support and interest in my work. I would also like to thank the dean of social sciences, Dr Peter Keller, the director of the School of Environmental Studies, Dr Peter Stephenson, and the past director, Dr Eric Higgs, for their support.

xxviii  |  Preface and Acknowledgments

Several friends and colleagues have made major contributions to the development of this book. I am especially indebted to Dr Rosemary Ommer for her constant advice, support, and editorial expertise and for reading through the entire first draft; her suggestions have improved the book in many ways. I also thank Dr Dana Lepofsky for her many valuable contributions, especially to the structure and content of chapter 2. Dr Madonna Moss also reviewed this chapter and provided advice and key information on relative dates and cultural developments reflected in the archaeological record. Ruth Kirk also provided important advice on this chapter. For the introductory section on the Pitt Polder wapato archaeological discovery, I am grateful to Chief Ed Pierre and the Katzie First Nation (KFN ) Council, to Debbie Miller, the chief negotiator, and to KFN archaeologist Tanja Hoffmann for their review of the wording and permission to publish the radiocarbon date and Tanja’s photo of the ancient wapato. For the section on the Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį archaeological site, I am indebted to Dr Sheila Greer, Dr Al Mackie, Kjerstin Mackie, Paula Banks, Sarah Gaunt, and the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations for their help in reviewing and correcting the manuscript and for use of the photo of the young man’s spruce-root hat (with permission of the Yukon government). Dr Dale Croes shared his ongoing research on the Sauvie Island Sunken Village site and the photo of the rush “sweetgrass” bag from that site. Dr Anna Saghatelyan (McMurray University, Texas) kindly checked the plant species listed in tables 2-1 and 2-2 for phytogeographical details from Russian sources. Salishan linguist Dr Jan Van Eijk (Department of Indian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, First Nations University of Canada) reviewed the introductory chapter and chapter 3 on plants and language and provided important advice on the use of linguistic orthographies for the terms cited from so many different languages. My sincere thanks go, as well, to Dr Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, Dr Suzanne Urbanczyk, Dr Leslie Saxon, and Dr Sonya Bird (all Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria), Dr William Poser, Dr Marianne Ignace, Debbie Leighton-Stephens and the Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Language Authority, and Barbara Wilson (K’ii’iljuus) for their help and advice on reconciling the linguistic orthographies. I am especially grateful in this regard to Aliana Parker, whose expertise and organizational genius helped immensely both in my struggles to find a common orthography in which to present the plant names in this book and in tracking down some elusive reference sources. Through Aliana’s contacts, Lena Izony McCook provided the spellings of some of the Sekani plant names. Dr Leslie Main Johnson (Anthropology, Athabasca University) reviewed the section on fibres in chapter 6, and Dr M. Kat Anderson provided information on quantities of resources harvested for different technological purposes. Just toward the end of my writing, I had a chance to read manuscripts of two books, one by Dr E. Richard Atleo (Chief Umeek), Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis (2011), and the other by Dr Enrique Salmón, Eating the

Preface and Acknowledgments  |  xxix

Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience (2012). I found in these volumes striking counterparts to the topics covered in my book – the first in worldview and philosophies from Dr Atleo’s Nuu-chah-nulth community of Vancouver Island’s west coast and the second in the botanical knowledge, history, and stories of Indigenous peoples of the southwestern United States and of those across the border in Dr Salmón’s Rarámuri homeland of northern Mexico. Dr Madonna Moss’s Northwest Coast: Archaeology as Deep History likewise provided important and relevant perspectives from the archaeological world of the Northwest Coast. I would also like to thank four anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their careful reading and helpful suggestions for its improvement. Pamela Spalding, who was enlisted as my research manager in the fall of 2011 through a grant from the Tula Foundation (mentioned previously), oversaw the latter stages of manuscript production and helped particularly in framing the discussion in the last chapter on cultural resource management. My husband, Robert D. (Bob) Turner, and all of our family have supported this writing project from the outset and have always been a part of my deliberations and “discoveries.” Bob read over many parts of the book, offering gentle editorial suggestions and always helping to improve it. He also meticulously scanned and prepared the photos included in the book, a number of which he also took. He has been a companion on many of my research trips and my personal photographer, and he is, in so many ways, a huge part of this book. Finally, thank you so much to Kyla Madden (acquisitions editor), Ryan Van Huijstee (managing editor), and all of the staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press for their constant help and perseverance in bringing this book to reality. Robert Lewis has been a superb copy editor for the press; I deeply appreciate his careful and sensitive editing. François Trahan created the indexes with great care and skill. All royalties from the publication of this book will be contributed to Indi­ genous undergraduate student awards in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Victoria.

xxx  |  Preface and Acknowledgments

N ot e o n t h e W r i t i n g Sy st e m U s e d i n T h i s Bo o k

Many different writing systems have been developed by linguists and Indigenous language speakers to represent the sounds of individual languages in northwestern North America and beyond. All of the Indigenous languages in the study area have sounds that are not found in European languages such as English and French. For this reason the Latin-based alphabet as it is used in English1 is alone inadequate for transcribing First Nations languages, and therefore phonetic alphabets and numerous practical orthographies have been developed. Linguists tend to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA ) or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA ) in academic writing of Indigenous sounds and words, but for most First Nations language programs, systems have been developed that use fewer, less technical symbols and mainly characters of the Roman Alphabet, which are modified as necessary. These systems, known as “practical orthographies” or practical writing systems, are generally more easily read and understood by speakers of a language and by nonlinguists once they connect the sounds of a language with the particular symbols used. There have been some efforts to standardize the orthographies used within given languages and groups of languages through the establishment of language authorities and consensus agreements among speakers and the linguists who work with them. However, across the many languages of the region of northwestern North America covered in these volumes, there is considerable variation in the practical orthographies used. In some cases, the same symbol is used in different languages to represent different sounds, and in others, the same sound spoken in different languages is represented by different symbols. The symbols may differ yet again from those used in the IPA or APA systems. For example, many languages in the area have what linguists call a “voiceless velar

fricative” sound, like the ch in German “Bach.” In Secwepemc (Shuswap; Interior Salish), this sound is written with c, whereas in the closely related language Nlaka’pamux, it is written with x. (Note the last letters of the names Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux, which both reflect this sound.) In writing the names of plants and other terms in these volumes, I was faced with a real dilemma. In my ethnobotanical work to date, I have always tried to use writing systems that are congruent with locally developed and applied practical orthographies for any language group. This is not only to respect local speakers of Indigenous languages and the systems they have developed for writing their languages but also to make my work more accessible and useful to local communities. In the present work, however, which is largely comparative in nature, I needed to find a way to show similarities and differences across numerous languages, and this would have been difficult using the multiple systems of writing that exist for the various languages. I have therefore used an adapted version of the APA system for representing plant names here, in hopes that it will make comparisons relatively clear while still being accessible and understandable. I hope that speakers of the different language communities will understand and will not feel disrespected by this decision.2 In all cases, however, readers should consult the original referenced sources listed in appendix 2 for the most accurate and appropriate spellings for particular languages. There are also some excellent websites for Indigenous languages of the region, including ones that detail the practical orthographies used to represent different sounds in different languages. Check out, for example, the website http://www.languagegeek.com (Harvey 2002–11), which provides orthographies for many of the Indigenous languages of Canada. It also provides links to many of the community websites and to the Indigenous Language Institute, language maps, apps for learning and texting the various languages, and references to the different fonts used. Another particularly useful website is http://www.firstvoices.com (First Voices 2000–11), which hosts communitydeveloped language archives for Indigenous languages all across Canada. Most of the language portals developed by communities contain detailed information on their practical orthographies, as well as word and phrase lists and other learning resources. Guide to the Orthography The orthography used to represent the plant names in this book is based on the American Phonetic Alphabet but with significant modifications to make the terms more readable for those unfamiliar with phonetic alphabets. For example, the sound at the beginning of the English word January is represented as [ʤ] in the International Phonetic Alphabet and as [ʤ] or [ǯ] in the APA . Both of

xxxii  |  Note on the Writing System Used in This Book

these symbols are somewhat counterintuitive for the English-speaking reader, so in this orthography the letter j is used to represent this sound, following English tradition. In some cases it was not possible to convert a plant name into this orthography because the original spelling was undecipherable. This was frequently the case with terms from older anthropological and ethnobotanical sources, such as from Erna Gunther’s work (see Gunther 1973). In these instances the word is left in its original spelling and put in quotation marks. The charts below are a guide to the orthography in this book.3 The left column shows the symbols used. The centre column provides a phonetic description of the symbol, with the corresponding APA symbol in brackets. The right column provides a description of the sound as it compares to English. An explanation about the representation of tone and stress in this orthography is found at the end. 1 The following symbols represent the same or similar sounds that they correspond to in English: b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z. 2 Glottal constriction is marked in two ways: with a full glottal stop /ʔ/ and with an apostrophe /’/. Although many orthographies have different ways of marking glottal constriction, this orthography closely follows the APA format. A full glottal stop /ʔ/ is used word-initally and in vocalic environments (i.e., between vowels) or word-finally (i.e., after a vowel). This usually sounds like a catch in the throat, such as in the English expression “uh-oh.” The apostrophe /’/ is used to represent glottalization of another segment, which may be ejectives (e.g., p’, b’, t’, d’, k’, g’, etc.) or glottalized resonants (e.g., l’, m’, n’, r’, etc.). This usually sounds like a sharp popping sound before or after the consonant. In most cases the apostrophe follows the segment it identifies with, but in some cases the apostrophe precedes a resonant to indicate pre-glottalization, in which the explosive sound occurs before the sound represented by the letter. (Note that in Skidegate Haida /’/ is used for both types of glottal constriction.) 3 The superscript /w/ is used to represent rounding of the lips when the sound is produced (labialized). This is frequently seen in the series of consonants such as kw, qw, xw, xw, and ʕ w. For example, kw sounds like the beginning of English quick. Rounding may be combined with glottalization, as in the case of kw’ and qw’. In practical systems, a plain w is often used, as in kw or kw’. Other superscript symbols used are /y/ to indicate palatalization and /th/ for the secondary articulation in dental affricates. For example, ny sounds like the gn of lasagna, and tth sounds like the -t thof English “at the” spoken quickly. 4 Retracted consonants and vowels are marked with an underline (e.g., a). Retraction refers to a retracted tongue root when the sound is being

Note on the Writing System Used in This Book  |  xxxiii

pronounced, which causes the letter to sound farther back in the throat. This is not common in English. 5 In some languages, consonants (specifically resonants such as l, m, n, and r) may be syllabic. This means that they can function as a syllable nucleus and may carry the primary stress of the word. Syllabic consonants are marked with a dot underneath the letter, such as in ṇ. This sounds similar to the -n of English button (“but-n”) spoken quickly. 6 The quality (or sound) of vowels varies greatly both within and across languages. For this book, the goal was to represent words phonemically (i.e., to represent the sounds as they are perceived in the minds of speakers) and to keep the transcriptions as simple as possible. Accordingly, only a small set of vowel symbols is used. Vowels are doubled to indicate length (or duration), as in aa, ee, oo, etc. Note that many earlier works used narrow phonetic transcriptions and thus had a greater number of vowel symbols. These are simplified in this book to reflect the broader, phonemic transcriptions of most practical writing systems.4 Vowels Symbol

APA symbol

Description

a

[a] ~ [ɑ] ~ [æ]

Similar to the vowel sounds of English ball or bat

i

[i] ~ [ɪ]

Similar to the vowel sounds of English beet or bit

e

o

u

ə

[e] ~ [ɛ]

Similar to the vowel sounds of English bait or bet

[o] ~ [ɔ]

Similar to the vowel sounds of English boat or bond

[ə] ~ [ʌ]

Similar to the vowel sounds of English but or about

barred i (high central vowel)

Pronounced farther back in the mouth than regular i

[u] ~ [υ]

Similar to the vowel sounds of English boot or would

ɛ

[ɛ]

ą, ę, į, ǫ, ų

nasal vowels

Similar to the corresponding plain vowels but with a nasal quality (such as in English enemy, kneel, Rome, room); some nasal vowels may also have high or low tone, which is marked as ã or ä respectively

i, e, a, ə, o, u

retracted vowels

Similar to regular vowels but pronounced with a retracted tongue root

ɨ

Similar to the vowel sounds of English bet

xxxiv  |  Note on the Writing System Used in This Book

Consonants

(Note that b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, and z are the same as in English.) Symbol

APA symbol

Description

ch

[č] voiceless/ aspirated palatoalveolar affricate

Sounds like the ch in English church

dh

[ð] voiced dental fricative

Sounds like the th of English the or that (but not of think or thin)

dl

[λ] voiced/ unaspirated lateral affricate

Sounds like the dl in English maudlin (but not like English middle)

dz

[dz] or [d z] voiced/ unaspirated alveolar affricate

Sounds like the ds in English kids

dz

retracted voiced alveolar affricate

Sounds like dz but pronounced with a retracted tongue root (except for in Dakelh; see below)

gh

[ɣ] voiced velar fricative

Sounds like English g but with friction; written as gg in some practical systems

gy

palatalized voiced velar stop

Sounds like the -g y- of English egg yolk

g

[ġ] voiced uvular stop

Sounds like g but farther back in the throat

gh

[ɣ̇] voiced uvular fricative

Sounds like gh but farther back in the throat

h

[ḥ] voiceless pharyngeal fricative

Similar to English h but with more friction

ł

[ł] voiceless lateral fricative

Sounds similar to the thl of English athlete; written as lh, hl, or ll in some practical systems; note that hl is used in Skidegate Haida terms here

ḷ, ṃ, ṇ

syllabic resonants

These letters function like vowels in a syllable; they sound like -əl, -əm, or -ən

ng

[ŋ] velar nasal

Sounds like the ng of English going

[q] voiceless/ unaspirated velar stop

Sounds like English k but farther back in the throat; written as k in some practical systems; note that the k is retained in Skidegate Haida words here

n q

y

palatalized alveolar nasal

Sounds like the gn of lasagna

Note on the Writing System Used in This Book  |  xxxv

Consonants  | continued Symbol

APA symbol

Description

s

retracted voiceless alveolar fricative

Similar to English s but pronounced with a retracted tongue root (except for in Dakelh; see below)

sh

[š] voiceless palatal fricative

Sounds like the sh of English shy

th

[θ] voiceless dental fricative

Sounds like the th of English think or thin (but not of this or that)

tł

[ƛ] voiceless/ aspirated lateral affricate [ƛ̛ ] ejective lateral

Similar to the tl of English rightly; written as tl in many practical systems; note that this sound is written as tl in Skidegate Haida terms

tł’

affricate

As above but with an exploded quality; similar to the sound some English speakers use to call horses; note that this sound is written as tl’ in Skidegate Haida terms

tth, t’th

[tθ] [t’θ] voiceless/ aspirated dental affricate (plain and glottalized)

tth sounds like the -t th- of English “at the” spoken quickly; t’th is similar but slightly exploded; written as tth and tth’ in many practical systems

ts

[c] voiceless/ aspirated apicoalveolar affricate

Sounds like the ts of English cats

ts

retracted voiceless alveolar affricate

Similar to ts but pronounced with a retracted tongue root (except for in Dakelh; see below)

x

[x] voiceless velar fricative

Similar to the ch of German Bach; written as c or kh in some practical systems

x

[x̣] voiceless uvular fricative; also written [x̌]

Like the ch of German Bach but farther back in the throat

z

retracted voiced alveolar fricative

Similar to English z but pronounced with a retracted tongue root (except for in Dakelh; see below)

ʔ

[ʔ] glottal stop

Sounds like the catch in the throat in the middle of English “uh-oh”; written as 7 or ’ in some practical systems; note that glottal stop is indicated by ’ in Skidegate Haida terms

ʕ

[ʕ] pharyngeal approximant

Pronounced like g but very far back in the throat

xxxvi  |  Note on the Writing System Used in This Book

Language Specific Notations A few languages have sounds unique to them that do not appear in other languages. These are described here. In Dakelh, the underlined consonants s, z, ts, and dz represent lamino-alveolar consonants, not retracted consonants as in other languages such as Tsilhqot’in. A lamino-alveolar consonant is pronounced with the blade of the tongue, not its tip, touching the roof of the mouth. The lz of Yupik is a voiced lateral fricative. It sounds like ł but with vibration of the vocal folds. A period /./ mid-word in Haida represents a relatively unique phonological phenomenon. It stands for what linguists call an “unlinked C-slot” or, plainly, an unpronounced consonant. There is variation between speakers in how this sounds; it may sound like a glottal stop (a short pause or catch in the word), or it may affect the pitch of the word. Importantly, when it appears between two different vowels, it prevents these vowels from combining into a diphthong (Enrico 1991). An underlined y, found in Tlingit, is a velar approximant [ɰ]. It sounds similar to gh but with less constriction in the throat. A Note about Tone and Stress One of the many challenges faced in representing these diverse languages in a single orthography was that of tone and stress. For example, most Dene languages are tonal and mark low, high, falling, or rising tones. Most Salish languages, in contrast, mark the primary stress of a word, as placement of stress may distinguish between two words. However, all of the writing systems use accent marks (i.e., accent ague /á/ for stress and accent ague /á/ and grave /à/ for tone). Rather than try to change these so that tone or stress are marked differently, all have been left as they were. The following languages are tonal: Chipewyan, Dakelh (Carrier), Gwich’in, Halkomelem (Stó:lō), Heiltsuk, Sekani, Slavey (Slave), Tahltan, Dena’ina (Tanaina), Tlingit, Tsilhqot’in, and Upriver Kaska. The following languages mark for stress: all Salish languages except for Upriver Halkomelem and Nuxalk, as well as Haisla, Kitasoo, Kwak’wala, Nez Perce, Oowekyala, Quileute, Sahaptin, Spokan, and Twana.

Note on the Writing System Used in This Book  |  xxxvii

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Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge

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1 Introduction to the Book: Ethnobotanical and Ethnoecological Knowledge across Time and Space

Introduction This book investigates people-plant interrelationships in northwestern North America in an effort to better understand the pathways and processes by which ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples in this area have developed, accumulated, spread, and evolved over time. Ethnobotany can be defined as the study of the interrelationships between people and plants, and ethnoecology as the study of people’s interrelationships with their environments. In every cultural group, in every community, over generations extending back thousands of years, there have been individuals, both women and men, who were experts in their knowledge of plants and environments, who knew how to survive and live well, and who knew how to sustain the resources they used, for their own purposes and for the sake of future generations.1 One of the roles of these knowledgeable individuals has always been to find ways of passing on what they learned in their own lifetimes to the next generation so that its members would be able to benefit – materially but also culturally and socially – from this knowledge and wisdom. In turn, this newer generation then applied the knowledge of their parents and grandparents, adapted it to their own cultural and environmental situations, and through teachings and actions, passed on what they had learned to their own offspring. This cycle of learning, using, adapting, and transmitting ecological and cultural knowledge has been occurring in northwestern North America since time immemorial. Stories of how this type of knowledge has accumulated and developed – and

how it connects back to “deep time” – can be recounted for almost every region of the world. My goal here is to focus on the rich botanical and environmental knowledge of Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America as it has been shared with me and others by many wise and knowledgeable cultural experts. Certainly, this environmental and cultural knowledge is not static; it has evolved and will continue to evolve and shift as cultural, ecological, and social contexts shift. As always in such a process, some knowledge is inevitably lost. Perhaps predecessors simply did not pass it on, or perhaps changing conditions made it irrelevant, and it was allowed to slip away. In some cases colonizers actively sought to suppress and eliminate it. In the case of botanical knowledge, the species to which information, names, or practices were linked may have diminished or disappeared because of changes in climate, sea level, or other factors (see Acheson 1998). As knowledge vanishes or is transformed, however, new knowledge is usually acquired to meet the needs of the next generations (Lutz and Neis 2008). Over many generations, a net accumulation of knowledge can develop, increasing in complexity and allowing people new opportunities to survive and thrive in different environments. The accumulated knowledge, practice, experience, and understanding comprising cultural systems have been termed the “ethnosphere” (W. Davis 2001). Under ideal circumstances, the ethnosphere co-evolves with the biosphere – the accumulation of biological and ecological complexity – in a region to build resilience, enabling human communities both to manage and sustain their resources and to adapt to changing conditions. For Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America, however, their complex knowledge systems, built up over millennia, have been threatened over the course of just a few centuries by a tide of change resulting from European contact and globalization. Disease epidemics, dietary changes, loss of access to land and territory, changing economic and social systems, environmental deterioration – the depth, breadth, and intensity of change has been immense. As a result, people have in many cases lost touch with much of the ethnobotanical, ethnoecological, and other cultural knowledge and practices that sustained their ancestors for thousands of years. Locally, regionally, and internationally, humanity is facing unprecedented losses of languages and place-based cultural knowledge – including botanical knowledge – held by Indigenous and other long-resident peoples. Furthermore, these losses are occurring in tandem with massive declines in global biodiversity.2 The compounding effects of colonization, government laws and policies suppressing language and traditional management practices, Indigenous peoples’ loss of access to resources, and economic restructuring, on the one hand, and urban and industrial encroachment, pollution, invasive species, habitat destruction, and now climate change, on the other, have resulted in alarming declines in local ethnoecological knowledge. Yet Indigenous elders, as well

4 | ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge

as scholars in anthropology, ecology, geography, education, and environmental studies, agree that retaining and building on Indigenous and local knowledge systems is of paramount importance. These systems help to support people’s options and capacity for social and economic resilience – our ability to withstand stress and change while retaining cultural integrity and identity, food security, and overall well-being (Berkes 2012; Ommer et al. 2007; Salick and Ross 2009; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009; Turner, Gregory, et al. 2008). Building on the knowledge shared by numerous Indigenous cultural and botanical specialists, as well as by other colleagues in various academic disciplines, I have undertaken a comparison of diverse aspects of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge across a range of cultures, linguistic groups, and geographical and ecological regions of northwestern North America. Through this work, I have aimed to reveal key insights related to botanical and ecological knowledge acquisition and dissemination. I also focus on cultural dimensions of environmental management and on unique ethnoecological perspectives that, I believe, are key components of our collective human heritage and of our capacity to sustain our resources and adapt to changing environments. The Biocultural Setting Any project of this scope must have established boundaries yet allow for some extensions beyond these as warranted (keeping in mind that the ranges of plants and animals vary from species to species and over time and that the travels and activities of people are likewise dynamic and not easily bounded). The focus area in this book, which I describe generally as “northwestern North America,” extends southward along the Pacific Coast from approximately Cook Inlet in Alaska to the Columbia River area of northern Oregon, eastward in the north to the Yukon River in central Alaska and Yukon Territory, generally following the line of the Yukon and Liard Rivers, and southward and eastward to the Rocky Mountains as far as western Montana and northern Idaho. As will be seen, however, the peoples and environments that influence and are influenced by the study area extend to other parts of North America – as far east as the Great Lakes and southward to the Great Basin and central California – and beyond this continent to Japan, Kamchatka, and Siberia in eastern Asia. The study area reflects both coherence and diversity in terms of its Indigenous languages, cultures, and ecosystems. Most of the region – except the highest and the driest habitats – is forested, mainly with conifers, and is subject to maritime influence. Numerous lakes and rivers permeate the interior, with wetlands comprising important landscape elements almost everywhere. The overall terrain is rugged but offers the Indigenous peoples of the region a wide selection of elevations and topographies, with a corresponding diversity of plant and animal resources. Three major subregions within the area – Northwest Coast,

Introduction to the Book  |  5

Interior Plateau, and northern interior – correspond in large part to the cultural areas delineated in the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of the North American Indians, volume 7, Northwest Coast (Suttles 1990a) (central and northern parts); volume 12, Plateau (D.E. Walker 1998); and volume 6, Subarctic (Helm and Sturtevant 1982) (southwestern part). Each of these areas has some degree of internal cultural and linguistic cohesion. The Columbia River forms a convenient southern perimeter to the study area. Some of the peoples south of the Columbia – for example, the Kalapuyans of the Willamette Valley and the peoples of the Southwestern Mountains of Oregon – are considered by some to belong within the Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau culture areas respectively. However, they tend to be culturally transitional in relation to the tribes of California and the Great Basin, relying more heavily on acorns and edible seeds such as tarweed (Anisocarpus spp.; syn. Madia spp.), and could as easily be included within these latter areas. In addition, there were huge disruptions for these peoples from disease, integration with neighbouring groups, and relocation in the postcontact era (Boyd 1990), and relatively little was documented of their languages and botanical traditions, making comparisons difficult. For this reason, although they are occasionally mentioned, they have not been a central part of this study. Furthermore, since – as noted in the Preface – much of my own research and experiences have been in the Canadian part of this overall area, the reader may notice a bias, in terms of observations and examples provided, toward the central part or core of the area, mostly within British Columbia. Of the three culturally defined subregions in the study area, the Northwest Coast has the mildest climate, due to the oceanic influence, with cool moist winters and warm, relatively moist summers. The Interior Plateau subregion, separated from the Northwest Coast by the crests of the coastal ranges and extending north to roughly 52o 30′ latitude, has a continental climate, with greater extremes of temperature – hotter and drier in summer, colder in winter. The southwestern Subarctic area (which I often refer to as the “northern interior”), north of the Interior Plateau, also experiences these extremes of temperature but with longer, colder winters due to the longer sunless periods. Certain trends apply generally within the overall study area. The temperatures tend to decrease from south to north. The growing season in the north is shorter but still relatively productive because of the prolonged hours of daylight. The climate shifts from milder, more temperate conditions on the coast to more extreme temperatures in the interior. Successive belts of moister, densely forested lands exist on the windward sides of the north-south aligned mountain ranges, with zones of drier lands on the leeward sides. Finally, elevational differences, from valley bottoms to mountaintops, also result in general temperature gradients, from warmer in the valley bottoms to colder at the mountaintops, and exhibit trends toward increasing precipitation, and more in the form

6 | ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge

of snowfall, with increasing elevation until near the mountain summits, when precipitation decreases (Meidinger and Pojar 1991). Although the coastal and interior regions are divided by the rugged Coast and Cascade Mountains, they are connected by the great rivers draining the Interior Plateau and northern interior and descending to the Pacific all along the coast: the Yukon, Stikine, Nass, Skeena, Kitimat, Kitlope, Bella Coola, Kingcome, Knight, Fraser, Nooksack, Dungeness, Elwha, and Columbia Rivers and their tributaries. Created by the Pleistocene ice and its meltwaters from as long ago as twelve millennia or more, these rivers are like the veins of the landscape, not only providing pathways for the flowing waters but also serving as routes for plants, fish, birds, mammals, and other animals – not to mention people – to travel back and forth and extend their populations. Anyone who has travelled by foot or small watercraft anywhere within the study area will appreciate fully the sheer immensity of the landscape and the physical barriers it presents to those who would traverse its terrain. The landscape is equally impressive and daunting, whether along the rugged islandspattered coastline, up the steeply banked side channels and inlets, across the jagged, towering, and seemingly endless mountains threaded with precipitous canyons, into the high Interior Plateau, or traversing the expanse of northern forestlands dotted with thousands of small lakes and wetlands. In terms of climate, the mountain ranges create barriers to large air masses moving eastward from the Pacific Ocean. As these maritime air masses are forced upward by the Coast and Cascade Mountains, they cool and lose some of their moisture-holding capacity, causing high rainfall and, at upper elevations, snowfall on the windward slopes. Then, as the air descends on the eastern slopes, it warms up and retains its moisture, creating a rainshadow effect. This happens to some extent on the eastern side of Vancouver Island, in the lee of the Olympic Mountains and the Vancouver Island Ranges. The rainshadow effect is particularly strong in the canyons, valleys, and plateaus of the central interior, which are much drier than on the coast, with the driest areas of central British Columbia and Washington classified as cold desert. Then, beyond the drylands of the Okanagan and Kettle River Valleys are the West Kootenays, a heavily forested and mountainous region known as the Interior Wet Belt because climatically its conditions almost mimic those of the coastal rainforests. This wet belt extends north to the Clearwater Valley region. Finally, east of this belt of higher moisture is another dry belt in the East Kootenays and the Rocky Mountain Trench. Although these geographically mediated climatic effects themselves are impressive, for ethnobotanists, ecologists, and biogeographers, it is the diversity in vegetation produced by these effects that is so fascinating. Plant ecologists recognize some sixteen distinct biogeoclimatic vegetation zones in British Columbia alone, on the basis of climate, geographic and edaphic factors, and dominant

Introduction to the Book  |  7

vegetation type (British Columbia Ministry of Forests 1999a). The major vegetation zones of the United States are classified under a different system, but they can be matched generally to those recognized in British Columbia, as shown in figure 1-1. Approximately 2,500 native, or indigenous, vascular plant species exist within the study area, many sharing similar patterns of distribution and/or ecological requirements. The area’s bryophytes, algae, fungi, and lichens are similarly diverse.3 The plants of northwestern North America range from widespread, cosmopolitan species to endemics of more restricted range and habitat. Some species have disjunct populations, with related species or varieties in other distant places. In some cases these are relicts of a once more widespread and continuous range, and in others they are the result of long-distance dispersal from a parent population at some time in the past. Some of the species in the study area originated from the south, as far as South America, moving northward along the coast or along rivers and waterways of the Interior Plateau; and some disseminated after the Pleistocene glaciation from scattered glacial refugia, areas that were not covered with ice and allowed the survival of species in situ. Some of those species that existed in the past have become locally extinct, whereas others have increased in range or abundance over time, continuing to evolve and change genetically in response to both biotic and abiotic factors. Within each of the major vegetation zones and large-scale landscape features are many smaller features that support specialized communities of plants and animals, virtually all of them culturally important to Indigenous peoples. Depending on the nature, intensity, and duration of disturbance, which determines ecological succession, species composition can also change over time in a given place. Thus having access to habitats with multiple successional stages can give people the advantage of greater choice of useful species. One of the effects of Traditional Land and Resource Management practices, such as intentional clearing, is to increase the range of these successional habitats in a given area and thus expand the resources available, as well as to enhance their productivity. For example, through use of fire, people can create and maintain a patchwork of different ecological areas ranging from grassy prairies to open berry patches, deciduous woodlands, and dense forests with large evergreen trees, each supporting suites of culturally important species of plants and animals (Boyd 1999b; Mann 2005; Pyne 2001). The topographic features and biological diversity of the study area landscapes continue into the coastal and marine environment as estuaries, tidal marshes, rocky foreshores, sandy beaches and dunes, intertidal flats and shorelines, and subtidal kelp forests and other marine habitats. All of these features existed at different elevations in the past millennia, when the sea levels were higher or lower than today. Thus some of the places of terrestrial habitation and resource use accorded to ancient peoples are now submerged in the ocean, although they

8 | ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge

1-1  |  Major vegetation zones of northwestern North America. Note: numbers in parentheses correspond to numerical codes in the North American Environmental Atlas (Commission for Environmental Cooperation 2009).

still offer specialized marine habitats and important resources for people’s survival. Conversely, some of the coastal and intertidal habitats from the past are now obscured by forests or lakes in the terrestrial zone. Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America The Indigenous peoples of the study area speak a total of over fifty distinct languages or major dialects, which are in turn classified within several language families: Na-Dené (including numerous Dene, or Athabaskan, languages, as well as Tlingit and Eyak), Ts’msyenic (Tsimshian), Wakashan, and Salishan, with Haida in the northwestern part of the area and Ktunaxa in the southeastern part as language isolates, having no known linguistic relatives (Helm and Sturtevant 1982; Suttles 1990b; L.C. Thompson and Kinkade 1990; D.E. Walker 1998).4 Tlingit, Haida, Ts’msyenic, and Wakashan peoples reside mainly in the coastal and near coastal regions of the study area. Salishan peoples are represented within both the Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau cultural areas. Ktunaxa and Sahaptian are recognized as Plateau peoples. Dene (Athabaskan) speakers, including the Tahltan, Dakelh, and Tsilhqot’in, exclusively occupy the Subarctic part of the study area, although the Tsilhqot’in are often considered transitional to the Plateau subregion.5 The diverse languages and cultural areas of the study area are shown in figure 1-2, with accompanying legend. In general, the peoples and cultures of the Northwest Coast are characterized by their close relationship with the Pacific Ocean. These peoples – the Tlingit, Haida, Nisga’a, Ts’msyen, Haisla, Heiltsuk, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Makah, and Quileute, as well as the Nuxalk Salish and numerous Coast Salish peoples of southern British Columbia and Washington – are famous for their diverse maritime economies, based on fishing, sea mammal hunting, and gathering quantities of different types of shellfish. Not only the marine habitats but also the associated rivers and lakes and the vast coastal rainforests and other diverse terrestrial environments were, and still are, essential to peoples’ lifeways. For at least the past few millennia, Northwest Coast peoples have been “cedar people.” They have travelled mainly on the water – and sometimes over great distances – by dugout canoes of western redcedar (Thuja plicata) (figure 1-3),6 and they have generally lived over the winter months – at least in the past 4,000 years or so – in villages of cedar post, beam, and split-board houses, some of them massive, multifamily dwellings but most quite modest in size (Ames 1996; Ames and Maschner 1999; Moss 2011; Stewart 1984; Suttles 1990a, 1990b).

1-2 (facing page)  |  Languages and cultural areas of northwestern North America. Note: boundaries do not necessarily reflect the official territories of the First Nations.

10 | ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge

Legend for figure 1-2  |  Languages and cultural areas of northwestern North America Language

Family

Cultural area

Key on map

Tlingit

Na-Dené

Northwest Coast

1

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

Haida

Northwest Coast

2

Haida (Skidegate)

Haida

Northwest Coast

3

Dena’ina (Tanaina) (Outer Inlet, Upper Inlet, Iliamna, and Inland dialects)a

Na-Dené

Subarctic

4

Northern Tutchone

Na-Dené

Subarctic

5

Tahltan (Tałtan)

Na-Dené

Subarctic

6

Hän

Na-Dené

Subarctic

7

Gwich’ina

Na-Dené

Subarctic

7a

Slavea

Na-Dené

Subarctic

7b

Beaver (Dunneza)

Na-Dené

Subarctic

8

Sekani

Na-Dené

Subarctic

9

Kaska (Liard)

Na-Dené

Subarctic

10

Witsuwet’in (Babine)

Na-Dené

Subarctic

11

Dakelh/Carrier (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake)

Na-Dené

Subarctic

12

Dakelh/Carrier (Saik’uz)

Na-Dené

Subarctic

12

Dakelh/Carrier (Ulkatcho)

Na-Dené

Subarctic

12

Tsilhqut’inb

Na-Dené

Subarctic

13

Nicola Athabaskanc

Na-Dené

Interior Plateau

14

Nisga’a

Ts’msyenic

Northwest Coast

15

Gitxsan (also Gitksan)d

Ts’msyenic

Northwest Coast

16

Ts’msyen (Tsimshian) (Sm’algyax)

Ts’msyenic

Northwest Coast

17

Kitasoo (Sgűűsx, Southern Tsimshiane)

Ts’msyenic

Northwest Coast

18

Haisla

Wakashan

Northwest Coast

19

Hanaksiala

Wakashan

Northwest Coast

20

Heiltsuk (Bella Bella)

Wakashan

Northwest Coast

21

Oweekeeno (Oowekyala)

Wakashan

Northwest Coast

22

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl; speaking Kwak’wala and several other dialects)

Wakashan

Northwest Coast

23

Nuu-chah-nulth (Hesquiaht and many other dialects) (formerly Nootka or Nootkans)

Wakashan

Northwest Coast

24

Ditidaht (Nitinaht) (sometimes included in Nuu-chah-nulth/ Nootkans)

Wakashan

Northwest Coast

25

Southern Tutchone

5a

Legend for figure 1-2  |  continued Language

Family

Cultural area

Key on map

Makah

Wakashan

Northwest Coast

26

Nuxalk (Bella Coola)

Salishan

Northwest Coast

27

Sliammon (Tla A’min), Comox Sechelt (Shíshálh)

Salishan (Northern Coast Salish) Salishan (Northern Coast Salish)

Northwest Coast

28

Northwest Coast

29

Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh)

Salishan (Northern Coast Salish)

Northwest Coast

30

Straits Salish (northern: Saanich and other dialects)

Salishan (Central Coast Salish)

Northwest Coast

31

Klallam (Clallam)

Salishan (Central Coast Salish)

Northwest Coast

32

Samish

Salishan (Central Coast Salish)

Northwest Coast

33

Halkomelem, Halq’eméylem, Hul’qumi’num, Quw’utsun’ (Cowichan, Vancouver Island)

Salishan (Central Coast Salish)

Northwest Coast

34a Snaw’Naw’As/ Nanoose) 34b (Snuneymuxw) 34c (Cowichan Tribes)

Halkomelem, Upriver (Stó:lō) and Downriver (Musqueam)

Salishan (Central Coast Salish)

Northwest Coast

35

Lushootseed

Salishan (Central Coast Salish)

Northwest Coast

36

Twana

Salishan

Northwest Coast

37

Nooksack

Salishan

Northwest Coast

38

Tillamook

Salishan

Northwest Coast

39

Lower Chehalis

Salishan

Northwest Coast

40

Upper Chehalis

Salishan

Northwest Coast

41

Quinault

Salishan

Northwest Coast

42

Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc (Lil’wat, Pemberton)

Salishan

Interior Plateau

43

Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc (Fraser River)

Salishan

Interior Plateau

44

Nlaka’pmx

Salishan

Interior Plateau

45

Secwepemc (Fraser River) (Western and Eastern)

Salishan

Interior Plateau

46

Okanagan (Okanagan-Colville)

Salishan

Interior Plateau

47

Sinixt (Lakes)

Salishan

Interior Plateau

48

Columbian (ColumbianWenachee; Middle Columbia River)

Salishan

Interior Plateau

49

Legend for figure 1-2  |  continued Language

Family

Cultural area

Key on map

Snchítsu’umshtsn (Coeur d’Alene)

Salishan

Interior Plateau

50

Spokan/Kalispel

Salishan

Interior Plateau

51

Selish (Flathead and Pend d’Oreille)

Salishan

Interior Plateau

52

Upper Cowlitz (Western Columbia River; Northwest Sahaptin)

Sahaptian (Penutian)

Interior Plateau

53

Sahaptin (including Yakima and neighbouring groups)

Sahaptian (Penutian)

Interior Plateau

54

Nez Perce

Sahaptian (Penutian)

Interior Plateau

55

Ktunaxa (Kootenai)

Kutenai

Interior Plateau

56

Quileute

Chemakuan

Northwest Coast

57

Wasco/Wishram

Chinookan

Interior Plateau

58

a included for comparative ethnobotanical data; b transitional to Interior Plateau; c no speakers remaining; d transitional to interior sub-boreal; e Klemtu, where Kitasoo speakers live, also includes Xai’Xais people, who speak a Haisla dialect.

Note: The following are not included in this list, or in the ethnobotanical plant name inventory, because of a lack of data (numbers in brackets are indicated on the map): Eyak (59), Tagish (Dene/ Athabaskan) (60), Pentlatch (Vancouver Island Coast Salish) (61), Lower Cowlitz (Taitnapam, Coast Salish), Chemakum, Chinookan (62), and the Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau peoples south of the Columbia River, namely the Clatskanie (63), Tillamook, Aslean (64), Siusiawan (65), Coosas (66), Kalapuya (Willamette Valley) (67), Cayuse (Umatilla and Walla Walla), Molala (68), and Klamath and Modoc (69).

From spring through fall, the people moved in smaller groups to different locations around their territories and sometimes to neighbouring territories, harvesting and processing immense quantities of plant foods – greens, root vegetables, and berries (Turner 1995) – as well as fishing and hunting. Food storage was an essential component of their lives since little fresh food was available in the winter months (Ames 1996; Suttles 1990b). Although the mountainous areas are often not well recognized as areas of habitation, people also accessed high-elevation sites, at and above the treeline, for hunting, berry picking, and spiritual purposes (Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). Besides cedar wood, bark, roots, and branches, the Northwest Coast peoples used many different types of wood, fibres, and other plant materials in making shelters, implements, clothing, and containers (Turner 1998), and they also harvested numerous different plants for medicinal and ceremonial purposes

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1-3  |  Western redcedar (Thuja plicata), a species closely associated with the Northwest Coast cultural area.

(Turner and Hamersley-Chambers 2006; Turner and Hebda 1990; HamersleyChambers and Turner 2011). Northwest Coast peoples are known for their hierarchical social organizations based on hereditary leadership, which is characterized by careful training and by accumulation, control over, and distribution of wealth in the form of food and other goods, as well as by development of

Introduction to the Book  |  15

elaborate ceremonial and religious practices that reinforce these complex social and economic systems (Suttles 1990b). Artists on the Northwest Coast have long been held in high esteem and may represent an occupation of specialization that extends thousands of years into the past (Ames and Maschner 1999). Less well recognized is the ability of Northwest Coast peoples to manage and enhance the plant and animal resources on which they rely (Deur and Turner 2005; Thornton 2011). This aspect, as it relates to plant use, will be further discussed later in the book. The Interior Plateau of the Fraser and Columbia drainages is home to many different Indigenous peoples, including the Interior Salish groups – Nlaka’pamux (Thompson), Secwepemc (Shuswap), Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc (Lillooet), Okanagan (Okanagan-Colville), Sinixt (Lakes Okanagan), Selish (Flathead), Snchítsu’umshtsn (Coeur d’Alene), Spokan, and others of central and eastern Washington – as well as the Ktunaxa people, neighbouring the Selish to the north, and the Sahaptian peoples (Sahaptin, Nez Perce, and Upper Cowlitz) in the south. The ancestral Interior Salish probably entered the Plateau region from the lower Fraser Valley to the west between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago and spread northward (with the Secwepemc extending the farthest north) and eastward (with the Selish, formerly known as Flathead, establishing their territory in what is now western Montana), joining and perhaps mixing with the peoples already living in the areas. The Interior Plateau peoples traditionally lived, at least within the last 4,000 years or so, in semi-subterranean pithouses in the wintertime. Like their coastal counterparts, they travelled in small groups throughout their traditional territories, from the river bottoms to the mountaintops, in order to access the diverse resources available during the growing season. They travelled on foot or used bark canoes (usually of sheets of birch or white pine bark sewn onto a wooden frame) or dugouts of either cottonwood or, as available, western redcedar for water transport. When horses were introduced to the Plateau in the 1700s, they were quickly adopted as a dominant means of transportation and remain so to the present day (Bhattacharyya 2012). Plateau people fished for salmon, trout, and other fish, and they hunted a variety of land mammals and game birds, but they also harvested significant quantities of plant foods, especially many types of springtime greens, root vegetables, and berries. Other foods included hazelnuts, pine seeds, cambium, and inner bark tissues of pines (Dilbone 2011; Dilbone, Turner, and von Aderkas 2013; Magne 2007) (figure 1-4), as well as a few types of mushrooms and black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii) (S. Crawford 2007; Turner 1997a). Hunn (1981) estimates that plant foods – mostly harvested by women – comprised as much as 70 per cent of the caloric contributions to the diets of people of the southern Interior Plateau. As on the coast, people spent considerable time and effort processing and storing their plant foods – most notably the roots and berries – for winter use. They steamed root vegetables

16 | ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge

1-4  |  Tsilhqot’in elder Helena Myers harvesting edible cambium from chendi (lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta), 1990.

and some other foods in underground pits and dried their berries, either separated like raisins or mashed and dried in cakes (Hunn, Turner, and French 1998; Turner 2006a; Turner and Hamersley-Chambers 2006; Wright 1991). The Plateau peoples occasionally interacted directly with the Northwest Coast peoples, and some cultural traits of the Northwest Coast are shared especially by those groups whose territories extend westward over the mountains toward the coast, such as the Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc and Nlaka’pamux (see Kuipers 2002 for linguistic evidence; and Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Plateau peoples’ social ranking is, in general, more egalitarian than on the Northwest Coast, but they also recognize the authority of chiefs and leaders, and archaeological evidence from sites like Keatley Creek, discussed in chapter 2, suggests that in past millennia there may have been stronger social divisions than in more recent times (Hayden 1992, 1997). The western Subarctic peoples of the study area – all Dene (Athabaskan) speakers, including the Dena’ina (Tanaina), Tahltan, Kaska, Sekani, Dakelh (Carrier), Tsilhqot’in, and related groups – traditionally lived in smaller familybased groups, travelling widely over the sparsely populated landscape and relying heavily on hunting caribou, deer, and other game, as well as on fishing

Introduction to the Book  |  17

and berry picking. Root harvesting was also important, but the plant resources are generally more limited, especially in the northern parts of the subregion (Turner 1997a). In the southern part, the Tsilhqot’in and Ulkatcho Dakelh have shared similar environments and cultural traits – including a high dependence on root vegetables, among other plant foods – with the neighbouring Plateau Salishan peoples (Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc and Secwepemc). One Dene (Athabaskan) group, the Nicola Athabaskans, formerly lived in the Nicola River Valley, within the Interior Plateau area, but merged with their Salish neighbours early in European settlement days. Along the western perimeter of the Subarctic, the Dena’ina (Tanaina), Tahltan, Witsuwit’en, and Ulkatcho (Dakelh) interacted with their Northwest Coast neighbours and adopted a number of their cultural practices, as well as obtaining coastal products in exchange for interior goods through trade. The Subarctic peoples generally travelled by birchbark canoe or on foot, using snowshoes, toboggans, and dogs to assist them in winter travel. They also fished with nets, made shelters of poles and bark, and generally used many different plant materials as well as plant medicines, just as their Northwest Coast and Plateau neighbours did (Andre, Karst, and Turner 2006). Berries, in particular, and the cambium and inner bark of lodgepole pine were important traditional plant foods for these peoples (Dilbone 2011; Magne 2007; Turner 1997a). Ames and Maschner (1999) suggest that the social complexity and lifestyles of the Northwest Coast peoples, at least, have been in place for the last 2,500 years, if not longer, as reflected in the archaeological record. According to palynological research from the 1980s, western redcedar, such an influential species in Northwest Coast cultures, has been common on the central and northern coast for only the past 5,000 to 4,000 years (Hebda and Mathewes 1984). The lifeways and social traits of the Plateau and Subarctic cultural areas are also uncertain in their antiquity, but archaeologists suggest that the Plateau Pithouse Tradition, generally reflective of the Plateau cultural area, as it was known when the first Europeans arrived, is approximately 4,000 years old. The ancestors of the Dene (Athabaskan) peoples of the Subarctic have been occupying central Alaska and the Yukon for many millennia, but they evidently started to spread farther southward into the interior of British Columbia, as well as into the Great Plains, perhaps around 1,200 years ago (Ives 2010). Merging Lines of Evidence as the Book Unfolds In all, over 500 plant species are known to have specific cultural roles and names in one or more of the Aboriginal languages within the study area.7 One of the most interesting and intriguing aspects of ethnobotanical work in this region – besides the extent and depth of peoples’ familiarity with the plants of their local environments – is seeing similarities in peoples’ knowledge and uses of plants

18 | ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge

across the diverse languages and cultures, and often across broad geographic expanses. Although these peoples have their own distinct languages and cultural traits, they also share many similarities in their cultural practices, including their relationships with plants, indicating in some cases common ancestral origins and, in others, a history of contact and interaction with each other. Taken as a whole, the correspondences in names, uses, and other aspects of botanical knowledge – as well as some notable differences and disjunctures in this knowledge – require a close examination of the mechanisms of knowledge transfer and dissemination. Given the sheer diversity and complexity of habitats and species, languages and cultures, opportunities for comparison are almost limitless. I have used a combination of broad-scale comparisons (e.g., the number of groups for which a particular use of a plant has been documented) and very detailed comparisons (e.g., similarities in names for plants across two different languages) from which to draw inferences about the nature and dynamics of the acquisition and exchange of knowledge across groups and over generations. Any picture of the distant past is necessarily fragmentary and blurred. Small hints or clues here and there emerge through archaeological and palaeoecological findings, as well as through the vocabularies, languages, observations, or oral histories recounted and recorded from more contemporary participants and extrapolated back in time and place. When these various threads of evidence are combined, the stories and understandings may become clearer and certainties become greater, but there are still many unknowns, and furthermore, lines of evidence – social, genetic, linguistic, and archaeological – can at times seem inconclusive or even conflicting (Ives 2010). This section provides an overview of the various types of investigations and methods associated with different areas of disciplinary knowledge included in this research, with the goal of better understanding the processes and outcomes of botanical knowledge acquisition, transmission, and adaptation as described in the succeeding chapters of the book. Identifying common threads of practice and belief – as well as differences – within human-environment relationships may illustrate ways that cultural and ecological interactions are interwoven across territorial and cultural boundaries, both within the study region and more generally in human societies. Appendix 1 provides a more detailed discussion of the major sources of information I consulted in developing each chapter. I have drawn on diverse sources of information, ideas, and findings from the general fields of archaeology, linguistics, anthropology, botany, and ecology, and especially from related interdisciplinary fields, including environmental anthropology, historical linguistics, environmental history, cultural geography, human ecology, common property resource management, ethnobiology, ethnoecology, and archaeobotany – all of which embrace research at the intersections of social and ecological systems. Each discipline and subdiscipline contributes its own combination of methods. One of the earliest studies integrating the history and

Introduction to the Book  |  19

dynamics of human-environment interactions in northwestern North America is Edward Sapir’s classic work of historical anthropology, Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method (1916), in which he suggested combining linguistic, ethnological, and archaeological evidence to inform reconstruction of Indigenous peoples’ history in North America. Since Sapir’s time, the paradigms and methods of these disciplines have changed dramatically, but the underlying concept of “triangulating” evidence survives and has been put to good use in many other contexts. For example, in their study to identify the ancestral homeland of Polynesian peoples and cultures, archaeologists Patrick Kirch and Roger Green (2001) integrated multiple lines of inquiry in physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics, described collectively as “the phylogenetic model.” Another example of an integrative study draws on multiple lines of inquiry to examine the culture and history of a people: the Stó:lō Nation historical atlas from the Fraser Valley region of British Columbia (K.T. Carlson 2001). The apparent linguistic relationships between the Dene (Athabaskan) peoples of North America and the Yeniseian peoples (represented by one contemporary group, the Kets of central Siberia) are explored by Kari and Potter (2010b) and their colleagues using multiple approaches. In other regions, questions on the origins of crop species are routinely addressed by combining archaeological, ethnographic, and sometimes linguistic evidence with taxonomic and ecological studies of wild ancestral forms. Such explicitly interdisciplinary approaches are standard in the fields of ethnobiology and ethnoecology.8 Palaeobotany and Palaeoecology

Fundamental to any attempts to compare known trends and patterns – in order to understand how similarities and differences in vegetation, culture, and language came to be – are methods that enable a clearer understanding of the past. As any historian knows, even with written records our knowledge of past events and conditions in a given region is limited in many ways. Learning about the histories of orally based cultures, for which no written documentation exists, is even more difficult (Arlotto 1981). There are tools and approaches, however, that can allow significant insights. Palaeobotany and palaeoecology are fields that rely on the evidence of ancient plant remains – pollen, spores, charcoal, and plant fossils – situated in particular physical contexts where they can be identified, quantified, and dated using radiocarbon or other techniques. Wet, frozen, and anaerobic sites, including glaciers, ocean bottoms, lakebeds, and waterlogged peatlands, can yield these remains, stratified along with other indicators of environmental history: layers of volcanic ash; clay, silt, or detritus strata from floods or tsunamis; or deposits of charcoal from forest fires of the past (see K.J. Brown and Hebda 2002a, 2002b; Gavin, Brubaker, and Lertzman 2003; and Hunn and Norton 1984). Tree

20 | ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge

ring analysis (dendrochronology) of core samples of living trees or of preserved and dated cross-sections of logs or snags is another technique used to determine past climatic conditions (related to the relative size of annual rings, scars from past fires, or other events as reflected in the wood), as well as past forest composition from preserved wood (Gavin, Brubaker, and Lertzman 2003). These methods rely on accuracy of dating and are limited by the nature of the remains available for analysis but can reveal important information of considerable time depth. In the context of this work, palaeobotanical and palaeoecological studies of ancient vegetation, plant distributions, and environmental change, from toward the latter part of the Pleistocene (14,000 years ago or more) to the Late Holocene of recent centuries, can allow some understanding of the natural environments of early humans and the plants they would have encountered. Along with associated research in geomorphology and geography, these analyses can also determine the extent, timing, and coincidence of glacial events, sea level changes, major flooding, volcanic eruptions, fires, and climate fluctuations, all of which would have impacted ancient peoples and their interactions with plants and environments. For example, a spectacular palaeoecological find was around 1,000 square kilometres of 17,000-year-old vegetation – grasses, sedges, mosses, and many other plants but with a thin root mat – preserved under a thick layer of volcanic ash in the now-submerged Beringia between Siberia and Alaska (Ames and Maschner 1999). Although no artifacts were found in these materials, they tell us what the ancient coastal environments were like and what sort of plants were available to humans at that time. In another example, tree ring analysis and radiocarbon dating at North Bonneville, Washington, revealed that about 550 years ago an immense landslide occurred that would have obliterated any evidence of human settlement (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Chapter 2 addresses the antiquity of human-plant relationships in northwestern North America, drawing on the environmental history record provided through palaeobotany and palaeoecology and on archaeological methods of analyzing plant remains in archaeological contexts (archaeobotany) and human interactions with plants (palaeoethnobotany) (Ford 1979; Renfrew 1973). Archaeobotany and Palaeoethnobotany

Methods in archaeobotany and palaeoethnobotany are similar to those of palaeobotany and palaeoecology in that they involve identification, dating, and analysis of plant remains. However, in this case, the work is undertaken in contexts of known human occupation and cultural applications of the plants and plant materials. Archaeobotany draws not only on palaeoecology and palaeobotany but also on inferences from ethnography, linguistics, oral history, and other fields (Minnis 2004).

Introduction to the Book  |  21

As with palaeoecology and palaeobotany, both direct and indirect evidence in archaeobotanical research can derive from analysis of microscopic plant remains, including pollen, spores, charcoal, phytoliths (i.e., microscopic silica bodies that form within individual plant cells or tissues of some species), starch grains, leaf epidermal tissues, and other minute fragments of plants, as well as macroplant remains such as conifer needles and cones, wood and charcoal, and plant fibres found within archaeological contexts. Studies of coprolites, or fossilized human faeces, can inform us of what people were consuming and in some cases even what medicinal plants they were taking (Gilbert et al. 2008). Sometimes, too, impressions of leaves, woven fibres, and other plant-based materials are left in clay or mud and can be identified even when the organic tissue itself has decomposed. Proxies for plant use, including stone tools,9 mauls, awls, bone cambium scrapers, and implements such as digging sticks and wedges, are also part of the archaeobotanical record. Chemical analysis of organic residues such as alkaloids – called biomolecular archaeology – is another recent approach to identification of plant use in archaeological contexts (Sutton, Sobolik, and Gardner 2010). Within the study area, archaeological records of human-plant interactions are to date relatively sparse. There are three main reasons for this. First, plants do not preserve readily in many environmental and archaeological contexts. Second, even when there is potential for preservation of plant materials, archaeologists have often not appreciated their relevance and therefore have not sought them out. And, third, many sites where details of plant use might have been revealed – particularly wetlands and river estuaries – have already been destroyed or obscured by development or disturbance (Lepofsky 2004; Lepofsky, Moss, and Lyons 2001; Bernick 1998b; Hayden 1997).10 Nevertheless, archaeobotany and palaeoethnobotany have received growing attention in recent years, and over 100 sites in the general Northwest Coast region have been examined for archaeobotanical remains, with remains of over 100 different species of plants, most of known cultural importance, identified from these sites.11 The technique of flotation has been a standard method in archaeobotany for several decades, but it has been increasingly refined and has revolutionized the recovery of plant remains in archaeological contexts (K.R. Adams and Smith 2011; Lepofsky 2004; Sutton, Sobolik, and Gardner 2010). Archaeological samples from particular contexts or features are separated by screens of different coarseness, which are placed in water. The lighter plant materials from each class size respectively then float to the surface, where they can be skimmed off, separated, and analyzed. Particularly important archaeological contexts from which plant remains are most readily recovered include wet or waterlogged environments (“wet sites”),12 where not only pollen and plant fragments but sometimes entire artifacts remain intact; dry caves, deserts, and other dry places, where desiccated

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plant remains and other evidence of plant use can remain preserved for centuries or millennia; hearths and other burned features such as earth ovens in which plant fragments – charcoal, seeds, twigs, cones, nuts, and bulbs – that were charred or burned have become carbonized, giving clues about species that were used for food or fuel or that surrounded the food being cooked;13 and frozen contexts – sites and remains that have been trapped under glacial ice or in permafrost – where wood, fibre, and even human or animal flesh can be preserved for centuries or millennia (see Dickson et al. 2004). Analysis of culturally modified trees (i.e., trees showing evidence of human harvesting or other transformation) and charcoal profiles in soil can also reveal patterns of human habitation and plant use from the past, as can analysis of vegetation and the modern composition of plant communities, sometimes reflecting past human activity.14 Wet sites often preserve artifacts and plant remains exceptionally well because of continuous anaerobic conditions, inhibiting the growth of bacteria and fungi that cause decay of organic materials. Discoveries of archaeological features in wet contexts (e.g., marshes, swamps, waterlogged valley bottoms, river deltas, shallow lakeshores, and peatbogs) are relatively recent in our region (Bernick 1998b). The earliest known wet archaeological site on the Northwest Coast is Kilgii Gwaay on Ellen Island at the south end of Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands), dating to around 10,000 years ago (i.e., 9,450 to 9,400 radiocarbon years BP ).15 At Kilgii Gwaay, along with numerous stone and bone artifacts and remains of many mammals, birds, and fish, over 100 wooden artifacts have been recovered, including wooden stakes and wedges, numerous withes (some wrapped with split spruce root), finely braided twine, a two-part haft, and objects that were probably points – all indicative of a well-developed woodworking technology, as well as an ability to use watercraft and to exploit many different ecological niches (Fedje, Christensen, et al. 2005; A. Mackie et al. 2003; Q. Mackie et al. 2011; Moss 2011; Wigen 2005). The Glenrose Cannery site, another early and renowned site with waterlogged features, situated along the lower Fraser River, has yielded significant evidence of early basketry on the coast, with wood splint and fibrous bark basketry dating to about 4,300 years ago (Bernick 1998b, 1998c). Among the region’s best documented wet context sites are the Ozette and Hoko River sites, both on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, in the traditional territory of the Makah. The Hoko River waterlogged deposits date to over 3,000 years ago, whereas the Ozette deposits date to just over 300 years ago (both described in more detail in chapter 2). Wet site specialist Dale Croes, who participated in the excavations of Ozette, Hoko River, and a number of other key sites containing waterlogged deposits (Croes 1989, 1992, 1995, 1997; Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009a, 2009b; Foster and Croes 2004), concludes that about 90 to 95 per cent of Northwest Coast material culture in general is based on botanical products (see also Whelchel 2005). Croes (2003; see also Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009b) argues that examining

Introduction to the Book  |  23

shell midden contexts alone,16 without looking at wet or waterlogged situations, yields information on only 5 to 10 per cent of a people’s material culture (i.e., stone, bone, antler, and shell) and that this limitation makes it impossible to have even a glimmer of the characteristics of early cultures, particularly considering that these cultures are ancestral to people who are today among the world’s best woodcarvers and carpenters and whose women are exceptionally fine weavers (see Foster and Croes 2004). Furthermore, the record of plant food use – and therefore the role of women as harvesters and processors of plant foods in early diets – would be even sparser than it is without the evidence provided from wet sites (Lepofsky 2004). In dry contexts, plant remains simply become desiccated, and as long as they remain dry, they can be preserved intact for long periods of time. On the coast, dry environments tend to be limited to some caves, such as at Hesquiat Harbour on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where a collaborative archaeological investigation with the Hesquiaht revealed a diversity of basketry, textiles, cordage, and mats of cedar bark and tule associated with burials.17 Notably, western redcedar and yellow-cedar contain preservatives in their wood and bark, which makes them particularly resistant to decay in both wet and dry contexts (Lepofsky 2004). In the Interior Plateau region, from the areas of the Fraser and South Thompson Rivers to the valleys of the Okanagan and Columbia Rivers and their tributaries, as well as in caves and rockshelters, there are many arid valleys and sidehills conducive to preserving some plant remains. The Keatley Creek pithouse village, described in chapter 2, is one example. Situated on a well-drained benchland vegetated by sagebrush, bunchgrasses, prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.), and other dryland species, this site has revealed diverse plant remains, some of them uncarbonized (Lepofsky 2004). Certain plant parts preserve better than others: birch bark (figures 1-5 and 1-6) and stoneseed (Lithospermum ruderale) fruits, for example, seem particularly resistant to decay and will remain intact for hundreds of years. In any archaeological site, distinguishing archaeological plant remains from those of natural sources requires careful sampling and attention to the source and context of the materials. Frozen contexts have also yielded extremely well-preserved botanical and other organic remains.18 In British Columbia, in the far northwest, the remains of a young man, at a site named Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį (Long Ago Person Found), are one of the most significant discoveries, as described in chapter 2. Frozen contexts will undoubtedly continue to reveal important archaeological materials as the ice and glaciers that have been in place for millennia, especially in northern regions, continue to melt due to global warming (Dove, Hare, and Heacker 2005). Many early archaeological sites in the study region include roasting pits and hearths with charred plants, including camas bulbs, hazelnuts, and acorns

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1-5  |  Paper birch (Betula papyrifera).

1-6  |  Birch-bark roll, probably between 500 and 1,500 years old, from an archaeological site at Kamloops, BC .

(Lepofsky 2004). At the Milliken site in the Fraser Canyon, famous as an important early location for fishing and processing salmon, large numbers of charred cherry stones – not identified by species but likely chokecherry (Prunus virginiana), based on edibility and distribution – were found, indicating late summer or early fall occupancy. However, more than simply revealing the seasonality of the site, the cherry remains are a clear indication that not only salmon but also fruits featured in early foodways and that people were processing plant foods in a focused manner even in the Early Holocene, some ten millennia or more ago (Kramer 2000; Lepofsky 2004; Thoms 1989). Since processing berries often involves some type of cooking before they are dried, berry seeds are one type of “plant remains” prominently associated with some hearth features. At the Barnett and Scowlitz sites on the lower Fraser River, huge quantities of seeds of elderberry (Sambucus sp.), Rubus species (possibly R. spectabilis, R. leucodermis, or R. ursinus), salalberry (Gaultheria shallon), and/or blueberry or huckleberry (Vaccinium sp.) were identified from a series of shallow cooking features; apparently the berries were being processed together for winter use (Lepofsky 2004). In the same region, at the Pitt River site (a Late Holocene fishing camp on the Fraser River east of Vancouver) over eighty hearths were found containing hundreds of thousands of charred seeds of wild lily-of-the-valley (Maianthemum dilatatum), along with quantities of western hemlock needles (Lepofsky 2004). Maianthemum fruits are not among the most palatable, but Northwest Coast people were known to eat them when still green as well as when fully ripe (Turner 1997a). At Pitt River the berries were possibly being cooked in pits lined with hemlock boughs, for the purpose of removing the seeds and making dried berry “fruit leather” from the pulp. Microscopic phytoliths may also be recovered from hearth sites and can give clues as to what types of vegetation were used to line cooking pits as well as, potentially, what types of roots or other plant foods people were cooking. Trees and shrubs showing signs of human use and modification are an important source of information on past plant use. So-called “culturally modified trees” (CMT s), reflecting a wide range of uses and purposes, are common throughout the study area.19 Categories of use resulting in the formation of CMTs include harvesting inner bark as food; employing bark in sheets or strips for technological purposes (basketry, roofing, storage pit lining, etc.); medicinal use of bark or wood; removal of wood planks from standing trees; coppicing trees and shrubs for basketry material production; marking trees to indicate trails, boundary lines, or significant locations; and carving or shaping trees for spiritual purposes. The type and extent of modification, and the patterns of CMTs across a landscape or time period, provide material evidence for peoples’ use and occupancy of a place and reflect commonalities in resource management practices and approaches that can come only from extended cultural interchange. CMT s are further discussed in later chapters.

Introduction to the Book  |  27

Aside from actual plant remains in archaeological contexts, archaeobotanists can infer ancient plant use from proxies, represented by a range of artifacts and features, such as roasting pits and, as noted previously, tools and containers used in the harvesting, processing, storage, and consumption of plants (see Lepofsky 2004; Matson and Magne 2007; Peacock 1998; and Thoms 1989). Once sites are identified and described, the patterns of occurrence of plant remains are significant indicators of similarities and differences in plant use and plant technologies. For example, knowing the location of particular plant remains – whether in short seasonal camps along the coast and in the mountains or in storage caches in or near houses – can inform us about peoples’ lifeways and potential seasonal movements. Quantities of plant foods or numbers of plant-processing tools can also help to determine the numbers of people involved and the relative contribution to an overall food system. By comparing types, quantities, and locations of plant foods and other plant remains in different parts of the same house or from different houses in the same village, we can determine potential social divisions within a household or community. For example, at Psacelay, a proto-historic Ts’msyen village on the Skeena River, evidence of large-scale berry processing was found in association with other indicators of occupancy by high-status families, with immense quantities of blueberry (or possibly red huckleberry) seeds (Vaccinium spp.) and berryjuice stains in hearths and storage areas (Martindale 1999; Lepofsky 2004). The houses themselves, including their relative size and presence or absence of features like hearths or board flooring, can serve as indicators of household wealth and potential capacity for food storage, not only for the occupants but also for feasting and trade (Ames 1996, 2005). Experimental archaeology is another approach to understanding the past. By counting the elements in a basket or mat, by experimenting with harvesting and preparing these elements, and by actually crafting them into a finished product, we can better understand the resources required and relative time and energy devoted to such tasks (M.K. Anderson 2005; Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009b; Hunn 1981; Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Often, we focus on the contents of a basket or container and overlook the essential cultural and economic role of the vessel itself in terms of its contributions to food transport, storage, and trade. Even the great salmon-based economies of the Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau in the Mid and Late Holocene could not have flourished without a host of plant materials for spears and nets, gaffs and dip net handles, spreaders, fuel, canoes, matting, and harvesting and storage baskets and bags, let alone the multitudes of roots, berries, greens, clams, and other foods that complemented the salmon in the diet. In terms of social organization and division of labour, women – as the weavers and gatherers – played an enormous role, which has often gone unrecognized. Lepofsky (2004) and others20 have pointed out that the underrepresentation of plants in the archaeological record corresponds

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with and translates into a general underrating of plants in the ethnographic record. Furthermore, since women are often associated with plant food gathering and processing, weaving mats and baskets, and harvesting and administering medicines, the privileging of hunting and fishing in archaeological contexts (i.e., description of stone, bone, and antler implements and artifacts) results in an emphasis on male occupations over female pursuits and endeavours. Correcting and reversing this bias is obviously necessary and is ongoing. Further research focusing on, or taking into account, the richness of potential plant resources featured in northwestern North American Indigenous history promises to reveal many new discoveries and insights. Some of the findings to date are intriguing. For example, Suttles (1976) pointed out that, in Coast Salish art traditions, implements made by men but used by women, such as mat creasers, spindle whorls, and weaving frame posts, were often decorated with carving and/or painting, whereas men’s implements were seldom decorated. In an examination of seventy to eighty spindle whorls, for example, he found many decorated with simple curvilinear designs and a number with representations of bird, animal, or human figures. He speculated that the decorations may have reflected spiritual aspects of the tools or the items of power and prestige that they were used to produce. Possibly, too, like shaman’s rattles and many other objects, they were instruments of transformation – of a raw material into an article indicating wealth and status. Language and Plant Terms

The present diversity of plant resources and of their recent applications and relationships with human societies as described in the remaining chapters of these two volumes is a complex product of the history, dynamics, and development of the flora and fauna over time and of the interweaving of human migration and settlement with the synchronous acquisition, transmission, and adaptation of knowledge, practices, and beliefs about these flora and fauna. Chapter 3 examines the various names of plants in the different languages and the connections between many of them; thus it draws mainly on data and methods from the field of linguistics. In this work, I have relied substantially on the information provided by my colleagues in this field, much of it undertaken in collaborative research projects (see Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner and Hebda 2012; Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983; and Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Plant names and botanical vocabulary lend themselves well to linguistic comparison and reconstruction. Adding the spatial and temporal dimensions of plant distributions and extensions from phytogeographical data brings a whole new level of complexity to these names and reveals how their semantic referents expanded or shifted on occasion as people, travelling into new territory or connecting with people from other

Introduction to the Book  |  29

places, encountered new species and accommodated them in their vocabularies (C.H. Brown 1999). In many instances, this meant adapting to plants that were similar in form or application to those species already familiar from previous times and places.21 As the idea for this book emerged, at the outset I undertook a systematic compilation of plant names in the diverse languages of northwestern North America, drawn from numerous ethnobotanical publications and language dictionaries. The inference that names for given plants in an ancestral language reflect a high degree of salience of these species is based on the pioneering work of Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven (1973). It is also supported by some of my own research on plant names of the Skidegate and Massett dialects of Haida (Turner 1974), along with evidence that names of plants of high cultural importance are retained in languages as they develop and diverge, whereas names of plants that are less important tend to exhibit less fidelity and to be replaced more readily. As C.H. Brown (2010, 76) notes, there is “a very strong positive correlation between the lexical retention (stability) of plant names and the cultural significance of the plants they designate.” In developing the database, I divided the plant species named into two categories: those that are indigenous to northwestern North America and those that were introduced, either intentionally as produce or crop plants or unintentionally as “weeds” at or since the time of European contact. I then reduced these lists to species (or groups of closely related species) that are named in three or more of the region’s languages (and/or major dialects), removing those occurring in only one or two languages. The two tables – one of Indigenous species and one of introduced species, in both cases having names in three or more languages – are posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091), with excerpts included in this volume as appendices 2 and 3 respectively. These datasets have been invaluable, especially when considering the relative ranges, habitat preferences, and cultural applications and relationships of the species named, and they have served as a foundation for comparing various other details and themes related to plant knowledge and use. Chapter 3 draws heavily on appendix 2 and the full online database as a source of comparative materials. Using lexical comparisons to find names that are both phonologically and semantically similar, I have been able to determine some of the borrowed terms that signal interaction across language boundaries, as well as many cognate terms that are based on common linguistic origin and therefore reflect common ancestral knowledge of plants. Chapter 3 suggests connections between peoples across major distances, as indicated by similarities in their plant names, and discusses possible pathways of interaction leading to the existing patterns in plant nomenclature. This work is far from complete, and I have tried to be conservative in my assessments of relationships across language groups.

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Further analysis by comparative and historical linguists will hopefully provide significant additional insights. Other Topics and Lines of Evidence

Chapter 4 explores the loss and adaptation of plant traditions during the socalled postcontact period, following the arrival of the (mainly) European newcomers in the region that started in the late 1700s. Much of the information in chapter 4 is based on methods from historical and ethnographic traditions, including those of ethnobotany and ethnoecology. From the exploration and fur trade era to the colonial era (in which intentional programs of cultural assimilation were implemented by church and state authorities, with accompanying suppression of languages, belief systems, and cultural institutions) and finally to the “modern” industrial era, every aspect of First Peoples’ lives was affected by the newcomers. Waves of epidemic diseases reduced Indigenous populations dramatically, especially over the nineteenth century. Many Indigenous people were prevented from accessing plant resources and other resources over large parts of their territories, and the landscapes themselves were transformed through agriculture, logging, urbanization, and other developments, as well as through a deluge of introduced species. The cumulative impacts of these relatively rapid changes were far-reaching and, in many ways, overwhelming (Duff 1997; Turner, Gregory, et al. 2008; Turner and Turner 2008). Chapter 4 addresses these changes and their implications in terms of people’s ethnobotanical knowledge. Given such dramatic transformations in the knowledge and use of plants, not only since the arrival of Europeans but also in the millennia since the Pleistocene, to what extent is it possible to project current and recent ethnobotanical knowledge and practices into the past? The next set of chapters – 5, 6, and 7 – address this question to some extent. They cover topical areas that are common concerns of ethnobotany: food and nutrition, plant materials and technologies, and medicinal applications of plants. Much of the information on recent plant knowledge is derived from interviews and learning experiences with knowledgeable elders of many different cultural and linguistic groups within the study region, using mainly qualitative (sometimes quantitative) and participatory research methods as described in some of my own publications and other ethnobotanical references (see E.N. Anderson et al. 2011; R.I. Ford 1994, 2001; and Martin 1995), including Nolan and Turner (2011), but the information is also based, to some extent, on archaeological and linguistic evidence from the earlier chapters. All of these topics, from food use to technological applications to medicinal practices, show patterns related to the availability of various culturally

Introduction to the Book  |  31

important plant species, the antiquity of certain practices, adaptations to changing conditions, and possible linkages across cultural and geographic space. Using these multiple lines of evidence – archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic, combined with palaeoecological, ecological, biological, and geographical – can increase our confidence in drawing conclusions about origins of botanical traditions and commonalities in processes and trends, at least in cases where two or more lines indicate similar results. For example, as noted earlier, we know from palaeoecological records that western redcedar (Thuja plicata) became a common element of central Northwest Coast forests only around 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, spreading north as far as Alaska possibly as recently as about 3,000 years ago (Moss 2011). Ames and Maschner (1999) suggest that its immigration into the region strongly supported the development of the sophisticated woodworking traditions of Northwest Coast peoples. The proliferation of terms for cedar tree, cedar wood, cedar bark, and cedar branches in virtually every language where this tree grows today shows that it was soon widely embraced by First Peoples everywhere. The Ts’msyenic names, meaning “real wood,”22 are one indication of its importance. That the Haida name for this tree, ts’uu, is related to Dene (Athabaskan) names for spruce (Picea spp.) suggests a possible borrowing and semantic shift in the name of an earlier species on Haida Gwaii, possibly somewhat supplanted in importance by the botanical newcomer. This is just one example that shows how palaeoecological, archaeological, and linguistic information can be applied to better understand the history of a culturally significant plant. The second volume of this book continues with an examination of different aspects of botanical knowledge and its variation, using data drawn mainly from ethnographic and oral history methods (see K.T. Carlson 2001; Lutz 2008; and Suttles 1987b, 1990b), combined with ethnobotanical and ethnoecological approaches (see Berkes 2012; and Deur and Turner 2005). Chapters 8 to 11 address aspects of resource use and management that cut across and integrate the topic areas of the previous section (chapters 5, 6, and 7 of volume 1). Chapters 8 and 9 focus on peoples’ organizational modes in relation to plant use and developing Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems. Chapter 8 discusses the adaptive strategy, adopted almost universally in the region, of moving seasonally to different locations in order to access the range of resources needed for survival: the so-called “seasonal round.” People worked in concert with other species, at times accessing the same resources as bears, birds, or rodents, and probably learned from ancient times to follow the signals and lifecycles of plants and animals in determining seasonal availability and variation of resources. As already noted, in an area where winter predominates for several months of the year, an ability to preserve and store food has been an essential component of peoples’ activities and knowledge systems.

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Chapter 9 presents sociological aspects of ethnoecology, focusing on how people have organized themselves in ways that have enabled them to access and use their plant and other resources efficiently and effectively. It describes the roles of men, women, children, elders, and – from the past – slaves in relation to plant use and knowledge. It also considers various ways that social organization and social institutions have influenced and been affected by peoples’ relationships with and use of plants. The contributions of chiefs and leaders to plant resource use, management, and distribution are a significant part of this story. Also important are the pathways for interpersonal and intergenerational knowledge acquisition and transmission in relation to people-plant relationships. Building on the previous chapters, chapter 10 considers economic linkages between different linguistic and cultural groups in terms of exchange and sharing of plant products and ethnobotanical knowledge across geographical space. Chapter 11 describes peoples’ diverse practical strategies for managing the quality and productivity of plant resources and habitats, including systems of proprietorship, or “ownership,” of key plant resources, which are described in this chapter. Using the example cited previously of western redcedar, the importance of this tree is confirmed through oral history and ethnographic accounts in different parts of the study area. Techniques for harvesting and using cedar wood, bark, branches, and roots, known locations where people go to harvest these products, and particular times of the year when these places are visited are also part of the ethnographic record. Traditional ownership practices that relate to cedar stands and widespread vigilance in how cedar bark, wood, and roots are harvested also point to its special cultural position, as well as to ecological and genetic diversity and spatial variation in cedar populations. These practices also indicate diversification of cedar-related knowledge and crafting with cedar products across different cultures, including gendered knowledge and occupational specialization as well as social stratification in the trading and gifting of cedar products. Cedar products – including finely crafted canoes, bentwood boxes, and coiled cedar-root baskets – have featured widely in peoples’ economies both locally and regionally. The second section of volume 2 includes two chapters related to Indigenous peoples’ underlying worldviews or philosophies. Chapter 12 draws on the methods of oral history and folklore studies (see Cruikshank 2005; and Dundes 1965), considering the role of stories and narratives as reflections of peoples’ histories, embodied belief systems, and intergroup connections in relation to plant use and development of ethnobotanical knowledge. In particular, the “origin stories” and narratives of transformations are suggested to have their roots in peoples’ “deep history,” some containing embedded knowledge and lessons expressed in metaphorical modes. Since many of these stories are connected to plants, sometimes as key elements of the plot, the stories are suggested as a

Introduction to the Book  |  33

potential indicator of early botanical knowledge and practice. Chapter 13 focuses on the belief systems that form the foundation, or core, of peoples’ Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems and how worldviews and approaches to other species and environments have shaped, and been influenced by, peoples’ interactions with plants. The different ritual and ceremonial roles of plants, and the taboos and rituals that relate to plant use, are discussed in this chapter. The sacredness of people’s relationships with plants intersects with studies of religion and philosophy (see Berkes 2013; and Loftin 1994). In fact, the belief systems are inextricably linked to – and derived from – all of the other topics under discussion in this book and may represent the most important aspect of what Indigenous knowledge systems can contribute to humanity; they may enhance our ability to change our destructive behaviours toward the planet and to maintain the earth’s precious biocultural diversity. Returning to the western redcedar example, the tree features in many traditional narratives, including some in which it is personified as a man or woman. The spiritual role of western redcedar reflects an underlying belief system, or worldview, in which trees and other plants are held as generous relatives of humans, to be treated with respect, care, and appreciation and never to be used wastefully or thoughtlessly. Thus there are many ceremonial practices related to cedar and its sacredness (Sewid-Smith and Dick 1998). Altogether, the numerous names and multiple cultural roles of western redcedar, including its widely held spiritual attributes, confirm its high cultural value as a “cultural keystone species” (Garibaldi and Turner 2004), and cedar itself illustrates how multiple themes and threads of inquiry can be drawn together. Although I cannot claim to present a complete congruence or clarity in relation to original sources of particular ethnobotanical knowledge, practice, and belief, there are some trends and evidence of homologous changes and concordances that emerge, which I present in chapter 14, which concludes the book. Exploring pathways through which ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge can be maintained as part of living, adaptive systems that help to promote healthy cultures, environments, and indigenous plant populations and habitats is my ultimate goal for this chapter. Despite all of the changes and disruptions Indigenous peoples have experienced in relation to their lands, resources, languages, and cultures in the study region, many have maintained their cultural ties with their territories. Due to the determination of key individuals who recognized the value of their knowledge of lands, plants, and resource use – their Traditional Ecological Knowledge – much of this knowledge and wisdom has carried through to the present day in one form or another. As long as some of this knowledge and wisdom exists, and as long as effective processes are maintained and developed for its continued application and transmission, there is the potential for expanding it through ethnoecological renewal and restoration. What are the legacies of knowledge, practice, and belief that can be drawn upon

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for such an endeavour? What are some models and examples of how this knowledge can be renewed and promoted in respectful and effective ways? How can peoples’ capacity for resilience and adaptation be strengthened, building on their sense of place and identity in a changing world? All of these are questions to be considered and addressed in the final chapter, drawing on the complex dance of themes and lessons presented in the previous thirteen chapters. Two emerging research approaches that have not contributed substantively to this work but that will probably have much greater prominence in the future in helping to unravel questions about human-plant interactions are genetic analyses – both human and plant – and computer assisted glottochronology (see C.H. Brown 2010). Ancient plant DNA from spores, wood, and other plant tissues in archaeological contexts can serve as proxies for past economies, ecosystems, migrations, and trading relationships (see Tomimatsu, Kephart, and Vellend 2009), and human DNA studies can also reflect ancient origins and relationships between populations (Malhi et al. 2004; Merriwether 2006; Reich et al. 2012; Schlumbaum, Tensen, and Jaenicke-Després 2008; Stone 2006). For example, south of the study area, people occupying caves in south-central Oregon in the Late Pleistocene left coprolites, or fossilized faeces, from which their DNA has been identified (Gilbert et al. 2008). Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems, Ethnobotany, and Ethnoecology Each group of long-resident people, living within its own geographic space and relying for the most part on local resources, accumulates over time a wealth of specialized and complex knowledge about its particular locality or territory. This includes knowledge about plant and animal species and about varieties, habitats, geographic features, weather patterns, and seasonal changes. It also incorporates knowledge of how to survive in a given place from one generation to the next, how to interact with other species and their habitats, and how to use the available resources in ways that do not diminish them or cause them to deteriorate. This critically important place-based knowledge is commonly termed “Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” Berkes (2012, 7) defines Traditional Ecological Knowledge as “A cumulative body of knowledge, practice and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission.” Because this system is fundamentally connected with values and insights, it is sometimes referred to as “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Wisdom” (Turner and Berkes 2006; Turner, Ignace, and Ignace 2000). Ethnobotany and ethnoecology are fields of study focusing on Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems of peoples – knowledge that relates to the plants and ecosystems of their home environments. Today, when we look at the immense and complex array of plant names and cultural knowledge about plants

Introduction to the Book  |  35

and environments existing across multiple language groups and geographic areas, there are significant patterns that can be seen in ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge systems: similarities in names and uses of various plants in food, technology, or medicine; common themes in stories and belief systems; and parallels in the roles of plants in lifeways, seasonal movements, and resource exchange systems of various peoples. On the other hand, there are often marked differences to be seen as well: differences in which species are sought out and used, even for similar purposes; development of diverse names and terminology, even among groups that are related linguistically; and arrays of unique stories, beliefs, ceremonies, and practices related to plants and environments. All of these patterns of similarity and difference are a result of historical and spiritual events, language development, and interactions of environmental and cultural influences played out over time across a given landscape. For each cultural group, ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge can be considered within the main areas comprising Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems: worldview or philosophy; practical knowledge and skills (e.g., how to identify species and knowledge of their lifecycles, edibility or toxicity of species, how to harvest and process foods, how to craft materials into artifacts, and knowledge of ecological succession following disturbance); and the multitude of processes of acquiring and passing on cultural perspectives and practical skills and information to others (e.g., using names and other vocabulary, stories, discourse, ceremonies, songs, art, demonstration, and participation) (Turner, Ignace, and Ignace 2000). Not only does botanical and ecological knowledge fit within a group’s unique Traditional Ecological Knowledge system, but the knowledge, practices, and beliefs that relate to plants and habitats also fundamentally influence the overall system itself and cannot really be separated from it. In this sense, addressing a people’s botanical knowledge alone creates an artificial division that must be acknowledged at the outset. However, because plant resources are known to, experienced by, and influenced by all groups of people, they serve as a particularly useful basis for comparative studies. Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems have become a major focus of studies over the past two decades, beginning on the international front with the publication in 1987 of the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, which notes that “the larger society ... could learn a great deal from their [Indigenous peoples’] traditional skills in sustainably managing very complex ecological systems” (United Nations Commission on Environment and Development 1987, 115).23 The United Nations has continued its interest in and commitment to recognition, protection, and promotion of Indigenous and local peoples’ knowledge of and interests in resource use, planning, and decision making, as indicated in key clauses of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (United Nations 1992) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2007), with explicit requirements for governments of

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member nations to respect the rights and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and to consult and collaborate with them meaningfully on all aspects of resource use affecting their lands and territories. Legal systems have also, if somewhat slowly (Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw 1989), given recognition to Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, including ethnoecological knowledge, in making decisions about land and resource rights in places like British Columbia, where modern treaties are still being negotiated (see Supreme Court of British Columbia 2007). Another relatively recent understanding is the role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems in helping people to maintain their resilience and adaptability in times of immense change (Berkes 2012; Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2003). Neither environmental nor social systems are stable but instead fluctuate in response to external and internal forces. Yet they are often able to maintain their overall integrity through accommodation to incremental change, or even rapid or large-scale change, often in cycles of mutual feedback and adjustment. In the case of ecological systems, maintaining key elements of the structure, function, and composition from original systems can assist their adaptation and renewal in the face of change or disturbance. For social systems, a capacity to turn to alternative means of survival, at least temporarily, can mean the difference between societal cohesion and disruption. Holding onto memories and stories from the past, retaining key vocabulary and language, and keeping or initiating institutions that help to maintain social linkages and to facilitate relearning and knowledge exchange, as well as providing access to a people’s original and/or similar environments and resources – all of these can strengthen a group’s resilience and allow it to rebuild its society and maintain its distinctive identity and lifeways. Without this legacy of knowledge, people are more vulnerable when changes do occur, and they may not be able to respond or survive as a coherent, functioning group (Berkes 2012; Berkes and Folke 1998; Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2000; Gunderson and Holling 2002; Ommer et al. 2007). There are parallels in the natural world. If environmental disturbance occurs too quickly or over too great an area – whether caused by humans (e.g., clearcutting, fisheries collapse, or oil sands development), by natural catastrophic events (e.g., glaciers, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or tidal waves), or by a combination of both, as is the case in global climate change – plant, animal, fungal, and bacterial species cannot adapt, and a loss or decline of populations and species occurs, with one loss leading to another in a downward spiral. The responses of social and ecological systems to such drastic change have been a major topic of study in recent years. Humans and the earth’s ecosystems have, of course, been subjected to massive and disruptive changes of one kind or another since the beginning of time, and many species and cultures have simply not survived them. We need only to look at the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs to see the devastating and wide-reaching effects of events such as giant

Introduction to the Book  |  37

meteors impacting the earth’s surface. And there are many examples of societies and social systems that have not been able to withstand change, even in cases when it was self-imposed (Diamond 2005). Perhaps what is more notable, however, is the enduring quality of species, ecosystems, and human systems. How have so many been able to survive through the changing environments and turmoils of history? The fact is that both social and ecological systems can have a capacity for resilience. There are many ways that systems can renew and rebuild themselves without losing their overall integrity or essence. The rich compendium of information on botanical and environmental knowledge in this book reflects such adaptive capacity and resilience in many ways. Conclusions People have been living and learning in northwestern North America for at least 14,000 years, building up knowledge and experience about how to survive, as individuals, families, communities, and nations, in an environment at once harsh and generous. Not only have Indigenous peoples survived materially, but they have also lived creatively, developing rich and expressive languages and vocabularies, acquiring transfixing narratives and ceremonies, and building social complexity and philosophical approaches that have enhanced their lives and livelihoods. Each element of a people’s history represents learning and transmission of knowledge, skills, and ideas, placing individuals and communities in a combined environmental and social matrix, in which they are both recipient and provider of important knowledge. From minute details (e.g., how to cook and dry berries in order to store them for winter or how to use a digging stick to pry up edible roots) to broad lessons (e.g., how to navigate across open waters in a cedar-wood dugout canoe or how to create and maintain a clam or berry garden that will yield almost unlimited food over many generations), peoples’ acquisition and development of knowledge and their abilities to pass on their learning, ideas, and techniques to others have been critical to the survival of Indigenous peoples in what is now called northwestern North America. The path of peoples’ learning has certainly not been linear but instead more like a convoluted web of discoveries, connections, changes, triumphs, failures, and recoveries that has been created and transformed over time and space. Sometimes single events can trigger particular learning responses; at other times learning occurs incrementally, building up and reinforcing practices and processes over the cycles of seasons and generations (Turner and Berkes 2006). The ancient stories reflect this complexity, each one taking on a life of its own as it is told and retold from elders to youth or from itinerant travellers to their hosts in other communities. Gradually, peoples living in proximity, even though they speak different languages and come from different places, take on some shared traits and ideas, often while still retaining their own identity through

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their own unique combinations of old knowledge, new knowledge, and transformed, adapted knowledge related to their own homelands and their own particular histories. Populations may change genetically, independent of culture and language, as new partnerships form, new members are inducted into a family or group, and communities amalgamate or separate. Any attempt to characterize and understand ancient practices of a people by projecting documented cultural traits of their descendants back into the past must be done with immense caution since much can change – linguistically, culturally, biologically, and environmentally – even within a few generations (Ives 2010; Moss 2011). However, the present does indeed follow from the past, and ethnobotanical knowledge often has deep roots, potentially reflected in language, cultural traits, stories, and ceremonies. There are good precedents for using ethnographically documented practices to understand archaeological traits and material remains of the region, especially in a subfield of archaeology called ethnoarchaeology (see David and Kramer 2001; Nicholas 2010). Citing the plant-based artifacts – spruce-root cordage, wooden wedges, wood points, withes, and other artifacts – uncovered at Kilgii Gwaay on Haida Gwaii by Fedje, Mackie, et al. (2005), Moss (2011, 90) notes, “Kilgii [Gwaay] shows that technologies made of perishables have been important to Northwest Coast peoples for more than 10,000 years. The artifacts show cultural continuity, even though modern forests had not yet developed.” Languages also have historical antecedents, and by comparing plant names and determining their extent across languages, some understanding of the historic importance of these plants can be inferred. Today, much of the knowledge that comprises learning of the past in northwestern North America and elsewhere is rapidly disappearing as younger generations become integrated into the broader “westernized, globalized” economy and culture. Over the past century and a half, elders and others have witnessed major shifts in cultural practices and lifeways, including declining traditional food systems, loss of languages and the knowledge embodied within their rich vocabularies, loss of practices for enhancing and renewing their lands and resources (both marine and terrestrial), and a general distancing from their local environments and ancestral teachings. In a blurred and entangled, yet tightly connected, pattern of cause and effect, Indigenous elders, being sensitive to environmental change, have noted cascading losses and deterioration of their foods and environments, coupled with increasing restrictions on access to their traditional resources. They have been systematically excluded and expelled from areas where they traditionally derived their living and that, in turn, they cared for and maintained (see Deur et al. 2013). The result? Further declines, changes, and loss. In the words of one Indigenous elder, “We are now aliens in our own lands!” This is a story repeated over and over across the globe and in many different environments and cultures. It needs to be told, and the

Introduction to the Book  |  39

destructive outcomes of severing the connections between humans and their home environments have to be explicitly recounted and highlighted. In this way we may create the capacity to reverse this destructive trend – and that is a challenge I have faced in writing this book. Learning is a remarkable process. It is highly individual and situational. No one person knows the same things as any other. Yet there is also a common thread to our learning, common ways that we acquire knowledge, and common expressions of learning that seem to repeat themselves in different iterations, perhaps like new words to old refrains, over and over, across generations and across the rich tapestry of human experience. Sometimes our lessons and actions are very selfish and self-centred, but all of us soon learn that, no matter how self-serving we are, we have to moderate our actions in order to consider the needs of others, both human and nonhuman, or we will never survive. We are part of something bigger than ourselves, and we need to be able to weave ourselves into the matrix of our world. Ethnobotany and especially ethnoecology are simply the studies of how we do this in relation to plants and our environments in general. This new analysis and synthesis will, I hope, lead to a significant advancement in knowledge and understandings of cultural adaptations to specific places and environmental situations and of people’s influences on these places and ecosystems. Moreover, the inclusion of scales of time and space over which particular trends can be identified can lead to a clearer understanding of humans’ capacity for learning, exchanging, retaining, and regenerating knowledge. This comprehension is critical to our efforts to reformulate our behaviours in ways that will allow us to live more sustainably and to rebuild both cultural and environmental integrity.

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Part one

History

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2 Into the Past: Ancient Relationships among People, Plants, and Environments

Introduction Wapato, or “swamp potato” (Sagittaria latifolia), is widely known as a tuberous root vegetable. Its cultural importance in the recent past for Indigenous peoples of the Fraser and Columbia Valleys, the Shuswap Lake area, and elsewhere in North America is well documented.1 However, the antiquity of its use is still little known. Therefore, when my friend and palaeoethnobotanist Dana Lepofsky sent me an e-mail on 20 August 2007 about an archaeological discovery of wapato, her note was infused with thinly masked excitement. She explained how the Katzie First Nation of the Fraser Valley was undertaking some archaeological mitigation work, headed by Tanja Hoffmann, in connection with a huge bridge construction project underway, the Golden Ears Bridge. “Two weeks ago, while digging in a waterlogged part of the site,” she wrote, “the crew discovered what looks like the remains of a now destroyed wapato patch. That is, they found beautifully preserved wapato tubers as well as what seem to be several bit ends of digging sticks (i.e. that presumably broke while digging for the wapato) all preserved in the waterlogged deposits” (figures 2-1 and 2-2). She later explained that the wapato patch was extensive – dozens of square metres, with tubers embedded in a substrate of peat together with the broken ends of the digging sticks, and the whole patch underlain by a single layer of fist-sized cobbles. The patch seemed to be comprised of pure wapato, with no sedges, willows, or other plant materials interspersed. In other words, this site seemed to be part of a managed wapato “garden.” This fortuitous find was a “first” for the Fraser Valley. How old were these wapato tubers? What were they doing there, growing over a bed of cobbles?

2-1 | Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) leaves and tubers. About 3 cm long. 2-2 | Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) tubers, approximately 3,500 years old, from the Pitt Polder archaeological site in Katzie territory.

There was a flurry of e-mails back and forth between Dana, Tanja, and a whole group of us interested in wetlands archaeobotany and Northwest Coast ethnobotany in general: Katzie First Nation members Debbie Miller and Roma Leon, George Nicholas, Terry Spurgeon, Ann Garibaldi, M. Kat Anderson, Kathryn Bernick, Melissa Darby, Douglas Deur, Dale Croes, Adolf Ceska, and myself. The finding was especially compelling since currently no wapato grows in Pitt Polder. Although it used to occur in dense patches all around the lower Fraser Valley, extensive dyking and draining of the region’s wetlands for agricultural production drastically reduced its abundance, and it has virtually disappeared from many of its former growing sites (Spurgeon 2001). Many contemporary First Nations’ people whose ancestors depended on this carbohydrate-rich food have never tasted wapato, called xwaqw’ólʔs or variants in the Halkomelem language (see Galloway 1982), or even seen it themselves. In an open letter, Lepofsky (2007) stressed the extreme archaeological significance of the wapato site: “Nowhere on the Northwest Coast, and in fact few places in the world, can we find in one site both an intact ancient harvesting area, the associated processing area, and evidence for the associated ancient residence ... The significance of the site, in all the ways that we measure such things, is clearly high.” Unfortunately, all too much archaeological research falls under the “salvage” label – with surveys and last-minute excavations being rushed through just ahead of earth-moving machines, cranes, and dump trucks at many sites, solely to meet the legal requirements of the Heritage Conservation Branch of British Columbia or its equivalent under other jurisdictions. The Fraser Valley, one of the richest regions in terms of ancient human occupation and therefore an expected mother lode of productive archaeological sites, has been so heavily altered by development that the potential for archaeological research has been severely constrained. In the end, only a fraction of the Pitt Polder wapato site was excavated before construction proceeded. In most cases in the Fraser Valley, the most obvious glimpses available to archaeologists of human activities are the easily accessible and highly visible sites along the main course of the Fraser River. Smaller camps and settlements along the outlying sloughs and tributaries with their plant and animal resources are largely obscured, yet these are where early people – ancestors of the Katzie and other Stó:lō people – spent most of their time (Lepofsky 2007), and here is where they would have acquired and exchanged valuable knowledge about plant resources. Wapato and bog cranberries (Vaccinium oxycoccos) (figure 2-3) are two key plant resources of these outlying sites, from recent centuries at least. The Pitt Polder wapato site has immense significance to archaeobotany and ethnobotany: it is one of a very few places in the entire region where plant use predominates in the archaeological record. When samples of the wapato tubers and associated digging stick tips were dated, they turned out to be at least about

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  45

2-3  |  Bog cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos), a key plant resource of the Katzie and other First Nations of the Fraser Valley, BC .

3,500 years old – an astonishing antiquity, especially since they seem to represent an intentionally managed plant resource. Yet as wetlands archaeology specialist George Nicholas (pers. comm., 2007) noted, researchers are only just starting to focus on wetlands settings in the region, and the future is likely to open up vast possibilities for new and better understandings of the nature and antiquity of plant use in northwestern North America in such places. As described in chapter 1, Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems are built up over many generations of peoples situated in and interacting with a particular place or territory. Therefore, to understand how the knowledge systems and cultures of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America have developed, it is necessary to think about them in the context of the history of both people and environment. When did the Indigenous peoples of recent times arrive in what are now their homelands? Where did they originate? Who were their neighbours? What were their environments like when they arrived? How did they survive? What plants did they discover? And how did they disseminate and adapt their knowledge about plants in the face of environmental and cultural change? In the remainder of this chapter, I examine the evidence for our ethnobotanical knowledge of the millennia since humans’ first entry into the

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region. The landscape of the Late Pleistocene – a time when a massive mantle of ice carpeted much of the land in the region and when sea levels were dramatically lower than today – has been transformed into a densely vegetated and productive homeland for large numbers of people. It was, in fact, the glaciation and other concurrent geophysical processes that created the foundations for the diverse and complex array of ecological zones and habitats supporting the cultural, linguistic, and ethnobotanical richness that was to develop over later millennia. This chapter is based on approaches and findings from the sciences of palaeoecology and palaeoethnobotany. It is important to acknowledge that these descriptions are only one “truth”; the other is embraced in the origin stories and traditions of First Peoples, many of whom would reject the notion of their ancestors originating from another place. These stories tell of founding ancestors – humans or supernatural animals or other spiritual beings – who have occupied their home territories since time immemorial: “since the beginning of time.” Some of these narratives may be metaphorical, reflecting deep memories of floods, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, famines, and some of the other profound events of ancient times, some of which have left physical marks in the landscape and in the archaeological record as well as in people’s oral histories.2 Many embody teachings, perhaps acquired from hard lessons learned by the ancestors from good or bad decisions that were made (see Hutchinson and McMillan 1997; McMillan and Hutchinson 2002; and Turner and Berkes 2006). The importance of these narratives in understanding past relationships with plants is highlighted in chapter 12. The Pleistocene and the Arrival(s) of Humans in Northwestern North America About 15,500 years ago, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered most of what is now Alaska and the province of British Columbia, with lobes extending into northwestern Montana, northern Idaho, and northern Washington in the southeast and in the west, thrusting down the length of Puget Sound to the Olympia region (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Hill 2006; Pielou 1991). The ice took several millennia to melt; by 12,000 years ago, most of the Pacific coastline was free of ice, but parts of the interior were still buried under massive ice packs. Nevertheless, plants and animals had begun to repopulate the landscape widely and to leave evidence of their presence in the palaeoecological record. During the Pleistocene – as revealed by analysis of sediments along the coastline, in lake bottoms, and in bogs – the sea level was generally lower than at present, in some places by as much as 150 metres (Barrie et al. 2005; Q. Mackie et al. 2011; I.J. Walker and Barrie 2004).

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  47

Over the ensuing millennia, the level of the ocean relative to the land fluctuated widely on both the local and regional scales, in large part related to the depth of terrestrial ice (see Abeysirigunawardena and Walker 2008). For example, at the close of the Pleistocene the sea level was lower than at present on then unglaciated Graham Island of Haida Gwaii but was higher than today’s levels on northwestern Vancouver Island and the lower mainland generally. In the Gwaii Haanas area of Moresby Island, the sea level changed over a relatively short period of time around the end of the Pleistocene (Ames and Maschner 1999; Barrie et al. 2005; Q. Mackie et al. 2011; Moss et al. 2004),3 but overall there was a nearly twofold increase in the land area of Haida Gwaii compared with today. This now-inundated region, called “Hecata,” was probably a significant feature in early human occupation of the Northwest Coast (Ames and Maschner 1999; Fedje, Christensen, et al. 2005; Fedje, Josenhans, et al. 2005; Fedje and Mackie 2005; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005). In addition to fluctuating sea levels, many other changes in geography and vegetation – resulting from the massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, mudslides, torrents from melting glacial lakes, and major climatic shifts that are chronicled in some of the First Peoples’ narratives – would have severely impacted human settlement, resource availability, and ultimately, plant use and knowledge. A rich kelp bed at one sea level at one point in time could be changed to a dry beach at another. But, conversely, an unproductive sand dune could be converted into a forest replete with diverse trees and other plant resources in a matter of decades or centuries. Pollen studies show, for example, that the unglaciated refugia on Haida Gwaii and the once terrestrial Hecata were originally covered with tundra-like vegetation, with few trees or tall shrubs.4 Later on, probably at the time humans were present, about 14,000 to 12,000 years ago, forests of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) and then spruce (Picea sp.) established themselves, providing opportunities in the form of new plant resources for fuel, food, medicine, and construction but also presenting obstacles to travel and to easy viewing of game and landmarks.5 Some of the species documented from this period include licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhiza), an important medicine to this day on the Northwest Coast, and mountain valerian (Valeriana sitchensis), used medicinally today by Interior Plateau peoples. Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis) – a cold-tolerant shrub whose bitter foaming berries were to become an iconic confection in the area – would also have been a common early element of the northern coastal forests (figure 2-4). The earliest human occupations documented from archaeological sites in northwestern North America date back to around 13,000 years ago (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Burroughs 2005).6 Some researchers suggest that the first people may have arrived earlier than this time by one or more millennia, and according to Burroughs (2005) these suggestions cannot be dismissed on

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2-4 | Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis), an edible fruit whose pollen occurs in early coastal palaeoecological sites.

climatic grounds alone. Although the environment at the end of the Pleistocene was much different from today, many of the same plant and animal species encountered today existed at that time, and some of the same patterns and practices of land use seen from more recent times extend back almost as long ago. In their comprehensive history of Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples, Ames and Maschner (1999, 240) conclude, “Virtually all the resources exploited 10,000 years ago were exploited 200 years ago. What changed was the economic organization and intensity with which they were harvested.” Although this assessment is based mainly on animal resources and artifacts related to hunting and fishing, plant resource use would probably have paralleled these findings. It is important to remember too, as Q. Mackie et al. (2011) note, that people at that time were not just coping with ongoing change but also dwelling in their changing homelands and presumably taking advantage of the opportunities and variation offered through change. Although I cannot provide a strict chronological account of deglaciation and revegetation of the land and humans’ use of available plant resources, I can present some general ideas about human-plant relationships during this ancient time. A detailed chronological review is not possible because of the relative

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  49

uncertainties of different events, including the human migrations to different parts of the region. Instead, I review the possible ethnobotanical connections of the earliest humans in the region, around the end of the Pleistocene, and then discuss people-plant relationships over three major time periods, roughly corresponding to the Early Holocene (about 11,000 to 7,000 years ago), Middle Holocene (about 7,000 to 3,500 years ago), and Late Holocene (after about 3,500 years ago). Many traditional narratives of First Peoples recount how the ancestors of their clans and families originated right in their present-day territories, sometimes through supernatural transformations or by surviving immense and dramatic events such as the “Great Flood” (see chapter 12), and that their descendants have lived in that place of origin “since time began.” Others’ narratives tell of migrations long ago that brought their ancestors to their current homelands. Certainly it is no exaggeration to say that some peoples in the study region have resided in the same area for thousands of years, as many traditional narratives and archaeological records suggest. For archaeologists and academics, the story of humankind and our origins is broader and more uncertain, but it extends back to an ancient million-year-old history in Africa, with humans migrating across the globe, from Africa to Europe, to Asia, to Papua New Guinea and Australia, and eventually to the American continents. Ames and Maschner (1999, 57) state succinctly, based on biological and logistical evidence, that “there is little doubt that all Native Americans are descendants of northeast Asian ancestors,” a position borne out by others (see Merriwether 2006; Nicols 2008; Schroeder et al. 2009). There are several theories and ideas about exactly how and when the earliest peoples arrived in the Americas. The two most widely accepted are briefly discussed here. The first is that beginning some 15,000 years ago, northeastern Asian people, probably as small bands of hunters, moved in a relatively slow progression across a vast expanse of land, Beringia, popularly known as the “Bering Land Bridge,” filtering eastward and southward into North America through interior Alaska and parts of the Yukon and through a continuous and well vegetated ice-free corridor along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. A second theory is that the earliest people travelled from Asia along an ancient water route paralleling Beringia around the north Pacific Rim. The route has been called the “Coastal Migration Route” (e.g., Fladmark 1979) or, more recently, the “kelp highway” (Erlandson et al. 2007) and refers to the almost unbroken line of highly productive kelp-dominated habitats that stretch for thousands of kilometres from Japan along the coast of Siberia, across the Bering Strait to Alaska, and south to Baja California. Some researchers think that the cooler oceans of Pleistocene times, especially in deeper waters, may have supported populations of certain kelp species, whose kelp beds provided an obvious route by which maritime-oriented people could find shelter and sustain

50 | part one – history

themselves as they moved, possibly quite rapidly, along the coastline from Asia perhaps right down to South America.7 Beringia

During the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago, the sea level globally was about 120 metres lower than at present. At that time, Asia and North America were connected by land – Beringia – across what is now the Bering Strait. The bridgelands were vast, creating one continuous and immense landmass, at times and in places up to 1,600 kilometres wide, from northeastern Siberia and interior Alaska and Canada eastward to the McKenzie River (Burroughs 2005). Beringia was mostly a low-lying, terrestrial landscape consisting of cold, relatively dry steppe, broken by some mountains and wet, marshy areas. In the Late Pleistocene, it joined many of the north coastal islands (including the Haida Gwaii Archipelago) to one another and to the mainland. Around 15,000 to 14,000 years ago, people living in western Beringia moved to what is now the Alaskan and Yukon side of the region. Although any trace of their lives as they migrated across has long been covered by the rising ocean, these people must have been closely related to the land mammal hunters living in Siberia at least 18,000 (and perhaps as early as 30,000) years ago. There is one strongly supported linguistic link connecting Siberia and North America – the link between Dene (Athabaskan) peoples of the so-called New World and the Yeniseian-speaking peoples of northeastern Asia, with evidence that these peoples once spoke a common ancestral language (Kari and Potter 2010a, 2010b) – but both the time depth and the mechanisms of migration that led to the divergence of these two language branches are not yet well understood.8 Ives (2010) suggests an ancient divergence of the Dene and Yeniseian, possibly sometime between the Mid Holocene and the terminal Pleistocene (see also Fortescue 2010; and Potter 2010). In any case, the original Beringian migrants probably walked across the icefree Beringian floodplain following herds of large mammals that grazed on the tufted and patchy grasslands and lichen beds comprising the cool “mammoth steppe” or that browsed the sedges and low scrub of the adjacent wetlands. Pielou (1991) suggests that the climate of Beringia was probably drier, and possibly warmer, than central Yukon today, as evidenced by fossil remains of badgers (animals that now live in warm mid-latitude grasslands south of the boreal forest) found at Dawson. Sheltered sites in Beringia evidently supported occasional groves of balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera) and possibly other trees and shrubs. Most of the landscape, however, would have been treeless and windswept: the evidence can be seen in the deep loess and sand dune deposits found throughout modern Alaska and Yukon. Grasses such as grama grass (Bouteloua gracilis), now found only in the south, northern wormwood (Artemisia frigida) and other Artemisia species, blue flax (Linum lewisii), prairie crocus (Pulsatilla

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patens), and other herbaceous species still to be seen also existed in this harsh environment at the time the first migrants would have arrived. Beringia was also populated by now-extinct mammal species such as mammoth, bison, saiga antelope, and horse, as well as by caribou, muskox, elk, and Dall’s sheep, along with various predators: wolves, giant short-faced bears, lions, and sabre-tooth tigers. Swans and other waterfowl, as well as species of salmon and other fish, were likewise a part of the fauna and were exploited by the Beringian migrants, who apparently brought dogs with them (Fiedel 2007; Snyder and Leonard 2011). Early sites in the vicinity of Beringia seem to represent short-term camps of small, mobile groups who spread out widely, hunting game year round, part of the Alaska Paleo-Arctic Tradition evident in archaeological sites at least until around 8,000 years ago (Bielawski 2007; R.B. Walker and Driskell 2007). Their stone hunting tools, including lanceolate projectile points, were similar to those of early peoples farther south. There is no record of people’s use of plants – only my own speculation that they must have taken advantage of any edible wild berries, greens, roots, inner bark of trees, and possibly predigested plants from the stomachs of caribou and other game as northern peoples have done more recently. Beringian people may have extracted small tubers and roots from the caches of rodents, a practice known from Siberia and still known to this day in the study region (Ståhlberg and Svanberg 2010; Thoms 1989). Whatever wood was available to them would have been put to use in construction of shelters and hunting and fishing implements. Possibly wooden frames for skin boats, snowshoes, or sledges were being made since people would have had to travel on land and water in summer and over ice and snow in winter. People would have employed grasses and sedges as bedding, for packing around food, for stuffing moccasins, and possibly in weaving bags and baskets. It is also likely that healers and shamans were already using many types of plants for medicinal and spiritual purposes. Fuel – and fire as a tool for cooking, for processing hides, and for warmth and light, especially in the dark winter months – would have been critically important for these early peoples. The technologies for fire making, from developing firedrills to using pitchwood for starter and moss, lichen, fungus, or shredded fibre for tinder, would have had their beginnings at this time or earlier.9 Storage of berries and other foods would have been relatively easy in what was probably a cold, dry environment (Bielawski 2007). Beringia existed in some form or other until between around 13,000 and 11,000 years ago (Manley 2009). A host of early archaeological sites in northwestern North America, from the Alaska Panhandle to northern California and far beyond (Bielawski 2007; Burroughs 2005; Erlandson, Moss, and Des Lauriers 2008), attest to the fact that, by the time the seas rose over the middle of this landmass, people were firmly situated on the new continent. Some of them, remaining more or less in place on the eastern end of Beringia, may have been the ancient ancestors of the Dene-Yeniseian peoples. Others – the majority – would

52 | part one – history

have continued on along the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains until they reached the unglaciated region to the south. From there, these early peoples spread out in all directions, including back across the Rockies and into northwestern North America from the south, following the melting edge of the Pleistocene ice. Some of the routes they travelled were probably, and not coincidentally, along the same pathways taken by North American flora and fauna repopulating the glaciated lands and waters as they were uncovered. The “Kelp Highway”

One notable puzzle, inherent in the Beringian land route peopling of the Americas, is the existence of an ancient archaeological site far to the south near the coast in southern Chile. This site – Monte Verde – was excavated by archaeologist Tom Dillehay (2000) and yielded an array of artifacts, plant remains, and waterlogged deposits, some dating back 14,600 calendar years (Burroughs 2005; Dillehay et al. 2008). The site also contained stone tools and wooden ones, including lances and digging sticks, as well as bones, chunks of mastodon flesh, fragments of many edible and medicinal plant species (including seaweeds, seeds, fruits, and other plant parts),10 twine, wooden foundations of a dozen elliptical houses, clay-lined hearths with charcoal and burned plant remains, and – most exciting of all – human footprints (Dillehay et al. 2008; Meltzer 2009). Many archaeologists resisted the idea that humans were living in South America well before the ancient “Clovis” people of interior North America, whose earliest artifacts dated to around 11,500 to 10,800 years ago, according to Meltzer (2009), but further scrutiny has confirmed the legitimacy of the dating methods, leaving unresolved the question of how these ancient South Americans arrived there at such an early time and where they had come from (Dillehay et al. 2008; Koppel 2003). The “kelp highway” offers a viable explanation, and the remains of several species of edible and medicinal marine algae11 demonstrate that the Monte Verde people were familiar with a range of coastal environments. It is likely that the coastal region south of Beringia and along the west coast of North America was never completely glaciated or possibly only briefly covered by ice at the height of the Pleistocene. There were evidently a number of ice-free areas, or refugia, along the coast that shifted their locations rapidly as ice lobes retreated and advanced and as sea levels rose and fell. Many of these shoreline refugia on the northern Pacific Coast would then have provided “stepping stones” along which plants and animals could migrate northward and southward, with some species such as beach lovage (Ligusticum scoticum) evidently spreading along the shore from Beringia in this manner (Pielou 1991). Pollen of the sand dune perennial sand verbena (Abronia latifolia) indicates the antiquity of this species on sandy shorelines of Vancouver Island (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005). We know from studies of revegetation of glaciated areas at Glacier Bay,

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  53

2-5  |  Seaside strawberries (Fragaria chiloensis), likely one of the early coastal plant resources of the Alaska and Haida Gwaii regions.

Alaska, and elsewhere that if populations of plants are nearby, they can move in quickly. As Thornton (1999, 33) points out, “Just two hundred years ago, in 1794, when George Vancouver’s pioneering expedition ventured into Icy Strait, they found nothing but a massive wall of ice and a small bight at the mouth of Glacier Bay. Yet, within two centuries ... this bight has grown to be one of the largest, richest and most dynamic ecosystems within Southeast Alaska.” In particular, the resources of Glacier Bay include an array of berries: kinnikinnick, or bearberries (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), soapberries (Shepherdia canadensis), gray currants (Ribes bracteosum), seaside strawberries (Fragaria chiloensis) (figure 2-5), and nagoonberries (Rubus arcticus). Thornton (1999) believes that these berries and other edible plants would have populated the area repeatedly, their presence and productivity shaped largely by the forces of glacial advance and recession over the millennia. Humans, he suggests, were probably utilizing these patches of berries when they first entered the area some 10,000 years ago. The earliest people might have moved south along this unglaciated or sparsely glaciated coastline, island hopping, living from the fish and other sea creatures of the kelp “forests,” and finding shelter behind these living breakwaters until they reached the area on the Washington coast beyond the main glacial mass. Pielou (1991) describes a sea cliff near Kalaloch, on the Olympic

54 | part one – history

Peninsula, that was evidently just beyond the farthest limit of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet and probably connected at times to the unglaciated lands to the south, despite being hemmed in between the sea and the Olympic Mountains icecap. It has a pollen record spanning an interval of over 60,000 years, showing repeated vegetation change over this time, from forest to tundra and back, over and over. During the mild periods, western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) and Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) forests predominated there, to be replaced during the cold periods by grasses, sedges, and other herbs. On reaching the southern extent of the ice, migrating people – as well as various other species – may have continued southward or in some cases moved inland, possibly up the Columbia River (Ames and Maschner 1999), and then north again, following the receding line of ice. Evidence from the Monte Verde site suggests that people may have ventured inland routinely. As Dillehay et al. (2008, 786) propose, “Assuming that other late Pleistocene people operated under similar subsistence and settlement practices, our data imply that if groups traveled along the Pacific coast, they may have migrated slowly and exploited the interior resources of the hundreds of river basins descending the long mountain chain from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego to the sea.” The shorelines these people would have encountered around the end of the Pleistocene now lie submerged beneath the ocean, but caves and rockshelters all the way from the coast of southeastern Alaska, Haida Gwaii, and the Columbia Basin to coastal California have already provided some important, if indirect, evidence for the potential of early coastal human migration (Erlandson et al. 2007; Fedje, Mackie, et al. 2005; Gilbert et al. 2008; Heaton n.d.; Moss 2011). Although no concrete evidence exists at present that the early peoples in the vicinity of Beringia used watercraft for either travelling or hunting, we know that humans have long been capable of deep-sea crossings.12 Within historic times, many derelict fishing boats originating in Asia, mostly Japanese, have arrived on the American coast between the Aleutian Islands and Mexico, several with survivors. Furthermore, modern Inupiag and Siberian Yupik peoples are capable of travelling by small boat across the Bering Strait (Erlandson 2002; Moss 2008a). Early Holocene archaeological sites on islands, such as Hidden Falls on Baranof Island, southeastern Alaska, with the lowest strata dating to around 9,000 years ago, are further evidence of the manufacture and use of boats by early people since Baranof Island has existed as an island since early geologic times (National Park Service 2004). At the Kilgii Gwaay site on Haida Gwaii, remains of sea lions, albatross, large rockfish, and halibut from around 10,000 years ago similarly suggest use of watercraft (Fedje and Mackie 2005; Fedje, Mackie, et al. 2005), which must have been constructed at least in part from wood and stitched or tied together with fibrous plant tissues such as withes or roots. Kirk and Daugherty (2007) argue that far to the south, along the Columbia River, people were using

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watercraft around 9,000 years ago since they left evidence of their occupation on Hayes Island, which is, and was, separated from the mainland by two swift channels. In the Channel Islands, off southern California, remains of a coastal settlement around 12,000 years old or more are a further testament to the early presence of watercraft (Erlandson et al. 2007; Erlandson and Fitzpatrick 2006; Moss 2011). The boats of these ancient travellers in the New World may have been quite modest, possibly of light alder, willow, or driftwood frames and skins, similar to those of the Alutiiq and Unangan (Aleut) peoples of today (Bielawski 2007), and therefore not durable in an archaeological sense. Much is yet to be learned about the genetic and linguistic affiliations of these early people. Some of the genetic evidence suggests that different lineages of people have split away successively from their Asian ancestors, some as early as 26,000 years ago or more, and some as recently as 13,000 years ago (Burroughs 2005; see also Scott and O’Rourke 2010). Some may have chosen one route and some another (see Perego et al. 2010). A recent genetic study (Reich et al. 2012) suggests that Native Americans have descended from at least three streams of Asian gene flow. The great majority, these authors conclude, descended entirely from a single ancestral Asian population. Speakers of Eskimo–Aleut languages descended from a second stream, and the Chipewyan, a Dene (Athabaskan) group of northern Canada, inherited about one-tenth of its ancestry from a third stream. There were numerous sequential population splits following the initial entry. The notion of peoples migrating to the New World via different routes, at potentially two or more different times, and spreading out at different rates raises intriguing questions about the new plants and animals they would have encountered on their various travels and about when and how they began to fit these into their knowledge systems. Each group would certainly have started with an original body of knowledge and understanding of certain plants. As groups of people separated out and moved into new territories, they would have lost touch with some of these plants, possibly finding close counterparts for some species or in other cases discovering entirely different and novel plants, to be tested out, adopted into use, named, and embraced by the culture. Ancient Sites and Plant Use

What did the early peoples arriving in North America eat, whether they travelled by the coast or overland? Specifically, what kinds of plants did they harvest and test in their quests for food, shelter, and other needs, including medicinal and spiritual? What kinds of technologies did they bring with them, and what did they learn along the way? Mackie et al. (2011) and Moss (2011) provide overviews of early environments and coastal archaeology on the Northwest Coast that give some clues about when and where humans were living in the earliest

56 | part one – history

times based on archaeological findings to date, although not necessarily with direct evidence of plant use. At On Your Knees Cave, on the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island, Alaska,13 a bone flaker dated to over 12,000 years ago was recently discovered, as were the human remains of a man in his twenties. The bones dated to around 10,300 years ago, making them the oldest human remains in all of coastal Alaska or anywhere in Canada (E.J. Dixon 1999; Heaton n.d.; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Koppel 2001; Moss 2011; Moss et al. 2004). Analysis shows that the young man, who was given the name Shuká Kaa (His Spirit Is Looking Out From the Cave), had derived his protein almost exclusively from marine sources, but this type of test does not reveal what types of plant foods a person had consumed. Artifacts, charcoal,14 and other evidence from the cave (which is 135 metres above the present sea level and over a kilometre inland), showed that people had been travelling to this site routinely over a period of thousands of years. Outside, stone blades were found in a layer of soil dating to about the same age as the young man himself. Obsidian at the site was originally traced to the vicinity of Mount Edziza on the mainland, about 200 kilometres away, although Moss (2011) suggests that it could also have been from Suemez Island, in the outer Prince of Wales Archipelago.15 If it was from Edziza, this would indicate a well-developed coastal trade network even at that early time. Some archaeologists’ attention has focused recently on the now-inundated areas of Beringia and the coastline in the quest to understand early human lifeways. With newer possibilities for accessing the seafloor through remotely controlled robotic submarines and other underwater archaeology technologies, it is conceivable that at least some physical evidence of people’s presence – possibly even plant use – will be realized in the future. One strategy is to seek artifacts, such as grinding stones, that might have been used to process plants such as root vegetables and therefore can serve as proxies of plant use. Net weights as indicators for use of fishnets – constructed from plant fibres – are another example of how plant use can be inferred from the context of more durable artifacts. As well, many stone implements, such as hafted blades, would have been attached originally to wooden handles, possibly with fibrous plant materials. Many early hearth sites have been identified archaeologically, but relatively few have been examined for preserved carbonized plant remains such as charcoal. Deposits in wet archaeological contexts are also prime potential sources of ancient plant remains, as shown by the data from Haida Gwaii (Mackie et al. 2011). In particular, examining now-submerged sites for pollen or macrofossil plant remains (e.g., wood, bark, or small seeds) may be fruitful.16 One potential archaeological site farther south within the study area serves as another possible example of “deep-time” human occupancy – and potential, if now-obscured, plant use – from the Late Pleistocene:17 the Manis site, at Sequim, Washington, on the northern Olympic Peninsula. It was discovered

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in 1977, when the Manis family tried to enlarge their cattail (Typha latifolia) swamp into a pond. To their surprise, their excavation revealed tusks, and then a huge corpse of what turned out to be a mastodon, lying on its side, but with its hind leg bone lying on top of its ribs, and its skull smashed and turned in a reverse direction (Gustafson, Gilbow, and Daugherty 1979). Seeds and wood found around the animal dated to about 14,000 years ago, a recalibration of the original radiocarbon date of 12,000 years back (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Plant species in the vicinity, identified from their pollen and seeds, included grasses, pondweed (Potamogeton sp.), wild rose (Rosa sp.), blackberry (Rubus sp.), soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis), willow (Salix sp.), spruce (probably Picea sitchensis), and alder (probably Sitka alder, Alnus viridis ssp. sinuata). Other animal remains and dozens of bone artifacts were found but no direct evidence of plant use.18 Another site, Ayer Pond on Orcas Island, also dating to the Late Pleistocene, revealed a partially articulated bison showing evidence of human butchering (Kenady, Wilson, and Schalk 2007; Kenady et al. 2011; Mackie et al. 2011). Inland, yet another site within the study area, apparently contemporary with Manis, is situated on the Columbia Plateau of interior Washington, in an East Wenatchee apple orchard, some 180 metres above the Columbia River on a terrace formed around 15,000 years ago by the most colossal flood of Montana’s glacial Lake Missoula. Five exquisitely crafted Clovis-type stone points and many other artifacts were discovered about a metre under the earth, evidently cached there for some purpose. In the study region, Clovis points – believed to have been manufactured by some of the earliest peoples on the continent – have been collected in the Puget Sound area and on the Oregon coast, as well as east of the Cascade Mountains (Ames and Maschner 1999). A similar cache of unworn Clovis points was found in southern Montana, associated with a child’s burial. The points from the Wenatchee site are apparently about 13,000 years old (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). The Clovis people, evidently bison and mammoth hunters, may have arrived in the area as early as 14,000 years ago. There are a number of other similarly very early sites in southeastern Washington, mostly campsites for hunting and gathering peoples. One is the Marmes Rockshelter, described as among the most important archaeological sites in the northern New World, because it provides a rare glimpse of a long sequence of life of Columbia Plateau people (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). One of over eighty sites around the basin of the reservoir for Lower Monumental Dam, this site contained storage pits, fire pits, and burials, some above and some below the Mount Mazama ash layer (indicating an age of over 7,600 years) (see Mastrogiuseppe and Mark 1992). In the deeper layers were found basalt projectile points and grooved stone weights that had been tied to the shafts of atlatls (spear throwers). Flat stone mortars and pestles were also found, possible indicators of use of berries, seeds, and roots, the pounding and grinding of which would likely have been the work of women. There were also scrapers, possibly for preparing hides,

58 | part one – history

bone awls, likely used in basketry, and many other items indicating a diversified economy, some type of social stratification, and trade links to the coast. A number of other camps in the region dating to between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago, including the Lind Coulee on the Columbia Plateau, show evidence of hunting people who were skilled stoneworkers and toolmakers, whose stone knives were similar to those found in the Great Basin, and who were evidently affiliated with peoples of the vast arid region to the south and east (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). These people may have been moving southward, possibly the ancestors of peoples now living in distant places. All told and undeniably, animals (mammals, birds, and fish) would have been prevalent in the food systems of these early peoples (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005), but plants would have contributed significantly in terms of nutritional diversity and essential vitamins and minerals. The coastal route, warmed by the Japanese current, would have been relatively warmer than an overland continental route (Pielou 1991) and would have yielded additional, more predictable resources, not only the diverse fish (salmon, cod, halibut, and rockfish), shellfish, sea mammals, and seabirds and eggs but also shoreline and terrestrial plant resources, including edible seaweed (Pyropia; syn. Porphyra spp.), eelgrass (Zostera marina), northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis), Pacific silverweed (Argentina egedii), and many of the other types of plants. Berries, including soapberry, bunchberry (Cornus spp.), wild strawberries (Fragaria spp.), and some of the hardier Rubus, Ribes, and Vaccinium species, as well as Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca),19 highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule), and red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa), would probably have been available from coastal refugia. Greens to be found probably included fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium), cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum), and western dock (Rumex aqueticus). Trees – for example, western hemlock and Sitka spruce – may have contributed edible cambium and inner bark and edible shoot tips, possibly also with hemlock boughs serving as a substrate for herring eggs, as they have more recently. Wetlands species like cattail and the wapato described at the beginning of this chapter may also have been available. At some point on their journey along the coast, people would have encountered important food species growing south of the ice sheet along the ice-free coastlines of Oregon and California – for example, salal (Gaultheria shallon), hazelnut (Corylus cornuta), gray currant (Ribes bracteosum), camas (Camassia spp.), wild caraway (Perideridia gairdneri), and tiger lily (Lilium columbianum), whose current distributions indicate southern affiliations (Klinkenberg 2013). Plants from montane refugia – such as western spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata) (Pielou 1991), and some blueberry or huckleberry species (Vaccinium spp.) – may also have provided food for these early coastal travellers. For people who might have been travelling in the Late Pleistocene down an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains, the available plant resources

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would have been sparser. Numerous nunataks existing nearby, just west of the corridor (Pielou 1991), if accessible, may have served as sources of some roots, such as spring beauty and glacier lilies (Erythronium spp.), and berries, such as dwarf blueberry (Vaccinium caespitosum), crowberry (Empetrum nigrum), soapberry, silverberry (Elaeagnus commutata), and juniper (Juniperus spp.), as well as the cambium and seeds of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) and some other conifers and the cambium and young shoots of cottonwood (Populus balsamifera) and willows (Salix spp.). All told, however, the environment would have been decidedly unfriendly and the possibilities for plant resources quite limited. Table 2-1 lists some of the food plant species and genera that are candidates as early sources of nutrition for the peoples first entering northwestern North America. The table includes those known edible species that grow and persist in tundra, arctic, marsh, rocky shoreline, boreal and scrub forests, or other environments that might be similar to those of ancient Beringia and nearby potentially unglaciated or early deglaciated regions of the northern coast, such as around Hecate Strait, as well as plants that are known edible species whose remains have been identified from late glacial and Early Holocene sites.20 Also included in this table are species used as food by Indigenous peoples of Kamchatka and/or other parts of Siberia and of northwestern North America, as well as species such as kinnikinnick and wild rose (Rosa spp.) that are widely named in diverse Indigenous languages, indicating widespread and longstanding cultural significance (see chapter 3). Aside from the potentially ancient food species listed in table 2-1, other plant resources these early peoples may have adopted (based on more recent usage of these plants by Indigenous peoples of Kamchatka, the Aleutians, Alaska, and northern British Columbia) are listed in table 2-2. One of the limiting resources for the very early peoples must have been fuel for cooking, for drying and smoking fish and clams, and for heat and light since woody plants would have been scarce, perhaps nonexistent, prior to the expansion of dwarf birch (Betula sp.) and cottonwood, or balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera), about 15,000 years ago (Ames and Maschner 1999). Animal fats and oils, peat moss, sagebrush (Artemisia sp.), spiraea (Spiraea sp.), heathers, dwarf willows (Salix spp.), dry grasses, and driftwood from the south may have provided alternative sources of fuel (Andre, Karst, and Turner 2006; Ager and Ager 1980). We know, for example, that in recent times driftwood from Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and from other species of the distant south has been found washed up on beaches and in archaeological contexts in Alaska and on other northern shores (Lepofsky, Lyons, and Moss 2003; Moss et al. 2004; Drabek and Adams 2004; Ames and Maschner 1999). Forests of lodgepole pine and alder, followed by spruce and then hemlock, were quick to expand into the largely herbaceous tundra on Haida Gwaii and the adjacent continental shelf, for example, and would have been good sources

60 | part one – history

Table 2-1  |  Early plant food resources of northern coastal and Arctic North America available to ancient coastline and Beringian travellers of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene times Type of food/species

Algae

Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera, including M. integrifolia)

Notes

Seaweed, herring eggs: springtime, subtidal; fronds eaten with herring eggs on them; dried for year round use (O’Clair and Lindstrom 2000); found as remains at Monte Verde site in Chile (Dillehay et al. 2008; see also Demes, Graham, and Suskiewicz 2009)

Red laver (Pyropia spp., incl. Porphyra spp.b)

Seaweed: various spp. from late winter to late spring and summer; rocks, low intertidal zone; widely eaten today by coastal peoples of Asia and North America; many traditions of processing, curing, and drying; a high-value food, served at feasts; food and condiment; cooked in soups and stews; eaten raw and dried (O’Clair and Lindstrom 2000; Turner 2003a); found as remains at Monte Verde site in Chile (Dillehay et al. 2008)

Marine algae, or seaweeds, gen.; many different spp.b

Seaweed, herring eggs: marine algae widely eaten in Japan and Korea today; some types eaten by Northwest Coast and California peoples (see Pyropia), with or without herring eggs; available year round; deep-water types wash up on beach after storms; fronds edible; raw or cooked (M.K. Anderson 2005; Dillehay et al. 2008; Druehl 2000; Turner 2003a)

Ferns and fern allies

Horsetails (Equisetum arvense ab and related spp.)

Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansaab)

Licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhizaab)

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinumab)

Root vegetable: small tubers on roots of E. pratense, E. arvense, and possibly other spp. gathered from mouse caches and eaten by Kotzebue Inuit, Yupik, and others; eaten raw with seal oil; also eaten by Makah (Gunther 1973; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005) Greens: young shoots, especially spore-bearing shoots, eaten in spring

Root vegetable: fleshy rootstocks widely eaten by Northwest Coast, Yupik, and Inuit peoples in recent times; cooked in underground pits; known as a famine food as well as a feast food; a Gitxsan crest; avalanche chutes, rocky areas (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992)

Root vegetable, flavouring: mouth freshener, sweetener, tea; widely used on Northwest Coast (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005)

Root vegetable: fiddleheads and rhizomes eaten in Japan; rhizomes formerly a highly important food of Northwest Coast peoples, roasted and starchy inner part eaten; rhizomes

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  61

Table 2-1 | continued Type of food/species

Notes

eaten cooked; fall through spring (M.K. Anderson 2009; K.J. Brown and Hebda 2003; Burroughs 2005; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005, re. ferns; Norton 1979a, 1979b) Conifers

Junipers (Juniperus communisb and other spp.ab) Spruces (Picea sitchensis,a Picea spp.b) Pines (Pinus contorta,a P. albicaulisab)

Hemlocks (Tsuga heterophylla,ab T. mertensianaa)

Flowering plants

“Fruit”: berry-like cones possibly eaten fresh or cooked in small amounts; year round; sandy and rocky slopes, mountaintops, shorelines; Juniperus sibirica berries eaten as condiment in Siberia; pollen found in early refugia sites (Pielou 1991)

Edible cambium and inner bark: harvested in late spring; eaten fresh or cooked and dried; spruce tips eaten, used to make tea by Kotzebue Inuit and others; Picea pollen found at a number of sites in glacial refugia (A. Jones 1983; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Pielou 1991; Turner 1995) Edible cambium and inner bark: eaten by Haida and others, mainly late spring when sap is running; scraped from the outside of wood when bark removed or from inside of bark; widely eaten by people and bears; Pinus pollen found in early sites (Dilbone 2011; Fedje, Magne, and Christensen 2005; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Pielou 1991) Seeds: seeds of P. albicaulis eaten in Interior Plateau region (young cones and seeds of P. pumila eaten in Kamchatka); eaten fresh, sometimes dried; pine pollen found in early contexts, including five-needled pines (Pielou 1991)

Edible cambium and inner bark: inner bark harvested by Haida, Ts’msyen, and others of the northern coast, mainly late spring when sap is running; eaten fresh or cooked, dried in cakes; a favourite food, served at feasts (all T. heterophylla); boughs also used to capture herring spawn (Fedje, Magne, and Christensen 2005; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Pielou 1991)

Sand verbena (Abronia latifoliaa)

Root vegetable: large, deep-growing taproots said to have been eaten by Makah (Gunther 1973)

Alders (Alnus rubraab and other spp.)

Edible cambium and inner bark: eaten by Saanich; Alnus pollen (A. crispa, A. rubra) found at a number of sites around Haida Gwaii and elsewhere in coastal refugia (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Pielou 1991)

Wild chives (Allium schoenoprasumb)

62 | part one – history

Greens: eaten by Alaska Inuit (e.g., in Kotzebue), Ahtna, and others; leaves in early spring; bulbs in later summer, early fall; greens and bulbs eaten fresh as potherb, with seal oil; cooked in soup, dried

Table 2-1 | continued Type of food/species

Notes

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifoliaa)

Fruit: berries, summer; fresh and dried; known to all coastal peoples as well as widely eaten in northern and southern interior, including Alaska; pollen found in early contexts on Haida Gwaii (Fedje, Magne, and Christensen 2005)

Seacoast angelica, or seawatch (Angelica lucidab) Bearberry (Arctous alpina, A. ruberb) Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursib)

Pacific silverweed (Argentina egediia) and silverweed (A. anserinaab)

Caribou leaves, sage (Artemisia tilesii b) Marsh marigold (Caltha palustrisab)

Sedges (Carex aquatilis and other spp.ab)

Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia tuberosa, C. acutifolia, and related spp.ab)

Greens: young shoots eaten by Inuit of Kodiak, Bristol Bay, Seward Peninsula, and Kotzebue; also eaten by Yupik and Aleuts; raw or cooked; young stems, leafstalks preserved in seal oil (quite strong)

Fruit: berries eaten by Kotzebue and other Alaska Inuit; mixed with other berries; open forests and dry tundra and mountainsides; not prized but used in poor berry years

Fruit: berries eaten fresh or fried in oil, late summer through winter, spring; widely eaten by Dene (Athabaskan) and other northern peoples and in Kamchatka; eaten with bear fat and with salmon eggs (keeps eggs from sticking to teeth); preserved in seal oil, fish oil, or bear fat; keeps fat from getting rancid; eaten by bears and grouse; sunny, dry sandy soil, especially in sand dunes and riverbanks (Porsild 1953; Steller 1767)

Root vegetables: fall through spring; tidal marshes and rocky shorelines; widely eaten by Northwest Coast peoples in recent times; Potentilla sp. pollen found in early contexts on Haida Gwaii (Kuhnlein, Turner, and Kluckner 1982; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Turner and Kuhnlein 1982); closely related to A. anserina, also widespread in Eurasia and roots eaten by some

Beverage tea: leaves used for tea by Kotzebue Inuit and others (A. Jones 1983)

Root vegetable: roots (also young leaves and stems) eaten cooked by Inuit and Yupik peoples of Alaska and by Kamchatka (Gülden 1992; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Steller 1767; von Dittmar 1856) (warning: potentially toxic when mature due to protoanemonins); occurs in Asia but apparently not eaten

Greens: succulent stem bases eaten raw by some Alaska Inuit; sedges dominant early vegetation type Root vegetables: tuberous roots or corms eaten raw or cooked, with seal oil, by Alaska Inuit (Wales) and Yupik; a staple food of Aleuts and Kamchatkans (“sweet-root”); C. lanceolata a staple root vegetable for Tsilhqot’in and Interior Salish peoples; refugial populations in Olympic Mountains (Gülden 1992; Jakubov and Černjagina 2004; Jochelson 1975; Pielou 1991; Reedy-Maschner and Maschner 2012)

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  63

Table 2-1 | continued Type of food/species

Notes

Pacific hemlockparsley (Conioselinum gmeliniiab)

Root vegetable: carrot-like roots eaten by Northwest Coast peoples; pollen found in early contexts on Haida Gwaii (Compton 1993a; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005)

Bunchberry (Cornus canadensis a and related spp.b) Shrubby cinquefoil (Dasiphora fruticosa b)

Silverberry (Elaeagnus commutata ab)

Crowberry, or “blackberry” (Empetrum nigrumab)

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifoliumab)

Riverbeauty (Epilobium latifoliumb) Cottongrass (Eriophorum angustifolium and other spp.ab)

Wild strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis, Fragaria spp.ab) Northern riceroot, or “sarane lily” (Fritillaria camschatcensis ab)

64 | part one – history

Fruit: fruits eaten by Northwest Coast peoples, mid to late summer, fresh or cooked; C. suecica eaten in Kamchatka and by Yupik of Nelson Island, Alaska, but apparently not by Kotzebue Inuit; woods, marshes, subalpine areas (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005) Beverage tea: used by Tahltan and other northern peoples

Fruit: flesh around seeds eaten occasionally; found in far north in dry gravelly areas

Fruit: berries eaten best in fall or winter, fresh or stored in containers; widely eaten by Inuit and northern peoples, also eaten in Kamchatka; mixed with trout livers (in Kotzebue); mixed with cloudberries and stored in seal oil; Low dense mats, over rock and tundra and muskeg (Erman 1848; Jochelson 1975; J. King 1785; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Porsild 1953)

Greens: young shoots, inside part; eaten by Haida, Ts’msyen, Tlingit, Inuit, and Yupik of Alaska; “staple food,” feast food, children’s food; dried or preserved in seal oil; also used for nets on Northwest Coast and in Kamchatka; a Gitxsan crest; rich source of vitamin C (Gülden 1992; Steller 1767; Summers 1993-94; von Dittmar 1856)

Greens: young plants eaten as mixed greens; fresh shoots steamed, preserved in seal oil for a short time; eaten by Inuit of Kotzebue, Seward Peninsula, and Bering Sea area, mixed with other greens

Root vegetable: base of stem and underground stem eaten by Alaska Inuit and Yupik, called “mouse nuts” and collected from rodent caches; boiled and stored in oil

Fruit: berries widely eaten, fresh and dried, by Northwest Coast peoples, by Aleuts, on Seward Peninsula, and elsewhere in Alaska; early summer; used as sweetener; F. chiloensis coastal; possibly at refugia sites; strawberry pollen found at early sites (Pielou 1991)

Root vegetable: bulbs eaten fall through spring; tidal marshes, rocky shorelines; cooked by steaming; dried and pounded into flour; staple food; widely eaten by Northwest Coast peoples, southeastern Kodiak, Aleuts, and in Kamchatka; eaten by grizzlies (Gülden 1992; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005;

Table 2-1 | continued Type of food/species

Licorice root, or “Eskimo potato” (Hedysarum alpinumb)

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximumab)

Marestail, or “goosegrass” (Hippuris vulgaris ab)

Beach greens (Honckenya peploides b)

Lovage (Ligusticum hultenii, L. scoticumab) Lupines (Lupinus latifolius, L. nootkatensis ab) Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus ab) Pacific crabapple (Malus fuscab)

Yellow pond-lily (Nuphar lutea ab)

Notes

Reedy-Maschner and Maschner 2012; Steller 1767; Summers 1993–94; Turner and Kuhnlein 1983; von Dittmar 1856)

Root vegetable: dry, well-drained places such as old gravel bars; sweet-tasting roots; fall or spring; eaten raw, boiled, or roasted by Alaska Inuit and Interior Dene (Athabaskan) peoples; preserved frozen in underground cache or in bear fat or seal oil; H. alpinum eaten by First Peoples and Inuit of Alaska; H. hedysaroides eaten in Kamchatka; roots obtained from mouse storehouses (Gülden 1992; Jochelson 1975)

Greens: peeled green leafstalks and budstalks; shorelines, forest edges, bottom of scree slopes; widely eaten (this or related spp.) by Northwest Coast peoples and by Karak and others in Kamchatka; eaten by grizzlies (Gülden 1992; Kuhnlein and Turner 1987; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Reedy-Maschner and Maschner 2012; Steller 1767)

Greens: collected in quantity by lower Kuskokwim Inuit and Yupik of Alaska; called tayaruk; boiled in soup with seal oil or fish eggs (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005) Greens: grows in clumps above the high tideline on beach sand and gravel; leaves mixed with other greens, eaten raw or cooked or made into sauerkraut; used by Inuit of Seward Peninsula, Bristol Bay, St Lawrence Island, and Kotzebue, as well as by Yupik (Ager and Ager 1980)

Greens: young leaves and stalks eaten raw with seal oil or stored in seal oil for winter; cooked with fish; eaten by Yupik and Inuit of Alaska, as well as by Aleuts (Reedy-Maschner and Maschner 2012) Root vegetables: roots eaten raw or cooked by Haida and other coastal peoples, as well as by Aleuts; tidal marshes, sandy shorelines (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; ReedyMaschner and Maschner 2012; Turner 2004a; Swanton 1913)

Root vegetable: rhizomes eaten baked as emergency food; known to be ancestral food of the first people before salmon for the Kathlamet (Boas 1901); eaten by bears and deer; occurs in Kamchatka (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Turner 2004a)

Fruit: fruits widely eaten by Northwest Coast peoples in late summer and fall; eaten fresh, cooked, or stored under water with grease; widely used and culturally important food; eaten by bears, grouse, and other wildlife; coastal sloughs and lake edges; possibly spreading from Asia in the Late Pleistocene (Routson 2012; Routson et al. 2012; Wyllie de Echeverria 2013)

Fruit: seeds, parched (use not recorded for northern coast but a staple food for Klamath of northern California; eaten

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  65

Table 2-1 | continued Type of food/species

Wooly lousewort, or bumblebee plant (Pedicularis lanata and related spp.b) Coltsfoot (Petasites frigidus b – crosses with P. hyperboreus) Goosetongue (Plantago maritima ab) Alaska knotweed, or Alaska bistort (Polygonum alaskanumb) Alpine bistort and related species (Polygonum viviparum;a syn. Bistorta vivipara and related spp.b) Poplars, or cottonwood (Populus ab spp.) Mountain sorrel (Oxyria digyna ab)

Labrador tea and related species (Rhododendron groenlandicumb and related spp.)

66 | part one – history

Notes

by Spokan); pollen in early coastal refugia (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005)

Greens: grows early in spring from tundra tussocks, often through snow; fuzzy young shoots eaten raw or fermented as sauerkraut (e.g., in Kotzebue); flowers eaten, fall, boiled or roasted (flowers also eaten by Inuit of Cape Prince of Wales and Shishmaref); roots eaten by some (e.g., Yupik of Nelson Island, Alaska) Greens: tundra and forests; young leaves eaten by some Alaska Inuit, mixed with other greens; used to cover food being stored; said to help preserve; Ainu of Japan use related species; Siberian Inuit said to eat the young greens Greens: young leaves eaten fresh or cooked in southeastern Alaska; eaten by First Peoples of the upper Yukon River (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005, re. P. macrocarpa)

Greens: village sites and along riverbanks in disturbed soil; snowbanks and along roads; young stems and greens eaten, raw or cooked; also roots occasionally used; can be preserved in seal oil for a short time; eaten by Kotzebue and other Alaskan Inuit

Root vegetables: root vegetable of northern peoples; tuberous roots (rhizomes) and also leaves, preserved in seal oil; cooked; roots boiled in stews; in Siberia, roots eaten raw as nuts; P. vivipara eaten in Kamchatka; tuberous roots taken from mouse caches (Gülden 1992; Jakubov and Černjagina 2004; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Steller 1767) Edible cambium and inner bark: mainly late spring when sap is running; eaten fresh; eaten by Nuxalk, Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, and others; browsed by moose; Populus pollen found at early sites (Pielou 1991; Turner 1998)

Greens: raw or cooked; widely sought after (Heller 1993); fermented and put in seal oil to eat; used in Kamchatka and across the north, also by Dene (Athabaskans) (found growing in ancient Cape Addington Rockshelter); used by Inuit of Seward Peninsula and Barter Island and by Yupik of Nelson Island, Alaska (Steller 1767); some populations survived glacial refugia (Marr, Allen, and Hebda 2008) Beverage tea: common in muskeg and peatbogs and in northern forests and tundra; leaves harvested and used to make a beverage tea by Alaska Inuit (e.g., in Kotzebue) and Yupik and by Northwest Coast peoples

Table 2-1 | continued Type of food/species

Notes

Gray currant, or stink currant (Ribes bracteosum)

Fruit: berries eaten fresh or dried, mid to late summer; common along Northwest Coast; possibly spreading from glacial refugia (Thornton 1999)

Red currant (Ribes triste b)

Nootka rose and other roses (Rosa nutkana a and other spp.b)

Nagoonberry (Rubus arcticus) Cloudberry, or bakeapple (Rubus chamaemorus b)

Wild raspberry (Rubus idaeus b) Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus b)

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis b)

Trailing wild blackberry (Rubus ursinus ab)

Western dock (Rumex aquaticus var.

Fruit: berries ripe in summer; eaten fresh or cooked, alone or mixed with other berries; widespread in Alaska and northern interior; also used in Kamchatka (Gülden 1992; Steller 1767) Greens: young shoots, peeled, in springtime; Rosa pollen found at Sequim Mastodon site (Kirk and Daugherty 2007)

Fruit: hips eaten fresh and as famine food, late summer, fall, winter on northern coast; Kotzebue Inuit eat with seal oil; young shoots also edible; fruits of Rosa rugosa and other spp. widely eaten and used for beverage, also petals in Kamchatka; pollen found at Manis site (Černjagina 1999; A. Jones 1983; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Steller 1767; Summers 1993-94) Fruit: berries ripe in late summer, eaten fresh or stored; eaten with other berries; mixed into “salmonberry” (cloudberry) barrel; finest flavour and aroma; grows under willows in forest clearings or on tundra Fruit: berries ripe in late summer, eaten fresh or stored by First Peoples and Inuit of Alaska; highly prized; eaten raw or cooked; stored with sourdock leaves and other berries; grows in muskeg and open tundra; widely eaten in Kamchatka (Černjagina 1999; Jochelson 1975; Steller 1767; von Kittlitz 1858)

Fruit: berries eaten fresh or dried; ripe in summer; leaves used to make tea; traditional dessert; common in interior Alaska and Yukon; grows readily from cuttings and transplants Greens: young shoots, peeled, in springtime (also fruits); pollen of Rubus in early palaeoecological sites

Fruit: berries ripe in summer, widely eaten fresh or dried; possibly spread from coastal refugia (young shoots also edible) Greens: young shoots, peeled, in springtime (also fruits); pollen of Rubus in early palaeoecological sites

Fruit: berries ripe in early to mid-summer, widely eaten fresh or dried; possibly spread from coastal refugia (young shoots also edible) Fruit: berries (leaves for tea); pollen found at Manis site (Kirk and Daugherty 2007) Greens: young leaves and leafstalks eaten raw, usually cooked, with oulachen grease, riceroot bulbs, etc., by coastal peoples,

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  67

Table 2-1 | continued Type of food/species

Notes

fenestratus and related spp.ab)

including Aleuts (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005, re. Rumex; Reedy-Maschner and Maschner 2012; Turner 2004a)

Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia a and related spp.b)

Root vegetable: tubers widely eaten; early lake vegetation post-Pleistocene at southern edge of Cordilleran Ice Sheet; occurs in Kathlamet origin story (Boas 1901); tubers retrieved in winter from muskrat caches (J.A. Ross 2011)

Arctic dock, or sourdock (Rumex arcticus and related spp.ab)

Willows (Salix spp., incl. S. alaxensis, S. pulchra, and related spp.ab) Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa b)

Salad greens, or wild cucumber (Saxifraga punctata, S. spicata b) Stonecrop (Sedum divergens b) Roseroot, or rosewort (Sedum roseum,b Rhodiola integrifolia) Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis a)

Arrow-grass (Triglochin maritima)

68 | part one – history

Greens: grows in wet places around tundra lakes, along brackish marshes, rivers; young leaves pinched off and eaten raw, cooked, or as sauerkraut; eaten with seal oil or blubber; R. arcticus “highly prized” by Alaska Inuit and Yupik (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005, re. Rumex)

Greens: tender shoots, peeled and eaten raw; leaves eaten raw with seal oil; gathered in quantity in springtime; eaten by Inuit and Yupik of Alaska; rich source of vitamin C; browsed by moose, deer, ptarmigan; leaves used to make tea by Kotzebue Inuit; inner bark of Salix eaten in Siberia (Benyowski 1790; Steller 1767)

Fruit: berries ripe in early to mid-summer; cooked in sauce, stored in underground pits; possibly spread from coastal refugia; Sorbus sambucifolia fruit eaten in Siberia (Černjagina 1999, Jakubov and Černjagina 2004; Losey et al. 2003; Steller 1767; von Kittlitz 1858)

Greens: young leaves collected in spring and throughout growing season; eaten raw with seal or walrus oil; preserved in oil; an important green for Alaska Inuit (e.g., in Kotzebue) and Yupik Greens: young fleshy leaves eaten by northern coastal peoples; grows in barren, rocky environments along the coast, in lava beds, and on mountaintops

Greens: fleshy leaves and stems eaten raw or cooked, or fermented as sauerkraut, in early summer by Alaska Inuit (e.g., in Kotzebue) and Yupik and by Siberian Inuit; also used for tea; moist rocky places along the coast and in the mountains (Hultén 1968)

Fruit: berries ripe in summer; very bitter but whipped into froth and dried for winter use; eaten in Alaska (by Kotzebue Inuit) and throughout British Columbia; widely traded; feast food; well-drained wooded places and old gravel bars, widespread in the north; pollen found in Manis site and other coastal refugia (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Pielou 1991; Turner and Burton 2010)

Greens: young vegetative leaf bases eaten in springtime

Table 2-1 | continued Type of food/species

Notes

Cattail (Typha latifolia ab)

Root vegetable: young stem bases, rhizomes eaten by some groups (Nisga’a); also eaten in Russia; early wetland vegetation post-Pleistocene at southern edge of Cordilleran Ice Sheet (Gülden 1992)

Blueberries and huckleberries (Vaccinium spp.;ab V. alaskaense, V. caespi­ tosum, V. membranaceum, V. myrtilloides, V. ovalifol­ ium, V. parvifolium) Bog cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos b)

Bog blueberry (Vaccinium uliginosumb)

Lingonberry, or lowbush cranberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea b)

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule)

Eelgrass (Zostera marina b)

a

Fruit: berries eaten in quantity, fresh or dried; ripe in summer to early fall; Vaccinium pollen found in early sites; many of these occur in the northern regions (Fedje, Magne, and Christensen 2005; Pielou 1991)

Fruit: berries eaten cooked, and stored under water by Alaska Inuit, Yupik, northern Indigenous peoples; also used in Kamchatka; ripe in late summer, fall (J. King 1785; Langsdorff 1812; Steller 1767)

Fruit: berries eaten fresh or dried; ripe in late summer; widely eaten by Inuit and Yupik of Alaska, where they are stored frozen in barrels sunk in the ground; and eaten on the northern coast; served with sourdock, blubber, other berries; also eaten in Kamchatka; grows thickly in tundra, wet and dry, and in forests (Černjagina 1999; Erman 1848; J. King 1785; Steller 1767) Fruit: berries eaten fresh or cooked and stored under water; preserved frozen in cloth sack; mixed with meat and fat or with whipped fish eggs (not salmon); widely eaten in circumpolar region by Inuit, Yupik, Kamchatka, and other northern peoples; ripe in late summer, fall; grows thickly on tundra beneath birch and spruce, from ocean up to mountains (J. King 1785; Langsdorff 1812; Steller 1767)

Fruit: berries widely eaten by Northwest Coast and northern peoples; fresh or frozen; cooked, stored under water with grease; said to be food of supernatural beings and feasts; feature in Haida origin story (Swanton 1905, 145-6); mixed with hemlock cakes or other berries; pick to eat after first frosts; open woods and moist area; picked in late summer, fall (Turner 2004a)

Herring spawn, rhizomes: intertidal, low subtidal; springtime; rhizomes and youngest leaves; herring eggs eaten from leaves; rhizomes eaten today by Kwakwaka’wakw and others; eaten by brant geese; an important feast food and “food of the ancestors” (Boas 1921; Cullis-Suzuki 2007)

Indicates presence of pollen and/or other remains in palaeoecological or archaeological contexts in the late glacial or Early Holocene period on the Northwest Coast.

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  69

b

Indicates that this or a closely related species is known to occur in Kamchatka, as per Jakubov and Černjagina (2004) and/or Anna Saghatelyan (pers. comm., 2009).

Sources: Specific references are cited in the table. Compiled generally from Ager and Ager (1980), Eidlitz (1969), Heller (1993), A. Jones (1983), Kuhnlein and Turner (1991), Marles et al. (2000), Pojar and Mackinnon (1994), Porsild (1953), Smelcer, Kari, and Buck (2011), Steller (1767), Strecker (2007), Sutherland et al. (2011), Thornton (1999), and Turner (1995, 1997a, 1997b, 2004a), with input on comparable Siberian and European uses provided by Anna Saghatelyan (pers. comm., 2009). Table 2-2  |  Potential early plant (nonfood) resources of northern coastal and Arctic North America available to ancient coastline and Beringian travellers, based on more recent usage of these plants by Indigenous peoples of Kamchatka, the Aleutians, Alaska, and northern British Columbia Species

Algae

Notes on use or potential use

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana)

Material: fishing and anchor lines, floats, cooking and storage containers

Algae, marine (including Porphyra,b Gracilaria, and various “short kelp” spp.)

Medicine: Porphyra and Gracilaria used used in Monte Verde, Chile (Dillehay et al. 2008)

Fungi

Bracken fungi (including Fomitopsis spp., Ganoderma applanatum, Inonotus obliquus) Bryophytes

Peat mosses (Sphagnum spp.) Ferns and fern allies

Material: marine algae, especially kelp fronds, used for covering fish and for surrounding food in cooking Material: tinder, fire starter Medicine: various

Fuel: peat, tinder

Material: baby diapers, stuffing, wiping

Licorice fern (Polypodiumb glycyrrhiza)

Medicine: rhizomes

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinuma)

Fuel: (fronds, rhizome fibres)

Conifers

Junipers (Juniperus spp.b)

Material: matting, flooring, etc. (fronds) Fuel: (branches)

Material: implements (branches) Medicine: (branches, “berries”)

Spruces (Piceab spp.)

Fuel: (wood)

Material: construction and implements (wood), caulking and glue (pitch) Medicine: (pitch, bark)

70 | part one – history

Table 2-2 | continued Species

Notes on use or potential use

Pines (Pinus contortaa and other spp.)

Fuel: (wood)

Material: construction and implements (wood), caulking and glue, fire starter Medicine: (pitch, bark)

Flowering plants

Monkshood (Aconitumb spp.)

Material: fish and game poison; known from Aleutians and far north (Heizer 1938)

Alders (Alnusab spp.)

Fuel: (wood)

Material: construction and implements (wood), dye and tanning agent (bark) Medicine: (bark)

Sagebrush or wormwood species (Artemisiaa spp.b)

Fuel: (wood), tinder (bark)

Material: fibre for cordage and clothing (bark)

Medicine: (leaves and twigs) (especially A. tilesii, A. frigida) Birches (Betulab spp.)

Fuel: for smoking fish (B. nana) (wood), tinder (bark)

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifoliumab)

Material: cordage and fish nets (stem fibre), food preparation (leafy stems)

Cottongrass (Eriophorum spp.b)

Fuel: fruiting “cotton,” twisted together, as oil lamp wicks, tinder

Dune wildrye grass (Leymus mollisb)

Material: cordage, mats, baskets, bags (leaves)

Calder’s lovage (Ligusticum calderia)

Medicine: (roots)

Pacific crabapple (Malus fuscab)

Fuel: (wood)

Material: construction and implements (wood), baskets and cache lining (bark)

Medicine: (leaves, stems, roots)

Material: implements (wood) Medicine: (bark)

Marsh buckbean (Menyanthes trifoliataab)

Medicine: (roots)

Yellow pond-lily (Nupharb luteaa)

Medicine: (rhizomes)

Coltsfoot (Petasitesb hyperboreus)

Material: makeshift baskets and food preparation (leaves), stuffing mattresses (seedheads)

Grasses (Poa spp.b and other grass spp.)

Material: lining skin boots or moccasins, matting, cooking, weaving (leaves)

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  71

Table 2-2 | continued Species

Notes on use or potential use

Labrador tea and trapper’s tea (Rhododendron spp.b)

Fuel: (stems)

Wild roses (Rosa spp.b)

Fuel: (stems)

Medicine: (twigs, leaves)

Material: implement shafts (stems); Medicine: (bark, shoots, hips)

Willows (Salixa spp.b)

Fuel: (wood), lamp wicks (stems)

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensisa)

Fuel: (stems)

Spiraea (Spiraea spp.)

Fuel: (stems)

Cattail (Typha latifoliaab)

Fuel: (tinder, seed fluff)

Stinging nettle (Urticab dioica)

Material: cordage and fish nets (stem fibre)

Medicine: (bark, shoots, leaves)

Medicine: (branches, leaves, berries) Material: implement shafts (twigs) Material: matting and bags (leaves), tinder and mattress stuffing (seed fluff) Medicine: (green plants, roots); follows human settlements in Old and New Worlds

a

Indicates presence of pollen and/or other remains in palaeoecological or archaeological contexts in the late glacial or Early Holocene period on the Northwest Coast. b Indicates that this or a closely related species is known to occur in Kamchatka, as per Jakubov and Černjagina (2004) and/or phytogeographer Anna Saghatelyan (pers. comm., 2009). Sources: Ager and Ager (1980), Bielawski (2007), Dillehay et al. (2008), Hebda, Pellatt, et al. (2005), Jaganova (2004), Jakubov and Černjagina (2004), Jochelson (1975), Kirk and Daugherty (2007), Lacourse and Mathewes (2005), Reedy-Maschner and Maschner (2012), Smelcer, Kari, and Buck (2011), Steller (1767), Strecker (2007), Summers (1993-94), Turner (1998, 2004a), von Dittmar (1856), with input on comparable Siberian and European uses provided by phytogeographer Anna Saghatelyan (pers. comm., 2009).

of fuel, as well as construction materials for dwellings and shelters in the late glacial and Early Holocene times. Along the “kelp highway,” the kelps themselves (Nereocystis luetkeana, Macrocystis pyrifera, and related spp.) would have served as key resources. These brown macroalgae are, lengthwise, the most extensive living organisms on earth; some are taller than the tallest known trees. They can withstand surges and pounding waves, and they help to break and calm the turbulent waters, mediating and reducing the ocean’s impact on the shoreline. The flexible stems, anchored to

72 | part one – history

2-6  |  Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) bed along the coast of Haida Gwaii, an important marine alga for First Peoples and the foundation of a key coastal ecosystem.

the rocks of the ocean floor and buoyed up by bulblike floats, bend and stretch out with the tides, their fronds undulating in the ocean currents.21 Kelp “forests” provide a rich habitat for myriad other life forms, from microscopic larvae to large-mouthed rockfish. Some organisms, like sea urchins, live on the kelps; others find shelter and protection from predators among the crowded stipes (figure 2-6). Coastal First Peoples have had long associations with these special kelp ecosystems. Northwest Coast peoples have names for the kelps in every language, as well as names for special places where kelps grow and for kelp-associated products. The Tlingit of Alaska have a name for a place called “at the bottom of the edge of the kelp,” where halibut are caught (Thornton 2008). Bull kelp

Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  73

stems were used for fishing lines, and the giant kelp fronds are still used today to catch thick deposits of herring eggs for a nutritious food and trade item. The coastal peoples used – and continue to use – kelps to navigate and read the tides, and they anchored their canoes to kelps while fishing or hunting for seals or sea otters. Aside from the fish and marine mammals, various kinds of seabirds, such as scoters, depend on kelp forests. Terrestrial species, including bear and deer, and shallow-water birds, such as mallard ducks, geese, and oystercatchers, frequent the kelps that have washed up onto the shore, making these wildlife species more readily accessible to people as well. Not surprisingly, First Peoples’ stories are replete with references to kelps, and it is possible that the antiquity of these narratives extends to peoples’ earliest experiences with the North American coastline. Some other plant-based technologies – for example, use of nets, wedges for splitting wood, digging sticks for prying out clams and roots, and barbed points for fishing and hunting sea mammals, as well as the construction of shelters, and of watercraft, mentioned previously – probably also extend back to the earliest times on the coast. There is indirect evidence for all of these during the Early Holocene (some 11,000 to 7,000 years ago), if not earlier (Fedje, Mackie, et al. 2005). Ames and Maschner (1999, 251) state, “We also believe that basic techniques for storage – smoking, freezing, and wind and sun drying – were also known to the continent’s earliest peoples,” with the caveat that there was a shift in emphasis later to heavier reliance on storage. In subsistence, as in technology, Ames and Maschner suggest, evolving resource use over the millennia of human occupation constituted changing the roles of many original resources (e.g., salmon) rather than discovering entirely new ones, with an increase in production and focus over time, possibly linked to better storage techniques, larger populations, and sedentism (ibid., 252–3). In any case, they conclude, it is unlikely that humans could have survived in any numbers, at least along the northern coast, without some ability for storing food, even during a warmer, drier climate regime. A corollary for this conclusion is that people would have been constructing dwellings and shelters – probably mainly of plant materials – in these early times as well. Further archaeological research, focusing on plant remains and on depressions of various shapes and sizes, postholes, and situated hearth sites, may shed light on the nature and construction of such early buildings. Each of the diverse habitats the earliest peoples would have encountered – including shorelines, wetlands, prairies and shrub steppe, and early forests – would have yielded important resources of one type or another. It is likely that people carried knowledge about plant foods and materials with them as they entered the new world, just as they apparently brought their stone technology across from Siberia. Some of the plants – bracken fern, silverweed, cow-parsnip, fireweed, stinging nettle, blueberries, birch, willows, and various conifers – would

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certainly have been familiar to them (see table 2-1), whereas others, such as perhaps nodding onion (Allium cernuum), seaside strawberry, and sand verbena, would have been discovered along the way and would require experimentation in harvesting and preparation. Perhaps some of the original food species were retained by Alutiiq and Unangan (Aleut) peoples into more recent times (Bielawski 2007; Maschner et al. 2009; Reedy-Maschner and Maschner 2012), and many are still used to some extent into the twenty-first century. Animals as Sources of Plant Knowledge

The early peoples would also have been continuously observing the habits of animals, not only so they could better hunt them but also because bears, deer, voles, ducks, geese, and other species seek out some of the same foods, especially vegetal foods, as humans (Turner 1997b). People can learn through close scrutiny of these animals what seasons to harvest certain foods and, in some cases, what parts to collect and how to store food – for example, in underground caches (Thoms 1989). They may also have learned from animals how to make plants more productive through selective harvesting, moderate disturbance of plants like northern riceroot (figure 2-7), dispersal of berries and other propagules, and snapping off the branches of berry bushes like highbush cranberry as a form of pruning. They may have learned that “browsing” or picking from the same patch of edible green shoots over a season will prolong the time period when younger growth can be harvested and that moving to successively higher elevations over a season, as many bird and animal populations do, allows one to access later maturing resources from the same species. Harvesting clusters or constellations of resources from around the same sites and strategically diversifying food supplies are also lessons that can be gained by observing animals (see chapters 5 and 11 for further discussions). The people may also have learned about new medicines from watching animals medicating themselves (see chapter 7). A good example of people’s knowledge and observations of animals is provided by John Ross (2011, 249), describing how women harvesting cattails assist squirrels in building their nests: Several elderly women remember seeing their mothers, before leaving the tule bed, carefully detaching enough cattail leaves from the stalks to make several neat piles for the express purpose of offering them to the squirrels for constructing their nests in near-by fir trees. Every fall, it was observed how a squirrel would annually intertwine additional layers of cattail leaves, ... increasing the outer diameter ... of interest is the explanation given for this annual autumn practice, one that acknowledged the similarity of technologies between humans and certain humanoid-like

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2-7  |  Bulbs and bulblets of northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis), disturbed by grizzly bear digging, Kitlope Valley, BC .

mammals that included bears, beaver, muskrats, and of course squirrels for building winter homes. Early Holocene Peoples and Plants Many of the plant and animal species existing today in the study region started to disseminate immediately after the Pleistocene, in the period known as the Early Holocene (approximately 11,000 to 7,000 years ago). Species spread from various directions – from coastal refugia, from nunataks in the mountains, and from the southern ice-free peaks and unglaciated areas – over the previously glaciated landscape, to become available as resources for people. These resources, however, would not have been uniformly accessible. There was immense climatic variation locally and regionally. Major disturbances such as floods and fires would have been frequent in one place or another. Along the coast, sea levels fluctuated widely, and extensively, and widespread variations in temperature, moisture, forest cover, and resource availability existed throughout (Pielou 1991). Regardless of the direction of their immigration, whether from the coastal regions or from routes across or along the Rocky Mountains, people, just to survive, would have needed to be versatile, resourceful, cooperative, and resilient. Since human settlements and encampments are often situated at

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edge environments (e.g., shorelines on the coast, lower treelines on the sidehills and benchlands of the valleys, and upper treelines in the mountains) (Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty 2003; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011), ancient fluctuations in water levels and in treelines mean that those seeking archaeological sites need to search for edges where humans would have lived in the past, which are not necessarily where the edges exist today. For example, throughout most of the first part of the Holocene and up until about 5,000 years ago (or later in some cases), the upper treeline in the mountains of southern British Columbia and adjacent Alberta was higher than at present (Hebda 1998; Pellatt and Mathewes 1997), suggesting that archaeologists need to survey areas above the present treeline in order to look for some of the campsites and processing sites of those days. Throughout the Early Holocene, over much of the study area, forest cover – like human populations – generally increased. Along the central and southern coasts under a cool, moist climate, small stands of trees and early successional vegetation spread and developed into dense, diverse forests of Douglas-fir, lodgepole pine, western hemlock, mountain hemlock, subalpine fir, and possibly Sitka spruce. Most of these tree species, along with alders, aspens, willows, grasses, and dense patches of bracken fern, probably survived the glaciation near the edges of the ice in the valleys of the Coast and Cascade Mountains (K.J. Brown et al. 2008; Pielou 1991). In the Interior Plateau, at this time there were expanses of open country, with immense wetlands dominated by cattail, large glacial lakes, and masses of ice remaining in many places. Sagebrush (Artemisia spp., possibly Artemisia tridentata), grasses, scattered mixed shrubs, and clumps of aspen evidently covered the higher areas of the interior during this time (Hebda 1998). Farther north, spruces, subalpine fir, willows, birches, and poplars, interspersed with extensive muskegs and fens, would have predominated. These and other cold-tolerant species like soapberry and highbush cranberry likely spread southward and eastward from unglaciated coastal refugia in the north. About 10,000 years ago, in the midst of the Early Holocene, there was a pronounced general warming, resulting in a predominance of more droughttolerant species and higher fire frequencies than at present, with the upper treeline in coastal and interior mountains being higher than its present elevation and with the expansion of prairies and steppes at lower elevations (Burroughs 2005; Moss, Peteet, and Whitlock 2007). There was a corresponding decrease in the extent of lakes and wetlands, although in some places extensive wetlands persisted, partly due to permafrost melting. The intermittent fire disturbance from this drier period generally promoted a diversity of species and plant communities (K.J. Brown et al. 2008). Lodgepole pine and juniper forests were common, with Douglas-fir in somewhat moister locations. On the humid coast, spruce and hemlock were well established. Garry oak savannahs – possibly with associated grasslands and camas prairies – expanded from the Puget

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Lowland, reaching their maximum extent on Vancouver Island around 8,000 to 7,000 years ago. Other species spreading from the south – arbutus (Arbutus menziesii), western redcedar, salal, evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum), and beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax) – evidently moved northward within the coastal zone but at different rates and ultimately with different northern range limits. Ames and Maschner (1999) note that the tools people were using in these early millennia were appropriately flexible and generalized in application. The same type of hunting gear, for example, was used on a variety of game animals. This versatility of implements – including those made of wood and other plant materials and those used, like cobble choppers, to harvest and process plant resources – seems to have been a successful survival strategy for the times. At the same time, it is likely that people were forced to diversify and to balance out the unpredictability of resource availability by exploiting as wide a variety of resources as they could from as many different habitats and over as long a harvest season as they could. The wide range of animal resources from the archaeological record generally reflects such a strategy, with multiple species that represented multiple habitats and seasons being the norm. One might assume people were using a similar variety of plant resources, limited only by the distribution and availability of the plants themselves. Everywhere, immediate coastal areas would have been critically important resource sites for these early people, containing fertile estuaries, intertidal flats, tidal marshes, rocky foreshores, kelp forests, sandy and muddy bays, and fishing banks, all richly endowed with food and other resources, both plant and animal (Ames and Maschner 1999; Fedje and Mackie 2005). Even sites within this range, however, would have been less extensive and less visible because of the short time available for settlement deposition at any one elevation, as well as the erosion and degradation of sites due to sea level changes (Fedje, Christensen, et al. 2005; Fedje, Josenhans, et al. 2005).22 For the Interior peoples, Nicholas (1998) suggests that “wetland mosaics” – ecological patchworks of terrestrial and wetland areas, shallow lakes and ponds, emergent riverine systems, and adjacent scrub and forests that formed within former glacial lake basins – would have been particularly attractive places on the early postglacial landscape. Collectively such areas would be capable of providing people with almost all of the resources they needed. However, like their coastal counterparts, these sites would have been relatively ephemeral since they could be easily and readily eliminated by the tempestuous floodwaters of melting glaciers and ice-dammed glacial lakes. For example, glacial Lake Missoula, whose volume was at times equivalent to that of Lake Ontario today, emptied and filled alternately in a cycle repeated over forty times within a period of around 1,500 years (Pielou 1991) near the end of the Pleistocene and Early Holocene. Human remains can sometimes provide clues about lifestyles, health, nutrition, and diet, including possible consumption of plant foods. One of the best 78 | part one – history

known of the earliest ancestors, Kennewick Man, whose almost complete skeleton was found eroding from the banks of the Columbia River near the confluence of the Snake and Yakima Rivers in 1996, lived around 9,500 years ago and died at the relatively old age of forty to forty-five years. His teeth were worn down (J.F. Powell and Rose 2004),23 characteristic for early individuals of the region, probably from chewing grit from stone-ground dried fish and roots (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Another individual of the Early Holocene from south-central British Columbia was Gore Creek Man, whose headless skeleton was found in an embankment about 20 kilometres east of Kamloops. His remains were dated to around 8,400 years ago (Cybulski et al. 1981). Unlike Kennewick Man, Gore Creek Man’s diet included mostly terrestrial-source protein, with only 8 to 10 per cent being of marine origins; salmon was evidently not as important for him. Unfortunately, the role of roots, berries, or other plant foods in the lives of these people cannot be determined, but likely plants featured highly, as they have in more recent times (see Hunn 1981). Right around the time of Kennewick Man, 10,000 to 9,800 years ago, people were congregating around a major fishing site along the Columbia River near the present location of the city of The Dalles, Oregon, at Five Mile Rapids,24 around 320 kilometres from the coast. Archaeological deposits from this site featured charcoal and immense quantities of vertebrae of butchered salmon, along with the bones of many other fish, large birds, and freshwater mussels (Ames and Maschner 1999; Kirk and Daugherty 2007). No specialized fishing equipment is evident at these early sites, but likely some early versions of the same plant-based fishing methods so well known from later times were employed there: possible construction of scaffolding for fishing as well as use of basketry, wooden-shafted spears, or possibly nets of local plant materials. This site was also one of the ancient places for gathering and exchanging both goods and ideas, just as it has been in more recent times, which would certainly have included diverse botanical goods and associated knowledge. Furthermore, there is an inference that plant foods would have been important at such sites of convergence.25 Large numbers of people congregating in one place during the fishing season would have required large quantities of food, so it seems likely that places where productive plant foods occur along with fish, such as many of the camas (Camassia spp.), biscuitroot (Lomatium spp.), onion, and balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) meadows of the Columbia Plateau, would have helped to support such gatherings (Ames and Maschner 1999). Likely, people utilized these and many other plant foods as well as the fish and other animal foods. For example, at The Dalles Roadcut archaeologists found hazelnuts, elderberries (Sambucus sp.), and cherry (Prunus sp.) seeds dating to the Early Holocene (N.D. Stenholm, cited in Lepofsky 2004, 393, 394–400). Other early documented evidence of plant food use comes from root-harvesting sites in the Willamette Valley just west of Eugene, Oregon (and somewhat south of the main study area Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  79

for this project), at the Hannavan Creek site, located on a small tributary of the Long Tom River. Here, Cheatham (1988) found a series of hearths and earth ovens containing over 300 charred camas bulbs, some dating back 8,000 years or more (Lepofsky 2004). He also recovered chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) seeds and charred hazelnut fragments. Remains of camas, acorns (Quercus garryana), and hazelnuts in the context of fire-altered rock and charcoal in multiple earth ovens are also reported from other Early Holocene sites along the Long Tom River (O’Neill, Connolly, and Freidel 2004; Prouty, O’Neill, and Connolly 1999). Thus camas-roasting traditions in the region have their beginnings in the Early Holocene, evidently from the Willamette region.26 As a group, early interior archaeological sites, such as the Olcott sites of the Cowlitz-Stillaguamish drainage, point to a wide-ranging tradition of relatively mobile communities of people some 12,000 to 9,500 years ago who engaged in hunting, fishing, and plant gathering and who spread from the Columbia Plateau into the Great Basin and south to the Mojave Desert (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Similarities in their basketry, fishing methods, tools, and other artifacts are a testament to cultural continuity, probably also maintained by their convergence at the major fishing and exchange sites, where prized items such as obsidian and marine shells were traded (ibid.). Significantly, organic residue on one Olcott site volcanic point indicates working with cedar – the first known identification of a plant residue on a stone tool (ibid., 86). Links between the Interior Plateau traditions and the northern Great Basin area are reflected in the exclusive presence of twining as a construction method throughout the Holocene, not only for baskets but also for mats, capes, skirts, caps, and sandals27 (Connolly and Barker 2004). There are other connections, too, such as the use of earth ovens for cooking edible roots in both regions and the importance of wetland species such as cattail and tule (Fowler 1992, 2000; Kelly 1932). Throughout the entire area, many ancient innovations – from styles of shelters and canoes to cooking and basketry techniques – would have been readily and efficiently transferred and adopted widely. Fishing nets, wedges for splitting wood, atlatls (spear throwers), barbed points for fishing and hunting sea mammals, and ground-stone technology – there is at least indirect evidence for all of these during these early times (see Ames and Maschner 1999), and most would have involved plant products in some capacity. Mid Holocene Peoples and Plants The Mid Holocene, from about 7,500 to about 3,500 years ago, was a time of expansion of human settlement throughout the study area, with evidence of increasing diversity in peoples’ lifeways and languages as well as in environments and vegetation (see Moss, Peteet, and Whitlock 2007). The pollen record reveals, in general, increasingly cooler and moister conditions than in the Early

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Holocene. Muskegs on Haida Gwaii and peatbogs on Vancouver Island expanded (K.J. Brown and Hebda 2003). Extensive forests, diversifying in their species but dominated by coniferous trees, were spreading over much of the landscape and encroaching significantly on the grasslands and sage steppe habitats of both the coast and the interior. Some of these forests, however – unlike the generally more open vegetation of the drier Early Holocene – were particularly prone to fire, sometimes recurring, severe, and stand-destroying (Hebda 1998; I.J. Walker and Pellatt 2001). Significantly, western redcedar (Thuja plicata), which would soon become prominent in Northwest Coast Indigenous technologies, starts to appear in the pollen record on the southern coast, joining Douglas-fir, lodgepole pine, hemlocks, and spruces as key, highly versatile species. Moisture-loving and cold-tolerant subalpine forests, with mountain hemlock and yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis), another newer arrival,28 established themselves in Vancouver Island’s montane regions, precursors of today’s higher-elevation Mountain Hemlock Zone forests. On the east coast of the island, the drier character of the forest persisted, with Douglas-fir, open pine woodlands, and sagebrush (presumably Artemisia tridentata). These forests are the precursors of the modern forests of this area’s Coastal Douglas-fir Zone and dry Coastal Western Hemlock Zone (K.J. Brown et al. 2008). In the interior, lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), and Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) continued as predominant forest species of the interior valleys, with denser forests of spruce and subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) developing in the moister environments of higher elevations – precursors of today’s forests in the Engelmann Spruce–Subalpine Fir Zone (Hebda 1998). Wetlands – bogs, muskegs, and marshes – expanded, continuing to provide a range of important resources for people, from blueberries and cranberries to wapato, yellow pond-lily (Nuphar lutea ssp. polysepala), and skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus). Even under the cooler, moister regime, grasslands and prairies persisted in the valley bottoms of the interior drier areas and in the southern coastal regions from southeastern Vancouver Island to Puget Sound and the Willamette Valley. The changes and developments in the environment during the Mid Holocene were matched by the various cultural traits reflected in the archaeological record. People continued their hunting, fishing, and plant-harvesting lifestyles, adapting to new conditions or moving on as required, while developing, borrowing, and exchanging new technologies and ideas. They probably already had initiated distinct patterned seasonal rounds within particular territories, moving over the year from one area to another as different groups of resources became available for harvest in different places. On the coast, movements would have included migrations from the sheltered inner coast and estuarine environments to the outer coast for more oceanic hunting and fishing, as well as some excursions to upland areas for hunting and berry picking. In the interior, people

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would have moved from the valleys and lower slopes and benchlands to montane regions as the seasons progressed. More and more, however, peoples in most parts of northwestern North America were settling down, finding more or less permanent dwelling sites at which to spend the winter months, with their stored goods, from around November until the spring harvest season began, usually around February and early March. To date, plants have not been well represented in Mid Holocene sites, probably due at least in part to research methods that have not systematically sought out plant remains. But this does not mean that plants were not important. Fishing and hunting were continuing as predominant activities, but plant foods would have comprised a significant element of diets throughout the region, with new edible plants identified and added to the fare as people moved across the landscape, encountering different species and habitats. Furthermore, as in the Early Holocene, fishing and hunting required the use of plant-based implements: wooden spear shafts, plant fibre nets, bags and baskets, bull kelp fishing lines, and wooden canoes and paddles. As noted previously, cedar was evidently not yet a common element of northernmost coastal forests in the Mid Holocene, but dugout canoes of other types of wood, such as Sitka spruce and cottonwood, may well have been used on the northern part of the coast. Trees and driftwood would have been sought as fuel for warmth, cooking, and smoking and preparing hides and as raw material for construction and implements. People would have used a range of fibrous materials for mats and basketry: cattail leaves, tule stems, sedge, grass and beargrass leaves, inner bark of maples (Acer spp.), sagebrush and willows, stem fibre from stinging nettle, fireweed and Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), and roots of spruces and other coniferous species. They would also have used and developed a range of wooden tools, from digging sticks and scrapers to wedges for woodworking, all items whose styles and designs would continue to be enhanced over the ensuing millennia. Stories, songs, and rituals pertaining to plants and plant resources would also have been developing, and plant names would have been increasingly incorporated into the vocabularies of the early proto-languages – the precursors of modern Haida, Salish, Wakashan, Dene (Athabaskan), and others. Kuipers (2002) lists over forty Proto-Salish elements and terms related to plants, some directly identified with plant species, others more broadly associated with particular traits such as taste or texture (see chapter 3). Enhanced techniques and strategies for managing plants and habitats were conceivably a part of peoples’ lives by the Mid Holocene, if not earlier. It is possible, for example, that controlled burning of individual plants and particular landscapes such as prairies originated at this time, although this practice is not really evident in the record until the Late Holocene. Likely artistic creations extend far into the ancient past and have always been an element of the cultures of the study region. Distinct evidence of art emerges

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by the Mid Holocene, reflecting not only the sophistication of technologies but also peoples’ spiritual and religious awareness, as well as a sense of connection to particular species and places. Small sculptures of stone, bone, and antler occur in archaeological sites from this time period, but these objects are rare (Ames and Maschner 1999; R.L. Carlson 1976) and give few clues to peoples’ relationships with plants.29 At the very least, however, located art forms can serve as indicators of past routes of transportation – pathways over water and land that would have facilitated dissemination of cultural traits, technologies, and ideas, including ethnobotanical knowledge, products, and technologies, within and outside the boundaries of a given cultural or linguistic group (see Blackstock 2001 for more recent examples). A proliferation of rock carvings and other art also may indicate an increasingly spiritual connection to particular lands and resources and may reflect ceremonial and ritual activities that would have influenced other aspects of life, another trend that has implications for the expanding complexity of people-plant relationships. On the Northwest Coast, shorelines continued to fluctuate, with levels both higher and lower than at present, depending on the time period and location, but by the middle of the Mid Holocene, sea levels on most parts of the coast had reached those of the present time. Diverse habitats, from lagoons and salt marshes to tidal flats, freshwater wetlands, forested plains, prairies, and upland areas, as well as the marine environments themselves, were all available to support peoples’ quest for resources. The cultural traditions of recent years are foreshadowed in the artifacts dating to between 6,500 and 5,000 years ago, with microblades and unifacial flaked stone tools generally giving way to ground-stone tools.30 Ames and Maschner (1999, 114–15) hypothesize, based on an apparent increase in archaeological deposits rich in marine resources, that shoreline and nearshore marine species may have become more important on the northern coast during this time, possibly a result of a decline in diversity and productivity of terrestrial resources. In any case, the proliferation of large, deep middens comprised primarily of shells of clams, mussels, chitons, and other shellfish may reflect a growing importance of these marine resources in peoples’ diets and their increasing skill in harvesting intertidal resources. Sea urchins, crabs, snails, and many types of fish, including salmon, herring, halibut, and rockfish, as well as birds and marine mammals, are all evident in sites from this time period (Bielawski 2007; Hebda and Frederick 1990). It is important to recognize, however, that shell middens are present in the archaeological record dating back to the Early Holocene (Moss 2011; Moss, Peteet, and Whitlock 2007).31 In terms of plant-related activities, increased intensity of marine resource use suggests increased employment of diverse plant-based tools and devices, such as spears, weirs, traps, nets, and vessels made from wood and fibre, and probably also the use of a comparable and growing diversity of coastal plants,

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such as roots, berries, and greens, in peoples’ diets as settlements became more permanent and populations increased. Certainly, most of the early plant foods and plant materials identified in tables 2-1 and 2-2 as candidates for use by Pleistocene and Early Holocene peoples can be expected to have also been intensively used in the Mid Holocene, supplemented by other species, like western redcedar, disseminating into the area from the south. With charcoal dating back to about 11,000 years ago, the site of Namu in Heiltsuk territory on the central coast of British Columbia shows intensified use in the Mid Holocene and is a good example of Northwest Coast occupancy during this time. The faunal record for the site dates from about 7,000 years ago, with indications of people’s strong reliance on salmon – especially pink salmon – and herring. Around 6,000 years ago, salmon increased in abundance in the archaeological record, and shellfish resources, especially mussels, showed a notable increase as well.32 This site, with its intensive salmon use, may have represented an early semi-sedentary population, but whether the increase in salmon use was a result of, or a reason for, the settlement is not known.33 Early tools (e.g., microliths, flakes, unifacial pebble choppers, pebble rasps and core scrapers, and flaked bifaced points and knives)34 represent evidence not only of a welldeveloped early fishing economy but also of woodworking (R.L. Carlson 1996). Unfortunately, there is no record of plant use at Namu since plant remains were not collected there. We can only speculate that, as well as working with wood, the Namu people of the time relied on the entire spectrum of plant foods available to them and used the diverse products of the developing coastal temperate rainforest in their technologies and medicines in ways that foreshadowed the uses of later millennia. Interior peoples along the major salmon rivers and their tributaries – the Columbia, Fraser, Bella Coola, Skeena, Nass, and Stikine – increasingly depended on the salmon species and probably applied techniques they already knew to cut and dry the flesh, to extract the oil and eggs, and even to make bags and shoes from the skin, as their counterpart salmon people in Asia did. These people also sought deer, marmots, mountain goat, sandhill crane, grouse, and a host of other game species, while continuing to develop appropriate technologies for tanning hides, for making snares, spears, and knives, and for preserving the flesh. As on the coast, plant foods and other plant resources are not well represented, especially in early archaeological assemblages – in many cases, because they were not looked for. It is safe to infer, however, that interior plant resources, like those on the coast, were numerous and diverse, probably fairly similar in range to the species known to and named by more recent Indigenous peoples (see chapter 3). The famous Keatley Creek village site along the benchlands above the Fraser River in south-central British Columbia, about 20 kilometres upstream from the present town of Lillooet, was occupied during the Mid Holocene, with the

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earliest deposits being around 7,000 years old (Hayden 1997). People began camping at Keatley Creek, on flat ground with water and fuel nearby, leaving behind evidence of microblade technology. It is unclear when they began to build pithouses at Keatley Creek – a practice that developed into what is known as the Plateau Pithouse Tradition (D.E. Walker 1998) – but they were likely being used as dwellings in the Mid Holocene, if not earlier (see Ames 1996). The people probably had domesticated dogs for packing and hunting, and they participated, like their contemporaries, in a fairly egalitarian generalized hunting, fishing, and gathering lifestyle (Hayden 1997). Southward, along the Columbia River in north-central Washington, there is further evidence of the antiquity of houses: clusters of ancient rings of cobbles just upstream from Wells Dam, which were apparently used to hold down coverings of conical or domelike shelters. Some of these settlements had three to four of these dwellings; others had a dozen and some as many as thirty to forty. Many of these date back 5,000 years, and one, at a site north of Chelan, dates to 7,500 years ago (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). As in the northern Interior Plateau, pithouses became more abundant over this period, such that by about 3,000 years ago pithouse villages dotted the landscape along the middle Fraser River and Columbia River systems and their tributaries throughout central and eastern Washington and southern interior British Columbia. In the Fraser Valley, especially toward the eastern end of their territory in the vicinity of Hope, the ancestral Stó:lō were also occupying pithouses, as well as cedar plank houses and rectangular “in ground” houses (Lepofsky, Schaepe, et al. 2009; Schaepe 2001; Schaepe et al. 2001).35 Here, as well as in the Pemberton Valley and elsewhere, many families lived in pithouses well into the period of European contact. The size and configuration of dwellings are important to consider in any discussions of human-environmental interactions. The form of the house itself reflects social groupings of the residents, as well as the environmental conditions in which they reside (Lepofsky, Schaepe, et al. 2009). Pithouses, commonly 7 to 8 metres across, could be round, square, or rectangular. Some were dug as deep as 2 metres into the ground, and many had earthen or benched walls. They were roofed with a conical framework of poles joined at the apex and were covered with brush, sheets of bark, or mats, often with an outer layer of earth. Entry was through a hole at the peak, with a notched log ladder leading down into the living space, and many houses also had a side entrance at ground level. Upright posts extending up from the floor of the house supported the roof logs of larger structures. Food and belongings could be stored in scaffolding under the roof, in cache pits buried in the floor, or outside of the dwelling (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Some pithouses had a central fire, but in at least some cases, a fire hearth was maintained outside of the pit.36 Mat lodges, common from more recent times, cannot be expected to have preserved well but were probably constructed by people starting in the Mid

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Holocene or even earlier. In the Interior Plateau, as documented historically, mat lodges were often elongated, with rounded ends, and were covered by mats usually made from tule (Schoenoplectus acutus), but cattail leaves were also used. Because the plant materials swell with moisture, such lodges were remarkably watertight. The lower parts could be opened up in fine weather or banked around the rim with earth, rocks, or bark sheets, making them a practical, versatile, and transportable type of dwelling. At North Bonneville, located on the Columbia River at the upper reach of tidal influence and at the lower end of a series of rapids, the archaeological record, from the Late Holocene at least, indicates both mat and plank houses. This was a key location – a portage place and an important site for salmon and sturgeon – where many people congregated over the summer for fishing and trading.37 Far to the north, in interior Alaska, Dene (Athabaskan) peoples of the Northern Archaic Tradition occupied a site at Onion Portage from about 6,500 to 4,300 years ago. Habitation from the very early Broken Mammoth site continued into this time as well. By this period, boreal forests had expanded northward, and sites in the Brooks Range and elsewhere in the interior of Alaska show an adaptation to hunting forest animals (Bielawski 2007). On the coast, in southeastern Alaska, many rockshelters and caves were first occupied during this time or perhaps a little later, from around 5,600 to 3,500 years ago (Ames and Maschner 1999). The earliest evidence of Dene (Athabaskan) occupation is said to date to the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, and in fact the Dene (Athabaskans) believe that they originated in Alaska, where, since time immemorial, they have lived in small family groups, often on the move, subsisting by hunting caribou, moose, and waterfowl, by fishing, and by harvesting berries and other plant foods (Crowell 1988; Ives 2010).38 Pit-cooking

In the Mid Holocene there is the first evidence for cooking root vegetables in earth ovens – one of the most significant developments in ethnobotanical knowledge, nutrition, and technology in northwestern North American. This method of cooking is so significant because it increases the overall caloric contribution of plant carbohydrates. In the 1980s investigations of Alston Thoms and his colleagues in the Calispell Valley of northeastern Washington resulted in some of the most detailed work in the region on ancient pit-cooking techniques, which had their beginnings in the Early Holocene farther south. Thoms found about fifty pit-cooking depressions, or earth ovens, the earliest dating near the beginning of the Mid Holocene, some 6,800 years ago (Thoms 1989, 2008a, 2008b, 2009; Kirk and Daugherty 2007). The region around the Willamette Valley has even older pit-roasting sites. The pits were used for the slow cooking of camas (Camassia quamash) bulbs and onions (Allium spp.), both staple carbohydrate root vegetables. 86 | part one – history

The main carbohydrate of the raw bulbs in both species is inulin, a complex and largely indigestible sugar. Prolonged cooking under certain conditions converts the inulin to its component units of fructose, which is sweet tasting and digestible (Konlande and Robson 1972; Peacock 1998). Cooked camas bulbs become dark and palatable and can be chopped, mashed, or squashed and dried in various ways for storage or trade. From the archaeological evidence, early camas-bulb diggers began harvesting in the spring, along the slopes of the river valleys, and then moved to higher ground as the season progressed. They stored their bulbs in strong woven bags of “rope” willow (sandbar willow, Salix exigua) bark or Indian-hemp fibre and baked them for periods of time in shallow cooking pits, which were dug into a gravel terrace formed by the wave action of an ice age lake. The earth ovens, measuring from 60 centimetres to over 4 metres across and ranging from about 12 to 60 centimetres in depth, were located directly above a camas meadow, adjacent to a forest that would have provided fuel for the cooking, and near a convenient source of rocks to serve as the cooking element (see chapter 5). In fact, ancient roasting pit depressions, milling stones, and cache pits, all reflective of a strong camas-based food system, are found throughout what is now Washington and the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Thoms (1989, 2008a, 2008b, 2009) concludes that the pattern of camas pit-cooking among the Kalispel changed little over thousands of years since more recently constructed earth ovens closely match the ancient ones. Late Holocene Peoples and Plants By the end of the Mid Holocene and into the Late Holocene, starting around 3,500 years ago, the vegetation across the study region was becoming increasingly similar to that of the present, although there were at least two general episodes of colder, wetter climate interspersed with warmer periods. This era represents the greatest development and diversification of Indigenous cultures and languages in northwestern North America, as well as an apparent integration or overall convergence of the different cultural traditions that some would say have been fairly readily identifiable in the archaeological record of the Early Holocene (R.L. Carlson 1976). Specifically, a time of significant cultural transition on the Northwest Coast seems to be indicated at about 5,000 years ago (Moss, Peteet, and Whitlock 2007). Many parallels in Northwest Coast and Columbia-Fraser Plateau lifeways, both increasingly reliant on a migrating salmon economy, are evident from this time (R.L. Carlson 1976).39 An increase in human populations and settlements over the Late Holocene occurred in concert with a general stabilization of climatic conditions, although this occurred in different time periods in different places. In the Interior Plateau small villages of semi-subterranean pithouses, contemporaneous with some of the large coastal shell middens that were evident along the major river systems in the Mid Holocene, were widely established after about 5,000 years ago.40 Into the Past: Ancient Relationships  |  87

The episodes of colder, wetter climate are characterized by reduced fire activity, expansion of wetlands, and a buildup of glaciers in the mountains. From about 2,400 to 1,200 years ago, in between these cooler phases, was a relatively warm, dry period, particularly evident in the lower Fraser Valley and coastal region, called the “Fraser Valley Fire Period” (Lepofsky, Hallett, et al. 2005; Lepofsky, Lertzman, et al. 2005). Evidence from this period points to an increase in naturally ignited fires and a resulting expansion in prairies and clearings and in fire-tolerant, early successional vegetation. Under this regime, there was likely an accompanying proliferation in deer and elk, as well as enhanced productivity of berries and other plant foods. In some areas, such as parts of Vancouver Island, the warmer episode may have stressed populations of salmon reliant on small streams. Lepofsky, Lertzman, et al. (2005) hypothesize that these ecological changes played a role in social changes occurring at the same time. They posit that differential productivity of resources encouraged people to enhance regional social networks, particularly to connect to kin living in the Fraser Valley, with its rich and diverse resources. Indeed, archaeologists broadly recognize this period as a time of regional social change and the formation of social identities (e.g., McMillan 2003). Not surprisingly, the densest human populations in northwestern North America also occurred during the Late Holocene. Settlements throughout the entire region in this period became larger and more permanent, both reflecting and reflected by a more complex social organization and an expanding resource base. The collective culmination of advanced technologies for resource harvesting and processing is evident, with increasingly sophisticated adaptation to particular places and specialization in skills and occupations. Land management techniques, such as using fire to create and maintain clearings and to increase habitat diversity and productivity, are suggested from the palaeoecological record. For example, a study of the long-term history of Ebey’s Prairie, an anthropogenic prairie on Whidbey Island, Washington (Weiser and Lepofsky 2009), indicates that within at least the past 2,300 years, people were probably intentionally burning over the Douglas-fir woods on the island to create and maintain “prairie” landscapes for food production (see also M.K. Anderson 2009). There is considerable evidence throughout both coastal and interior regions for greater logistical mobility in the Late Holocene. In concert with the establishment of more permanent settlements and special-use sites and with the diversification of food procurement and production, there was an apparent development of more structured seasonal rounds, reflected in both archaeological findings and oral traditions (Hayden 1992; Ames and Maschner 1999; Moss et al. 2004). On the Northwest Coast, shoreline and marine resources remained the basis for the Northwest Coast diet and economy; continuing and evidently expanding use of intertidal resources is revealed in increasingly large shell midden deposits, several metres thick and covering many thousands of square

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metres at many sites along the coast.41 These middens apparently developed earlier on the northern and central coast and later on the southern coast, although one early midden from the Tacoma area dates to 6,500 years ago (Kirk and Daugherty 2007).42 People continued to migrate and spread out, often for considerable distances, in the Mid and Late Holocene. Between about 5,000 and 3,500 years ago, early Salishan peoples spread out from their lower Fraser Valley homeland into the Interior Plateau and eventually as far as the Rocky Mountains in the case of the Secwepemc and Selish (formerly Flathead) peoples (as described in chapter 3). These peoples apparently settled among populations already occupying the Plateau region, their languages and practices merging to form the Proto-InteriorSalish and the relatively stable Plateau lifestyle, which extended northward along the Fraser River nearly to the Nechako River (see R.E. Ignace 2008; Stryd and Rousseau 1996; D.E. Walker 1998). As well as moving eastward and spreading out in the interior, Proto-Salish-speaking peoples – or at least the language itself – also moved westward, across to the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island, and along the coast southward into Puget Sound and northward to the Sechelt Peninsula and beyond, with some Salishan speakers remaining more or less in situ in the resource-rich lower mainland of what is now British Columbia. On the northern coast, some sites from the Late Holocene seem to represent incursions of peoples from the interior down the Skeena and other river systems to the coast between about 3,000 and 2,000 years ago (Martindale and Marsden 2003). It was apparently some time later, around 1,200 years ago, when Dene (Athabaskan) peoples originating from the interior regions of Alaska, the Yukon, the western Northwest Territories, and northern British Columbia – well adapted to survival in the boreal and montane forests of the north – moved southward into central British Columbia and in some cases replaced or merged with existing populations of Salishan peoples of the Plateau Pithouse Tradition over much of south-central British Columbia. The initial migration may have been instigated by a major ash fall from the White River volcanic eruption around 800 CE . From their original homeland in the north, Dene (Athabaskan) peoples moved over an immense area, some ultimately reaching the coast in what is now southern Oregon and northern California, others populating large areas of the Great Plains of Canada to the east, and still others settling – as Apache and Navajo – as far south as the American Southwest in Arizona and New Mexico (Ives 2010). Their major resources shifted as they moved into new areas, but in general, wherever they went, they continued at least some of their northern boreal forest hunting traditions. Expansion of knowledge and use of plant resources would have been a major component of a general elaboration of subsistence strategies characterizing the entire Late Holocene period, such as improved harvesting, cooking and storage technologies, housing, social structure, art, ceremonial practices, and

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transportation and trade connections, right up to and including the time of European contact. To say that people were flourishing in this rich and developing environment would not be an overstatement – and the contributions of plants to this relative prosperity were numerous and diverse. Specifically, more sedentary lifestyles – both reflecting and reflected by a proliferation of pithouses and, on the coast and somewhat later, of post and plank houses – were accompanied by augmented emphasis on technologies for food processing and storage, an apparent significant intensification of salmon fishing, improved transportation, and a number of social trends (Ames and Maschner 1999), all involving plants. Furthermore, larger, more permanent houses signifying greater and more permanent identity with particular places – probably particularly productive resource-harvesting areas – may be the beginning of more formalized land tenure systems that were evident on the Northwest Coast at the time of European contact and that involved a range of plant resources from berry patches to root “gardens” (Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005). Plants were employed in almost every aspect of these expanded lifeways: in making implements, canoes, and houses and in procuring and processing food. Although people since the earliest times used woods and fibres in making their hunting and fishing implements, including atlatls (dart throwers), spear and harpoon handles, and fishhooks (Hare et al. 2004), these implements, along with nets and weirs, are best documented from the Late Holocene (Ames and Maschner 1999).43 Bow and arrow technology, dependent on an intensive knowledge of the properties of different woods, particularly yew and juniper, evidently developed rather suddenly and spread widely around the beginning of the Late Holocene, replacing the atlatl. Woodworking in many ways defines the Northwest Coast culture area, with its massive plank and post houses, giant dugout canoes, bentwood boxes, and many other wood products, including the totem and mortuary poles so commonly associated with coastal villages from Alaska to Vancouver Island. Largescale woodworking began in the Mid Holocene. Western redcedar was established in the Fraser Valley as early as 6,600 years ago (Wainman and Mathewes 1987) and, along with yellow-cedar,44 started to spread from the south northward into the coastal forests. Then, in the Late Holocene, around 3,500 years ago, as cedar increased in abundance, age, and size, the use of wood and the complexity of wood-based technologies intensified, as did the development of a variety of woodworking tools and techniques for cutting, splitting, trimming, steaming, and bending the wood into all of the forms and products we associate with Northwest Coast cultures today (Ames and Maschner 1999). The height of woodworking technology probably occurred just in the few centuries before European arrival, when iron apparently filtered into the area through wrecks of ships from Japan and through trade (ibid.). In fact, 200 to 300 years before

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European contact may have been the time when the massive monumental totem poles and large wooden figures that characterize Northwest Coast art had their origins. Since no totem poles have been recovered from early archaeological sites, it is difficult to determine just when people started to make them. Developments in plant food harvesting, processing, and storage paralleled innovations and improvements in hunting and fishing technologies. Root vegetable use apparently intensified, and elaborate technologies for harvesting, preparing, and storing roots, berries, seaweed, and other foods become evident. Increased sophistication in basketry and earth oven construction throughout the entire region, and innovative box-making techniques on the Northwest Coast, were as important in helping to feed the growing populations as the advances in food procurement itself (Ames and Maschner 1999; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Lepofsky 2004; Peacock 1998; Thoms 1989, 2008a, 2008b). Digging sticks, which may have been known and used in some form by the earliest peoples in the region,45 were in widespread use in the Late Holocene, probably reflecting intensive root harvesting, as well as other digging activities such as clam harvesting and perhaps excavating the ground for pithouses and cooking pits. These sticks, generally made of hardwood or antler, have been found in both dry and waterlogged environments – such as those at Pitt Polder at the wapato tuber site, which date back 3,500 years or more (R. Inglis 1976; Lepofsky 2004).46 Some digging sticks were equipped with handles, usually of antler, but these were evidently a more recent innovation; the earliest digging stick handle from a dated context comes from a pithouse site in Kamloops, British Columbia, that is around 2,400 years old (Lepofsky 2004). Other digging stick handles have come from the northern Oregon coast, dating to between 2,000 and 1,000 years ago (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). These handles were sometimes elaborately carved and may have represented prestige items or possibly have embodied the spirit of the plant or digging ground that would assist the root harvester in her task (Hayden and Schulting 1997). Some are inscribed with parallel lines, apparently representing root trenches that girls at puberty dug as part of their training practices (Marianne Ignace, pers. comm., 2008). For example, digging stick handles, decorated with long parallel lines tattooed and inscribed around the surfaces and ends, were found at the Bell pithouse village site near Lillooet on the northern Interior Plateau, possibly dating to around 1,500 years ago (Stryd 1978), as well as at Keatley Creek (Hayden 1997). Some Key Sites of the Late Holocene In this section, ethnobotanical and ethnoecological developments described in the previous sections are illustrated by specific examples of archaeological findings at particular locales of the interior and coastal regions, arranged here

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somewhat regionally, starting with the Interior Plateau pithouse village at Keatley Creek, near Lillooet, British Columbia. In each of these sites, plants and plant resources have played an obvious and important role. Keatley Creek – A Complex Culture of the Interior Plateau

The famed Keatley Creek village of the Interior Plateau, situated on a bench far above the Fraser River, upriver from the modern town of Lillooet, was mentioned earlier since it had its beginnings in the Mid Holocene, around 7,000 years ago. By the Late Holocene, however, it was a flourishing, complex pithouse village, one of the largest in western Canada. Its primary occupation spanned a period of about 800 years, from 1,700 to 900 years ago, but its occupation continued at least sporadically until just around the time of European contact, around 1800 CE (Hayden 1997; W.C. Prentiss et al. 2005) (figure 2-8). The residents of Keatley Creek probably spoke a proto-version of one of the Interior Salish languages, and the artifacts found at the site, including the pithouses themselves, show strong cultural continuity with modern Interior Salish peoples (Hayden 1997). Although Keatley Creek is one of the most extensive and best known pithouse villages, with some of the largest house pits in the region (at 18 to 21 metres across), there are many other such villages in the northern Interior Plateau, including at the Bridge River, McKay Creek, Seton Lake, Texas Creek, Lochnore Creek, Pavilion, “The Fountain” (Xaxl’ep), and Lillooet (Hayden 1997; W.C. Prentiss et al. 2005). Clear remains of pithouse living at Keatley Creek span hundreds of generations during a period of at least 3,500 years, from about 4,500 to 1,000 years ago. Over 115 house-sized depressions at the site date to the time period between about 2,400 and 1,000 years ago. Mostly concentrated in a core area of about 4 hectares, some of the house pits and related features extend for almost a kilometre along the river terrace. Particularly significant are the reflections in the archaeological record among different dwellings and over time of the differing patterns of peoples’ activities and variations in resource use and household assets, including social stratification (Hayden 1997; Lepofsky 2002; W.C. Prentiss et al. 2005). Keatley Creek stands out as one of the few archaeological sites in the Interior Plateau where palaeoethnobotany was actively incorporated into the initial research design, with an integrated sampling scheme for collecting plant remains (Lepofsky 2002, 2004). Analysis of the sediments and floors of house pit remains showed a village economy centred in large part – but by no means exclusively – on the drying, preservation, and trading of salmon from the Fraser River in the canyon far below. Bones of deer also predominate, with bones of birds, mountain sheep, elk, beaver, hare, fox, grizzly, and dog also occurring. Hide scrapers, cores, and flaking debris indicate possible activities associated with hunting, namely

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2-8  |  Keatley Creek archaeological site above the middle Fraser River, BC , showing pithouse depressions.

scraping and preparing hides. In one house pit were three dentalium shells, also known as money shells, evidently originating from the west coast of Vancouver Island. They were a widespread article of trade and exchange and generally indicate wealth and prestige. A purple-hinged rock scallop and a group of perforated pecten shells (another type of scallop) were also uncovered. Pecten shell rattles may have been traded from the coast or have belonged to a person who married upriver since these shells are typically part of the regalia for the sxwayxwey dance, for which women are often singers (Dr Earl Claxton Sr, pers. comm., 2006). Pieces of scallop shell, along with a broken mask that appeared to be that of a sxwayxwey dancer, were found in a prehistoric site in Chase, near Shuswap Lake, and a scallop shell rattle was also discovered in the LochnoreNesikep locality, both accompanied by other evidence of trade with the coast (Suttles 1976). The site showed strong suggestions of hierarchical social organizations, with elites and their families owning rare and prestigious resources: nephrite adze blades, sculpted stone mauls, sculpted white marble, steatite bowl fragments, copper jewelry pieces, a stone sculpture with a serpent-like head, tubular soapstone pipe fragments, and domesticated dogs. Hayden (1997) notes that it takes about 110 hours to cut out a single adze blank, making this a valued item indeed. Hayden also suggests from his research that chiefs who presided over the largest households probably controlled some of the best hunting and fishing areas. His research, and that of others (W.C. Prentiss et al. 2005), suggests that individual families and lineages travelled to, and obtained their resources from, different and distinct parts of the overall territory. Keatley Creek is rich in evidence of early plant use and of botanical knowledge and technologies employing plants. The village, on a high river terrace, straddles the edge of sagebrush grasslands and open ponderosa pine, Douglasfir, and juniper (Juniperus scopulorum, J. communis) woodlands – vegetation types that have prevailed in the area for at least around the past 5,000 years, if not much longer. Saskatoon berry bushes (Amelanchier alnifolia), laden with delicious, sweet fruit in the early summer, dot the landscape, and among the sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata, A. frigida) and bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata), many edible species thrive: kinnikinnick, prickly pear cactus (Opuntia fragilis), desert parsley (Lomatium macrocarpum), wild nodding onion, balsamroot, or spring sunflower, and mariposa lily (Calochortus macrocarpus), to name just a few. Along the water channels of Keatley Creek and adjacent gulleys and rivulets are cottonwoods, willows, and shrubby vegetation – chokecherry, wild gooseberry (Ribes inerme), black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii), redosier dogwood (Cornus sericea), and wild rose (Rosa woodsii) – extending from the benchland terraces down to the Fraser River in the canyon bottom. Edible greens – cow-parsnip and balsamroot stalks – also occur in the vicinity. Indianhemp, with its tough stem fibers, ideal for fishing nets, and sandbar willow (Salix

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exigua), known as “rope plant” in Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, whose branches are used for tying and construction, grow in patches in seepage areas below the benchlands and along the river. At higher elevations above the village, in the cooler, moister regions, are montane forests of lodgepole pine, with its edible cambium, trembling aspen, Engelmann spruce, and subalpine fir, with an entire new complement of edible and useful plants: whitebark pine, with large, edible seeds; soapberries; spring beauty, or mountain potato; and tiger lily; as well as some of the same lowland species, like nodding onion. Medicinal plants and dozens of other useful and culturally important species can be found in almost any location around the Keatley Creek site (Turner 1992b). Many of these plant species also occur in archaeological contexts at Keatley Creek. Plant remains found in and around the pithouse features reflect many different activities and items used in a family’s day-to-day life: bedding, mats, baskets, digging stick handles, bark scrapers, roofing, materials for making bows, arrows, string, rope, nets, hoops, clothes, armour, and firewood (Hayden 1997). The main house poles of Keatley Creek pithouses were of ponderosa pine, which is softer and probably easier to cut than Douglas-fir. Boards of cottonwood were set around the houses. The floors were probably covered with fir and pine boughs, judging from the immense numbers of needles of these species found on the rim, roof, and floor areas (Lepofsky 2002). Both ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir were common fuels for the villagers, although it is notable that fuel wood must have been in limited supply since the pithouses showed only intermittent use of hearths for fire (Hayden 1997). Possibly the houses became too smoky if fires were burned continuously, or possibly some of the cooking took place away from the houses.47 Many of the pithouses at Keatley Creek had been burned, but evidently the heavy timbers were removed from the houses beforehand. Roasting pits, or earth ovens, occur outside of the houses at Keatley Creek but are relatively uncommon considering the size of the village. They are loaded with charcoal and fire-cracked rock, indicating preparation of large quantities of food, possibly onions, balsamroot, or other root vegetables, or perhaps deer or other meat. The quantities cooked might reflect large gatherings of people and feasting and/or the processing of large amounts of food for drying and winter storage. There was also plenty of fire-cracked rock separate from earth ovens with distinct areas of deposit near hearth sites, possibly discarded rock from boiling food in birch-bark baskets, which was a common means of cooking known in recent times. Life at Keatley Creek in the depths of winter, even at the heyday of the village – must have been crowded and uncomfortable, with an estimated 2 to 3 square metres per person in some of these houses. People would have slept around the perimeter of the houses, with cooking and other activities in hearths near the centre. It appears that each small group possessed its own cooking rocks,

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baskets, blankets, and eating utensils (Hayden 1997). Detailed findings of plant remains, documented by Lepofsky (2002), include relatively large amounts of saskatoon berry seed, kinnikinnick seed, rose hips, red-osier dogwood seed, prickly pear cactus seed, grass grains, and large numbers of seeds of a chenopod species (the single most common type of seed), possibly of the red-fruited and weedy strawberry blite (Chenopodium capitatum). There were many pieces of birch bark, some with punctured holes in them. Chokecherry seeds were found in storage pits, and one piece of burned coiled basketry was uncovered – a rare find since coiling is largely absent in ancient archaeological assemblages, even though coiled baskets, mainly of split cedar root, are common in more recent Salish collections. Remains of stone pipes, which started to appear in interior archaeological contexts about 1,200 years ago, were found at Keatley Creek, but analyses showed no nicotine or alkaloids present in the charred residues. Evidently, people were smoking some type of plant materials other than Nicotiana (Hayden 1997). During the harvest season, individuals or family groups from the Keatley village would have travelled and camped far afield: down to fishing sites such as Six Mile Rapids along the Fraser River, where they would have fished with long-handled dip nets made of fir saplings and with nets of Indian-hemp fibre and then wind dried the salmon for winter storage, and up to various mountain peaks for harvesting plant and animal resources. The large nodules of chert and trachydacite stone used for flaked knives, scrapers, points, and other tools came from considerable distances, the nearest source for some being the Hat Creek Valley, about 20 kilometres across the Clear Range Mountains (Hayden 1997). The nearby salmon fishery, the large-scale cooking technology, and cache pits for storage of quantities of food (as well as possible storage of food in woven baskets and bags inside of the pithouses) would have enabled a lifestyle not of leisure by any means but of opportunity to focus on enterprise, invention, social relationships, and lifestyle enhancement. Judging from the diverse items brought from distant places, the site evidently represented an annual or at least periodic convergence of peoples from Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, Nlaka’pamux, and Secwepemc communities in the region, possibly in connection with the nearby salmon fishery at “The Fountain” (Xaxl’ep). Hayden (1997) suggests that the complex hierarchical social structure evident in uneven distribution of amenities and prestige items at Keatley reached its peak between around 2,000 and 1,000 years ago and then deflated to give way to a more modestly organized, more egalitarian society. The reasons for this change are not known. Hayden proposes that it was related to a catastrophic environmental event: a major landslide that occurred downriver of Keatley Creek around 1,100 years ago. Evidently, the slide blocked the lucrative Fraser River salmon runs for years or even decades, with major impacts on Keatley Creek

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and other upriver communities of the day. In any case, the large village at Keatley Creek was abruptly abandoned right around this time, although occupation continued at some level up to the historic period (Hayden 1997; Hayden and Ryder 1991).48 Indian Heaven, Huckleberries, and High-Elevation Sites

Food-processing sites of various types give an especially comprehensive understanding of women’s activities in particular contexts and at particular times. A remarkable berry-picking and -processing site is at Indian Heaven, an area of scattered meadows southwest of Mount Adams, Washington, reported in historic records to serve as berrying grounds for seven mid-Columbia Sahaptian groups and for Chinook groups as well. Of the numerous types of berries eaten by peoples of the region, huckleberries are by far the most important and highly valued because of their sweetness and flavour. They were considered the “chief ” of the berries by some Okanagan elders, for example (Turner 1974; Turner, Burton, and van Eijk 2013), and are still the focus of an annual First Fruits ceremony held by the Warm Springs Sahaptin. Black huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum) are the best known, and at Indian Heaven and in other regions of the Cascade Mountains, they are found in huge abundance at around 900 to 1,200 metres. Cascade bilberries (V. deliciosum) are also valued and tend to grow at slightly higher elevations, around 2,000 metres. At least within recent centuries, people maintained their berry patches by burning them over periodically. This was especially necessary for mid-elevation berry meadows that might be encroached on by forest without this management by fire.49 As Kirk and Daugherty (2007, 71) observe, “Burns were a horticultural tool of considerable worth.” The antiquity of berry picking at Indian Heaven is demonstrated by the multitude of berry camps scattered around, some dating back 3,000 years. To date, well over 200 berry-drying features have been identified (Cheryl Mack, pers. comm. to Dana Lepofsky, 2000). There are still thousands of cedar trees (culturally modified trees, or CMT s) with distinctive scars, dating from about 300 years ago to the mid-1900s in Gifford Pinchot National Forest of south-central Washington alone, where women harvested rectangular sheets of bark for makeshift berry baskets. At least over the past 600 years or so, people used a unique technology for drying their huckleberries: trenches dug in the ground, some 10 metres long and 1 or more metres wide, with mounded earth and a line of fist-sized rocks along one side. Experiments with using these trenches show their ingeniousness. The freshly picked huckleberries were spread out on mats, sun dried for two to three days, and then placed on mats laid along the trench mound. The heat from logs smouldering alongside the trench opposite

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the berries finished drying the berries within a day (Mack and McClure 2002). In more recent times, the dried berries were transported down the mountain by horseback (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Dried huckleberries were a trade item at villages along the Columbia River as noted by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in the early 1800s (R.T. Richards and Alexander 2006). A report from the late 1800s notes about 200 people at a single berry camp, with the number expected to double soon (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Huckleberry Mountain (Iwamkani in the Klamath language) in western Oregon is another prime example of a montane huckleberry-picking site of long antiquity. This volcanic ridge is covered with some of the most productive huckleberry patches to be found in the southern Cascade Mountains and was frequented long before European contact by thousands of people – Klamath, Modoc, and many other tribes – who shared the bounty of this resourcerich area and undoubtedly exchanged many ideas, technologies, and goods from ancient to recent times (Deur 2002a; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). Other highelevation berry-processing sites have recently been discovered in the Coast Mountains of northern Washington, in the northern Cascade Mountains of British Columbia just north of the international border, and near Mount Garibaldi north of Vancouver (Lepofsky 2004). High-elevation archaeological sites were little known or studied in the region until the 1980s, with a growing realization of their seasonal importance to many groups of people, including the Dena’ina (Tanaina), Tahltan, and other Dene (Athabaskan) peoples in the north, the Secwepemc and Ktunaxa in the east (Kirk and Daugherty 2007), the Nlaka’pamux and Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc in the northern Interior Plateau (Alexander 1992; Pokotylo and Froese 1983; Turner 1992b; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990; York, Daly, and Arnett 1993), and the Sahaptin and other peoples in the south (Deur 2002a; Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). On the coast, too, people from Haida Gwaii to Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula travelled to the mountains periodically for hunting, bark gathering, root digging, berry picking, medicine gathering, and spiritual purposes (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Turner 2004a). One compelling piece of evidence of human presence in coastal mountains is at Obstruction Point, in the Olympic Mountains, where at an elevation of about 1,800 metres, fragments of a cedar-withe pack basket dating to nearly 3,000 years ago were found melting from the edge of a snowfield (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). The Hoko River Complex – An Ancient Fishing Camp

The Hoko River complex, on the Olympic Peninsula along the Strait of Juan de Fuca about 25 kilometres east of Neah Bay, has revealed an entire spectrum of fishing gear and marine harvesting technologies, especially cordage and fish-

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hooks, with a time depth that demonstrates a progression of technological development. In particular, the site shows that bentwood fishhooks and barbs have been in use on the coast for over 3,000 years, if not much longer (Croes 1997). Hoko River is a complex of three sites: a riverbank wet site rich with botanical remains, dating to about 3,400 years ago (in the same age range as the Pitt Polder wapato site on the Fraser River); an adjacent dry forested campsite dating to about 3,100 years ago; and a river-mouth rockshelter, used seasonally about 1,000 to 100 years ago, with an undisturbed midden dating to about 1,700 years ago (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Offshore about 2 kilometres is a halibut fishing bank. The riverbank site was excavated between 1977 and 1989 by a team of archaeologists and students, directed by Dale Croes. Archaeologists using water and garden hoses carefully extracted baskets, hats, mats, nets, and cordage – and some of the tools used to make them – from the eroding banks. Some of the baskets were similar to more contemporary salmonpacking baskets, used to carry salmon from weirs to drying racks, being coarsely woven to allow water to drain out and having loops around the rim to allow them to be closed up (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Fishbones, dating to between 3,500 and 1,500 years ago, showed a large proportion of flatfish and lesser but significant quantities of rockfish, cod, and salmon, as well as dogfish, and small amounts of bone of diving seabirds, ducks, swans, and some mammals (Ames and Maschner 1999). A fishnet with a mesh of about 5 centimetres and evidently about 3,200 years old was still tied to a sandstone weight. The net was of split spruce root or boughs. Tattered tule mats sewn with twisted two-strand spruce-root cordage and long mat sewing needles of redcedar wood were also revealed from the riverbank deposits. Also found was a mat creaser, possibly the earliest documented. Students attempted to replicate the construction of the mat, which would have measured about 1.2 by 2.4 metres, with carefully twined edges. It took them eight hours to construct the mat, and they determined that 30 centimetres of spruce twine took ten minutes to make. Each mat required about 30 metres of string. Kirk and Daugherty (2007, 98) note, “even an experienced mat-maker must have needed three or four days to gather materials for a single mat, prepare them, make the string and do the sewing. Probably six to eight mats were needed to cover a shelter of the size indicated by postholes from the dry part of the Hoko site.” Other artifacts uncovered at the Hoko River wet site included five hafted knives – apparently for cutting fish – with small stone flakes held between redcedar splints over 12 centimetres long and bound with strips of spruce root or wild cherry bark (Prunus emarginata). (Similar stone flakes dated at up to 9,000 years old had been found in dozens of Northwest Coast sites but not with their handles intact.) Over 351 wooden fishhooks dating to between 3,000 and 1,700 years ago were also found, some made from pairs of straight wooden shanks and many bent from a single spruce bough that was steamed and moulded to

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a U shape and ingeniously self-barbed with a sharpened recurved tip (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Fishing lines for these hooks were probably of bull kelp, which would not have preserved even in the wet site. With the help of veteran Makah fishers, and with careful experimentation, the Hoko River archaeologists were able to fashion replicas of the fishhooks that enabled them to actually catch (and release) fish at the Seattle Aquarium (ibid.). Unidentified fern rhizomes, quite possibly of bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum), were found at the Hoko wet site. Croes (1995, 68) believes that they had been discarded after being ground – possibly with the stone bowls and grinding stones found in the associated dry deposits of the site – a processing method documented from ethnographic literature on bracken rhizomes (Norton 1979b). Just downriver, another site in the Hoko complex, a little over 1,700 years old, contained hearths, stone artifacts, and some storage pits lined with stone slabs. The rockshelter near the river mouth was used seasonally about 1,000 to 100 years ago and revealed about 70,000 bones of fish, as well as of birds and land and sea mammals, and hundreds of thousands of shells and shell fragments (clams, mussels, sea urchins, limpets, snails, barnacles, and crabs). There were nearly 2,000 stone, bone, antler, and shell artifacts: combs, olivella and dentalium shell beads, clamshell bangles (undoubtedly symbols of wealth and status), as well as five bone harpoon heads (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). There were also ground mussel shell knives and projectile points, a bone spindle whorl and a bark beater, bone and antler wedges, bone awls, hand-held stone hammers, abraders, choppers, scrapers, and scoops, ladles, and bowls of clamshells (ibid.). Altogether, the Hoko River site is an enduring testament to the maritime economy, especially to the technologies associated with fishing and the processing and transport of fish by people who were probably the ancestors of the Makah and their relatives of today. Sunken Village – Acorns and Much More

The huckleberry sites at Indian Heaven described earlier are a spectacular example of one type of staple food processing captured in the archaeological record. Another, quite different area for food harvesting and processing, this time for leaching acorns, is at the Sunken Village wet site (35MU 4) on Sauvie Island, near the mouth of the Columbia River at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. A relatively recent site, described by Croes et al. (2007, 1) as “one of the best wet sites on the Columbia River,” the Sunken Village site has proven to be a treasure trove of emerging food-processing technologies and has opened a door to possible avenues of cultural sharing from the lower Columbia River to the Great Basin, and even across the Pacific (Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009a, 2009b; Croes et al. 2007).

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So far, Sunken Village has revealed well over 100 in situ acorn-leaching pits lined with western hemlock boughs and marked with wooden stakes, with associated basketry and other surface artifacts. (Acorns have appeared elsewhere in the archaeological record. For example, a small number of acorns were recovered with hazelnuts from a late prehistoric campsite south of Seattle [N.D. Stenholm, cited in Lepofsky 2004, 394–400], and a site on southern Vancouver Island near Victoria dating back about 1,500 years [2,400 to 1,500 BP ] is thought to be an acorn-processing site for Garry oak acorns [Quercus garryana] [Baptiste and Wollstonecroft 1997; Lepofsky 2004].) The acorn-leaching technology and basketry of Sunken Village show marked similarities to those of much more ancient Jomon period acorn-processing sites throughout Japan – a possible tangible linkage between cultures of the northwestern and northeastern Pacific Coast. The pits are circular, averaging 80 centimetres across, with a lining of hemlock boughs, and each contains whole acorn remains. The affiliated wooden stakes, averaging 5 centimetres in diameter and 1 metre in height, were adze-sharpened and driven into the beach surface on the south edge of many of the acorn pits. Cultural layers at this site extend at least 3.5 metres below the surface. Along with hundreds of bone chisels and awls, shell and stone points, scrapers and knives, approximately 1,800 wood and fibre artifacts (over 75 per cent of the total items from the site) were recovered from around the pits and adjacent beach surface, including hundreds of acorns and hazelnuts; over 3,000 split wood pieces and wood chips; bark, bough, and/or root splints from basket-making activities; bark curls of bitter cherry; shredded cedar-bark skirts; cedar-bark checker weave matting; wooden wedges with cedar-rope collars still intact; wooden bows and arrow shafts; thousands of pieces of charcoal and fire-cracked rock; and well-preserved basketry reflecting exceptionally fine technique. The basketry included cedar-root acorn baskets and – most exciting – a fragile soft bag (recovered in 2007) of diamond plaiting weave over two-strand strings, the material apparently “three-square” rush, known locally as “sweetgrass” (Schoenoplectus americanus [Pers.] Volkart ex Schinz & R. Keller; syn. Scirpus olneyi A. Gray), from cellular-level analysis.50 Notably, this style of soft material weaving dates to around 9,400 years ago, from diverse geographical regions, with examples from cave sites in Nevada, as well as in the Klamath and Puget Sound areas (in Duwamish and Skokomish collections) (Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009a, 2009b; Croes et al. 2007). Even more remarkably, this distinctive style of soft bags is also associated with 7,000-year-old traditions of acorn-leaching pits at waterlogged sites in Japan, through modern Ainu collections – possibly reflecting one of the few artifact styles that trace their ancestry to peoples on the opposite side of the North Pacific Rim (Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009a, 2009b).

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Only a handful of salmon vertebrae have been recovered from Sunken Village so far, indicating that this location was primarily an acorn-processing site. Sunken Village is a National Heritage Landmark site, one of the most famous in the western United States, but it has been severely impacted by erosion from boat propeller wash, and other human activity has noticeably deteriorated the site over the past fifty years. The Sunken Village site is co-managed with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Indians. Cape Addington Rockshelter – The Importance of Archaeobotany

In the outer coastal region of southeastern Alaska, the Cape Addington Rockshelter site of Noyes Island in the Prince of Wales Archipelago is a good example of the opportunities and challenges presented to people accessing the exposed marine environment (Moss et al. 2004). This site, occupied between about 2,000 and 1,500 years ago, represents one of a number of caves and shelters formed in the karst topography of this region and was probably an outpost, perhaps a regular subsistence camp, a satellite campsite, or a place to stop during travels. As reflected in relatively deep shell midden deposits, there is no question that it was an intertidal gathering, hunting, and fishing site. A rich assemblage of shell and bone remains included shellfish, salmonids, flatfish, and a host of other fish species,51 a variety of birds,52 as well as a variety of land and sea mammals (ibid.). Under other circumstances, investigation of this site would have stopped with these zoological findings. However, archaeologist Madonna Moss used the site as an opportunity to investigate plant use as well and recruited palaeoethnobotanists Dana Lepofsky and Natasha Lyons into the research at the outset. When such evidence is actively and directly sought by those trained in archaeobotanical methods, it is revealed in abundance (see Lepofsky, Moss, and Lyons 2001). A careful excavation of the site, with flotation and systematic screening of samples, revealed a total of fourteen plant taxa from several habitat sites: charred and uncharred seeds, needles, buds, wood, and other plant parts, probably root tissues. Specifically, researchers found charcoal from yellowcedar (as well as uncharred wood and uncharred branch or root), a true fir (Abies sp.), Sitka spruce (charred needle, uncharred wood, and uncharred branch or root), lodgepole pine, Douglas-fir (probably from driftwood), western redcedar (charred and uncharred wood), western hemlock (charred needle, uncharred wood, and uncharred branch or root), alder (Alnus sp.), Pacific crabapple and willow (Salix sp.), seeds of kinnikinnick, red elderberry, and salmonberry, and a nearly complete plant of thrift (Armeria maritima). Mountain sorrel (Oxyria digyna) and shooting star (Dodecatheon sp.) were growing on cultural deposits at the rockshelter. Almost all of these species, preserved through charring or

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desiccation, are known from the ethnographic record to have been used for food, fuel, or technological purposes. The uncharred roots and branches were possibly for basketry since several deer-ulna awls were also found at the site (Moss et al. 2004). A point carved from the heartwood of western redcedar, slightly curved, with a bevelled tip, and diamond-shaped in cross-section, was one of the interesting findings. This artifact may have been a spear or a digging stick, or possibly a fish-spreading stick (ibid). In any case, these plant remains probably reflect social complexity and specialization of roles, specifically the role of women in an otherwise seemingly male-occupied world (Lepofsky, Moss, and Lyons 2001). Moss et al. (2004) provide a review of outer coast archaeological sites from Alaska to Oregon and point out that the range of resources used at the Cape Addington Rockshelter compares favourably with that of many outer coastal sites all along the Northwest Coast. For example, the Haida used many of the same resources: harbour and fur seals, sea lions, porpoises, and sea otters; black cod and halibut; puffins and other birds; and whales hunted or salvaged from the beach (Blackman 1990; Swanton 1905; Acheson and Wigen 2002; Moss et al. 2004). Approximately contemporary with the Cape Addington Rockshelter occupation, spanning about 1,600 years, were sites in Kunghit Haida territory around the southernmost tip of Haida Gwaii. The ancestral Haida here relied on a range of coastal resources similar to that of their Cape Addington counterparts but evidently lived year round in clans or lineage groups in dozens of more or less permanent settlements around the coastline, many situated on the outer coast. The settlements were much smaller than the larger multilineage villages of the more recently known Haida (Acheson 1995). Their major marine resources included rockfish, salmon, sea otter, harbour seal, alcid, and California mussel, followed by herring, northern sea lion, and cetaceans. Altogether, Acheson (1998) documented eighteen rockshelters (twelve of which were along the outer coast) and eighteen caves (fifteen on the outer coast), which revealed abundant wooden artifacts on surfaces and upper deposits. Some of these sites were evidently occupied year round, whereas others were mainly seasonal. Around 500 years ago, some Haida arrived at Prince of Wales Island, possibly in response to expanding populations and ensuing resource shortages (Moss et al. 2004). The Haida, already well adapted to open, offshore waters, and to fishing for halibut and other bottom fish, located their villages close to banks for halibut and cod fishing, whereas the Tlingit may have tended to select more protected estuaries or bays in proximity to salmon streams, particularly those with large runs of sockeye salmon, highly valued and tightly controlled by clan groups. Bielawski (2007) and others suggest that the Tlingit used fishing weirs across streams or in tidal areas, whereas the Haida were more adept at trawling and dragnet fishing for dog and pink salmon while these fish were still in

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the ocean. However, Moss (2008b) points out that this suggested difference in resource strategies between Haida and Tlingit may be too simplistic given the many different factors at play in the archaeological record. Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį – A Link to the Past in Northern British Columbia

Meanwhile, about 300 years ago, on a day probably around the middle of August, a young man with shoulder-length hair set off on a journey through the mountains in the far northwest of what is now British Columbia, near the southern St Elias Mountains, his purpose and intended destination unknown to us. Perhaps he was going to visit family members or was on a trading mission. Whatever his purpose, the life of this ancient traveller was cut short, and he died on a glacier in the headwaters of the Tatshenshini River, some 80 kilometres inland from the estuary of the Chilkat River, southeastern Alaska. This was right around the time when Russian explorers were first approaching this area. In August 1999 three friends hunting Dall’s sheep in the region decided to alter their route across a mountainside around 1,600 metres above sea level and, in doing so, fortuitously encountered the hide clothing and some artifacts of this young man from long ago, exposed from a melting glacial ridge. His discoverers immediately notified heritage officials from the Yukon government in Whitehorse, who notified the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, in whose traditional territory the remains were situated. With their participation, the body was carefully and respectfully recovered, to be kept temporarily at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria during the course of the autopsy. In recognition of his status as a person and of the territory in which he died, the discovery was named by elders Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį (Long Ago Person Found) in the Southern Tutchone language. Decisions about removal and placement of his body, the research to be undertaken, and his ultimate cremation were based on protocols consensually developed between the First Nations, park officials, and provincial heritage officials. In the end, the research outcomes and understandings gained were widely perceived as very positive (see Beattie et al. 2000; Dickson et al. 2004; Mudie et al. 2005). The circumstances of this discovery and subsequent intensive research on the body, clothing, nutritional status, potential travel routes, and possible origins have been studied and described in a number of venues,53 and research is still ongoing. The man’s digestive tract, his clothing and tools, and the soil, water, and ice around where he was found were thoroughly scrutinized for pollen, plant and animal fragments, and mineral and soil grains that might provide clues to his identity, lifestyle, cultural affinities, and travel route. The approaches used in the investigation of this young man’s remains are worth emphasizing because they represent some of the most advanced thinking in archaeological and archaeobotanical research: collaboration and respect

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2-9  |  Twined spruce-root hat found with the frozen body of a young man, in the Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį (Long Ago Person Found) archaeological site, from a glacier at the headwaters of the Tatshenshini River, BC , about 300 years old.

between scientists, government officials, and First Nations; a multidisciplinary research team; application of the most up-to-date research techniques; and carefully conceived integrated studies of dietary information, clothing, tools, and all aspects of the young man’s characteristics and possessions, including a particular focus on pollen and other plant remains. In the past, much of this detail could well have been overlooked. In short, the Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį discovery can serve as a model of the best in research practices. Apparently relatively well provisioned, although lightly dressed with a fur cape or robe, made from ninety-five skins of Arctic ground squirrel,54 and a coastal-style twined hat of Sitka spruce roots (figure 2-9), the man must have been injured or caught unprepared in a sudden storm up on the glacier. Probably in good health to the day of his death, he succumbed to the cold and his body remained covered by snow or ice until the last year of the twentieth century. The tragedy of the young man’s death is overshadowed in some ways by the immense gift of his remains and the story they have told us. The Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį discovery is one of the few intact ancient bodies to be found in the world, and perhaps the first in North America. The first was the discovery of Ötzi, the “ice man” of the Tyrolean Alps, a mountain traveller of a much earlier time, dating to 5,300 years ago (Dickson, Oeggl, and Handley 2003; Dickson et al. 2004). Both of these individuals, studied by archaeologists, palaeoecologists,

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and forensic scientists, have provided us with unprecedented opportunities to understand human prehistory, notably ancient diets, tools, and lifeways (Dickson and Mudie 2008). What are some of the relevant findings about the man’s life? He remains a mystery in many ways. However, isotope studies of his bone and hair indicate that 90 per cent of his protein intake in the last five to ten years of his life was from marine sources but that some – yet not all – of the protein in the last few months of his life was derived from land mammals. His life seems to have reflected a linkage between coastal and interior peoples, and thus he seems to be an example of how resources, technologies, and knowledge can be transmitted across geographic barriers. If only he could tell us the stories of his life! Fortunately, James Dickson, Petra Mudie, and their colleagues, from their detailed study of the plant, animal, and mineral remains associated with his body, particularly his robe and digestive tract, have been able to determine with a fair degree of certainty where he had been and what he was eating over the last few days of his life (Dickson and Mudie 2008; Mudie et al. 2005). There is significant evidence that he had been on the coast just prior to his trip and was possibly journeying from the coast to an interior destination, or between coastal fjords, when he died. With him were two pieces of four-yearold sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka),55 with many scales encrusted on his fur robe. The salmon was likely captured in a fishery located at or near the Alaskan coast (Troffe et al. forthcoming). Fragments of endophragmal skeleton and outer shell of a large decapod crustacean, probably crab, were also found in his stomach and lower intestine. Another indicator of the coastal origins of his trip was the presence of copious quantities of pollen (about 25 per cent of the total pollen found) of the maritime flowering plant glasswort, or beach asparagus (Salicornia perennis) (along with some Salicornia-like tracheids and possibly anther tissues), in his stomach and upper intestine, as well as on his cape. A ripe fruit of mountain sweet-cicely (Osmorhiza berteroi), a species confined to the Pacific Coast region, and a needle of mountain hemlock, also a coastal species, both found on his robe, are further evidence of recent coastal linkages. A leaf of water moss (Fontinalis sp., probably F. antipyretica), common in streams and lakes at lower elevations on the coast but not known from the Yukon or at elevations above the treeline in northern British Columbia, was found in his small bowel, as was a leaf fragment of yellow pond-lily (Nuphar sp., probably N. lutea ssp. polysepala), another lowland pond species. Red bogmoss (Sphagnum sect. Acutifolia), a species occurring in bogs and wet woods and abundant in coastal regions, was found in a rectum sample. Fragments of epidermal tissue, possibly of blueberries (Vaccinium sp.), were also found in the stomach and small intestine, along with various other leaf and wood tissues. A fragment of hardwood charcoal in his small intestine may indicate either cooking or inhalation of ash fallout from a fire that was eventually coughed up and swallowed. Fresh

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softwood fibres lower in the small colon possibly indicate that he had eaten the inner bark of spruce or larch. Dickson and Mudie (2008) conclude that the man’s last meal included fatty meat (possibly seal), marine crustacean (possibly crab), glasswort, and some type of fruit (possibly blueberry). Analysis of mineral grains in various parts of his digestive tract indicate that he probably drank glacier meltwater around the time of his last meal, water from a karst sinkhole or small lake in limestone bedrock a few hours earlier, and water from a different source six or seven hours previously.56 He had also eaten some kind of fatty meat at this time. Ten to twenty-two hours earlier, he had eaten some kind of flesh, possibly salmon, as well as some type of plant tissue, possibly edible inner bark of spruce, and had apparently drunk water from a pond or stream, where he may have swallowed the leaf of the water moss (Fontinalis). A day before his death, he had apparently eaten salmon and some kind of plant leaves or stems and had somehow consumed a pollen grain resembling that of cloudberry, or bakeapple (Rubus chamaemorus), which could have been growing around a boggy pond. He also had a very small, broken spine of a sea urchin in his lower bowel. He had drunk from a creek or river carrying calcite-coated mineral grains, which had flowed through a region of limestone. From two to three days before his death, the material in his rectum contained muscle fibres apparently from salmon, red bogmoss, and pollen of glasswort, among other findings, generally pointing to his situation near a marine environment at that time. The presence of the glasswort pollen could indicate that the probable time of the man’s journey was late July or August. His meals seem to reflect the notations by Krause (1956, 135) from the ethnographic period that in summer long-distance Tlingit travellers ate “a light diet of salmon and berries during the day, with a large meal only in the evening,” that young men trained for mountain climbing carried as food only a seal’s stomach full of grease, and that “the principal dish of the day is always fish, boiled, roasted, dried but never raw. Next in importance is the meat of land and sea mammals, fowl, crabs, squid, shellfish, sea urchins” (ibid., 170). The route the man took, Dickson and Mudie (2008) suggest, may have represented a more open course over the Samuel Glacier between the Chilkat and Tatshenshini drainage basins, which may have been closed abruptly by an unseasonable storm and snowfall. The time when this young man perished was in the middle of a major cold period, the Little Ice Age. Notably, around this time, tree ring data show extreme warm-cold weather variations (ibid.). He must have remained covered by snow or ice from the time of his death.57 The finding of his body melting from the glacier in 1999 was evidently an outcome of climate change, so glacial melting and the lowering of lake and river levels due to changing climate may reveal other archaeological findings in the future (Moss 2011).

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Ozette – An Archaeobotanical Treasure Trove

Another Late Holocene site is at Ozette, the westernmost point of the northern Washington coast, on the Olympic Peninsula. The site, now famous, was a major village for sea mammal hunting and halibut fishing at the base of a cliff bank facing the Pacific Ocean.58 It included deep midden deposits with dates spanning at least the past 1,600 years, with some strata suggested to be at least 2,000 years old (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Daugherty and Friedman 1976; Whelchel 2005). The most astonishing and informative deposits from an ethnobotanical perspective, however, were from a series of five cedar-wood houses buried at the base of a cliff along the shoreline by mudslides probably triggered by earthquakes, perhaps several, the latest being around 1700 CE . The village is sometimes described as an “American Pompeii.” The wet clay from the bank created an anaerobic environment that allowed extraordinary preservation of many types of wooden and fibre artifacts, with even the alder and salal leaves it covered remaining green centuries later. The village was seemingly buried in an instant, such that the context of the houses and artifacts was preserved along with the materials themselves (Whelchel 2005). Altogether, some 40,000 structural remains – house beams and planks – and approximately 1 million animal and bird bones and shell pieces were recovered from Ozette. Around 55,000 whole artifacts and pieces in about 200 categories were excavated from the site, an assemblage representing the largest precontact Northwest Coast Indigenous collection on the continent (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Significantly, wooden and fibre tools comprised well over 90 per cent of the artifacts recovered, some still in the process of being made. Between 300 and 600 decorated items were present in the houses, many correlated with the position of the hearths and postholes: tool handles, woven bags and baskets, spindle whorls, awls, knives, combs, and clubs. Realistic zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms were commonly sculpted into these items, and many were decorated with zigzag lines, parallel lines, patterns of triangles, and crescents. There was, for example, a blanket of cattail fluff woven in a plaid design. Baskets were decorated with geometric designs patterned in the weave and created from different colours of materials or with false embroidery (Daugherty and Friedman 1976). Woodworking obviously flourished in this village, as would have been typical of villages up and down the coast (see Lepofsky 2004). One of the main lessons of Ozette is that the people were not just “cedar people” – a common perception for peoples of the Northwest Coast – but also “people of the forest,” given the great diversity of woods they used (Friedman 2005). There were bowls and trays carved from red alder (Alnus rubra) and bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum), as well as from western redcedar. One bowl was of Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) and five of Oregon ash (Fraxinus latifolia), the latter of which does not grow at Ozette and

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must have been imported as raw wood or finished product or arrived as driftwood. There were, as itemized in Whelchel (2005), over 400 wooden wedges (the vast majority made from dense compression wood from the underside of Sitka spruce branches, with some of yew wood and a few of other species, including Pacific crabapple); over 500 wooden projectile points, mostly of Sitka spruce, western hemlock, true fir (probably Abies amabilis), and western redcedar; hundreds of redcedar-wood boxes and box fragments; over 280 wooden halibut hooks (the majority of western hemlock but many of true fir), some with bone barbs joined and wrapped with strips of bitter cherry bark; and over 140 arrow shafts (as well as many more pieces), the great majority of western redcedar.59 Some rather unusual woods were found as part of this assemblage: false azalea (Menziesia ferruginea) for lance heads, wedges, three projectile points, and various other purposes; salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) for gaming disks, children’s bows, and projectile points; flowering dogwood (Cornus nuttallii) for combs, bows, one projectile point, and one weaver’s sword; red elderberry for combs and sealskin float plugs; black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata) for chisel handles and other small objects; bird cherry (Oemleria cerasiformis) for one bow; cascara for one comb; salal for one comb; arbutus (Arbutus menziesii) for one D-adze handle; and willow (Salix sp.) for canoe paddles, crutch handles, and one wedge. Douglas-fir would have been limited in availability and was not widely represented at Ozette, but it was used for herring rakes, salmon stakes, arrow shafts, loom parts, and a few other items (Whelchel 2005). Perfectly preserved ropes twisted from cedar boughs, cedar planks (some as wide as 45 centimetres), fragments of mats, and over 1,000 baskets, half of them intact, were discovered at Ozette, along with 80 tumplines, 41 cedar-bark harpoon sheaths, and 13 looms, all amazingly preserved by the dense clay, which in places was around 3 metres thick. One basket was discovered containing carved and decorated wooden combs, along with a spindle whorl, ground-stone blades, and bone awls, possibly having belonged to a weaver or other craftsperson. A gillnet recovered at the site helped to establish the antiquity of Makah use of fishing nets, giving contemporary Makah legal rights to use this technology. Also found were 579 whetstones and 30 iron blades, probably salvaged from Japanese drift ships. Stonework was also reflected in the petroglyphs pecked into beach boulders near the village (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). The houses themselves told a story of the lives of the Ozette people. As large as 20 metres long and 10 metres wide, they were constructed of split cedar planks lashed to a framework of cedar posts. Each house contained living areas for probably six to ten individual families, as well as visiting relatives and slaves. Raised platforms around the living spaces served for sleeping and storage. On one platform was a sleeping mat with a box resting on it, and underneath the platform, lying one on top of another, were a storage basket, loom, canoe paddle, two seal clubs, and a bow. There were areas for food preparation and

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tool making as well (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Remains of food found at Ozette included two hazelnut fragments (Corylus cornuta) and almost 90,000 red elderberry seeds mixed together in various proportions with over 100,000 salmonberry seeds, suggesting that these two types of berries were mixed, possibly to increase the palatability of the elderberries. There were also nearly 250,000 seeds of salal and/or its close look-alikes of the genus Vaccinium, probably evergreen huckleberry (V. ovatum). There were also a few wild rose (Rosa nutkana) seeds and some smaller Rubus (possibly thimbleberry) seeds (Gill 1983, 2005a, 2005b; Whelchel 2005). The lower house was evidently that of an elite whale hunter and his family. It had carved wall planks, benches inlaid with shell, a large central hearth, and a woven hat with a knob at the crown, similar to the hat Chief Maquinna wore when Captain Cook and his crew arrived at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island (Croes 2003). There were four more knobbed hats just outside of the house. A clump of dentalium shells, which had probably been strung up on the wall, lay in the northeastern corner of this house. This house also contained the nowfamous “whale saddle,” an effigy of a whale’s dorsal fin studded with about 700 sea otter teeth, some forming the outline of the mythical thunderbird. Adjacent to it were seven large, flat, square whaling gear baskets, two of them still containing mussel shell harpoon blades with antler barbs, each encased in a folded cedar pouch. There were also remnants of lanyards and killing-lance heads, including one of metal (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Gill 2005a, 2005b; Whelchel 2005). The Ozette site is a reflection of the strengthening partnerships and collaborations between people of local Indigenous communities and archaeologists that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.60 Makah community members – elders, students, and people of all ages, through the Makah Cultural and Research Center – participated in the excavation with archaeologists from Washington State University for over ten years, from 1970, following a storm that started uncovering major parts of the original village. Through painstaking research, they reconstructed the essence of the village and constructed a new museum at Neah Bay to house the artifacts and interpret the site to visitors through reconstructions of the actual houses and their contents (Whelchel 2005). Discussion On both the Northwest Coast and in the interior throughout the study region, cultures of recent times were foreshadowed by the archaeological records at least from the Late Holocene and, in some cases, much earlier. In Alaska, for example, the regional adaptations that characterized the coastal peoples of the cold ocean regions and the hardy hunters of the interior of Alaska can be said to foretell specific cultures of European contact time. As early as 4,000 years

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ago, and probably much earlier, there was a definable Dene (Athabaskan) cultural pattern in central Alaska, reflected in a number of interior archaeological sites from that time. These peoples used the rivers and lakes as routes through the dense boreal forest, constructing ingenious birchbark canoes with wooden frames of birch or white spruce (Picea glauca), spruce-root lashing and stitching, and spruce pitch for waterproofing (Bielawski 2007). These canoes would have paralleled the development of giant western redcedar dugout canoes on the coast and of cottonwood dugouts in the interior lakes and rivers. In all cases, such vessels opened up new opportunities for accessing resources and for both long- and short-distance travel. They enabled and facilitated regular trade and the development of relationships that would have resulted in permanent connections through marriage and formalized ties, contributing to the well-being and resilience of all participants. Likewise, the wooden stakes, wedges, withes, and other artifacts from Kilgii Gwaii on Haida Gwaii show that, some 10,000 years ago, people there were working with wood and participating fully in a maritime economy (Fedje, Christensen, et al. 2005; A. Mackie et al. 2003). Similar developments were taking place with societies throughout the Americas and many other parts of the world during this time. Less frequently, at the edges of the Cascadia region, there were ties and linkages with some of the innovations of the Great Basin and California regions to the south and of the Great Plains and boreal forest regions to the east and north. Perhaps, if we are to look at the beautifully crafted soft diamond-plaited “three-square” rush bag recovered from the Sunken Village site on Sauvie Island at the mouth of the Columbia River in 2007, there were links far beyond, as far away as the Jomon culture of ancient Japan (Croes et al. 2007). Studies of earth oven use, root vegetable harvesting,61 birch-bark containers, and herbal medicine practices may reveal more such connections. We know that, even recently, within the past 1,500 to 200 years (the latter date was around the time of the arrival of the first Europeans in the region), the Indigenous peoples – mostly the direct ancestors of the peoples living within their territories today – were surviving through a turbulent time, with climate fluctuations, including the Little Ice Age, a cooler period that existed throughout the northern hemisphere from sometime before 1650 CE . Yet over this period, they shifted their technologies away from chipped stone and more generalized tools and toward an array of bone and antler tools, ground-stone tools, large celts, mauls, scrapers, elaborated digging sticks, and spindle whorls. Wooden tools and other plant-based artifacts such as cordage and basketry, always important, gained increasing prominence, as reflected in their prevalence in wet sites such as Ozette and Sunken Village, as well as in caves such as at Hesquiat Harbour (Bernick 1998c) and Cape Addington Rockshelter (Moss et al. 2004). There were many shifts in settlement and changes in subsistence, possibly related to rising populations, which apparently peaked around 1,000

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years ago and then declined. There was also an escalation in warfare, with an increase in defensive sites (Moss and Erlandson 1992; Ames and Maschner 1999), possibly a result of resource scarcity and competition for territory or need to acquire slaves (Donald 1997), but the role of plant resources in these situations is not known. Wetlands have always played an important role in peoples’ lifeways in the region, ever since neoglacial times, and perhaps dependency has not been recognized as much as it should be. An expansion of wetlands in the Late Holocene, at both low and high elevations, for example, would have resulted in an increase in an entire suite of resources available to people – from waterfowl to cattails. Many sites, both villages and campsites, were established at or near wetlands. This affiliation with wetlands extended beyond northwestern North America. Some of the adaptations for harvest and use of wetland resources may have been learned, directly or indirectly, from the peoples of the Great Basin, for example, where marshlands have been a major feature in survival strategies for well over 4,000 years, possibly back to the Early Pleistocene (Connolly and Barker 2004; Fowler 1992; Nicholas 1998). The wapato site at Pitt Polder in the lower Fraser Valley, described at the beginning of this chapter, dates to around 3,500 years ago, with all the signs that wapato was by then a well established and valued resource. Other types of sites, too, both on the coast and in the interior, provide widespread evidence of plant use and increasing complexity of botanical knowledge and skills in maintaining and using plants and other resources. Coastal habitats such as tidal marshes and estuarine tidal flats produced a range of nutritious root vegetables tended in garden-like plots, including Pacific silverweed (Argentina egedii), springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii), and northern riceroot (Deur 2000; Turner and Peacock 2005). Clam beds, carefully built up to extend their area and productivity, were created and sustained on many parts of the coast (Fowler and Lepofsky 2011; J. Williams 2006; Recalma-Clutesi 2005). Camas prairies, maintained by periodic landscape burning, clearing, and selective harvesting, were a mainstay of many peoples of the southern coast and interior regions as far eastward as Montana (Beckwith 2004). Berry patches at the edges of forests and coastlines, and the rainforests themselves – the source of the giant cedars and other trees used in construction and implements – were also critically important habitats (Turner 1995, 1997a; Turner and Peacock 2005; Thornton 1999). Mountains also provided a range of resources, from the upper-elevation trees (yellow-cedar for its bark, subalpine fir for its medicinal qualities, and whitebark pine for its edible seeds) to edible berries (black mountain huckleberry and Cascade bilberry), root vegetables (yellow glacier lily, spring beauty, and tiger lily), and medicinal plants (false hellebore and mountain valerian) (Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). In fact, there were almost no places, anywhere, that were not ventured into at some time by some individual or group on some

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particular pursuit, whether for food, medicine, spiritual questing, or all of these. Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį is the epitome of people’s presence in any and all parts of the vast landscape of northwestern North America. The archaeological record is scanty in indicating what must have been important diverse roles of women and children in Indigenous societies of long ago. As Lepofsky (2004) demonstrates, with some exceptions, most of the archaeological record to date is slanted toward hunting and fishing, which have been generally attributed as male activities, although, as Moss (2011) points out, women were often active in these endeavours as well. Thanks in large part to the contributions of wet site archaeology, evidence of other occupations in which women would have been key players – from looms, spindle whorls, and net shuttles to bark shredders and bark beaters, basketry and mat-making tools, digging stick handles, bark peelers, cambium scrapers, and cooking and food-processing implements – are evident by the Late Holocene (Dewhirst 1978; MacDonald 1983; McMillan 1999; Croes 1995; Lepofsky 2004). Ames and Maschner (1999) suggest that there may have been a change in social organization in the Late Holocene, with increased production of shellfish and plant resources and increased participation in the subsistence economy by elders, women, and children. However, another explanation is that there is simply better preservation in the archaeological record and that these practices were equally important earlier (Moss 2011). A notation by George Dawson from his time in Victoria on the southern end of Vancouver Island in 1876 reminds us that even shell middens can give hints about diversification of resources and possible interactions and division of roles: “little shell heaps found scattered through the woods in all directions about Victoria. Often far from the shore. Formed no doubt by parties of Indians hunting, hiding from enemies, or digging Kamass root [Camassia bulbs]” (in Cole and Lockner 1989, vol. 1, 171). In subsistence, as in technology, changes that took place over the most recent millennia seem to have involved the adoption of novel roles and the expansion of harvesting ranges for the same resources rather than the exploitation of entirely new ones (Ames and Maschner 1999). For example, salmon was harvested in most areas from the beginning of occupation, but enhanced technologies in procurement (canoes, weirs, and basket traps) and in storage (woven baskets, cedar boxes, and cedar houses) allowed an intensified use of salmon, which is mirrored in the quantities of salmon remains occurring at many sites. It is hard to say whether the drivers of intensification were linked to larger populations and increased sedentism or whether intensification of salmon and, on the coast, shellfish allowed the populations to increase and to become more sedentary. Assuming plant foods and other plant resources parallel patterns suggested by some for salmon and other animal resource use, a similar pattern of intensification of already existing species (berries, root vegetables, basket and weaving

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materials, and wood products) occurred through the implementation of various management strategies. These include the use of fire and landscape burning and the development of improved harvesting and storage techniques (Ames 2005; Peacock 1998; Weiser and Lepofsky 2009). Along with the elaboration of people’s technologies and lifestyles that took place over the Holocene,62 especially in the Late Holocene, it is not surprising that there is also evidence of elaboration of social organization within households and communities, enhanced status of individuals and hereditary leadership,63 designated ownership of resources and territories, and increasing ceremonial and ritual practices and shamanism – trends that continued right into the period of European contact (Ames and Mashner 1999; Fedje and Mackie 2005). Intergroup interactions were not always constructive or positive; they certainly included warfare and slavery, which are still recalled in today’s oral traditions and through the ethnographic literature. Nevertheless, social, ritual, and economic contributions – like the ceremonies and practices surrounding the potlatch, which must have ancient roots – are critically important aspects of these interactions, and their value as venues of exchange of practices, ideas, and goods cannot be overstated (R.L. Carlson 1996; Trosper 2002, 2003, 2009). Ongoing learning and experimentation with resource management strategies were also occurring throughout the period of human occupation in northwestern North America, right up until the present. Narratives about resource scarcity, and rituals around resource use, like the First Salmon and other First Foods ceremonies, are related to resource management and must have been grounded in the ancient past. Resource management may also be reflected somewhat in changes in the archaeological record. The Glenrose Cannery site, for example, was evidently first used mainly as a springtime camp for hunting elk, deer, and seal and for generalized fishing, and only later, as populations increased, did it show the development of the “stored salmon economy” that people associate with the Northwest Coast today (see Bernick 1998b, 1998c).64 Some archaeological evidence points to possible resource depletion, with a resulting imperative to abandon some habitations and develop new resource bases, as well as to learn lessons about resource management and stewardship (see Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Lacourse, Mathewes, and Hebda 2007; and McKechnie 2007). Lacourse, Mathewes, and Hebda (2007) cite evidence of a decline in western redcedar populations on Skangwaii, about 1,000 years ago, at the time of a Haida settlement there, but there is no way of knowing whether this might have represented accidental resource depletion, intentional clearing to encourage berry growth, climatic change, or some combination of these factors. McKechnie’s (2007) study from a prehistoric coastal village on the west coast of Vancouver Island shows evidence of long-term and sustainable use of rockfish (Sebastes spp.) by some resource users, with apparent differences in sustainability for others. S.K. Campbell and Butler (2010) reviewed the record

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of fish bone deposition in archaeological sites from the Pacific Northwest and found a remarkable stability in salmon use, concluding that the observed persistence in the salmon fishery was due to the effectiveness and resilience of the humans managing the system. Differences in subsistence options based on differential availability of particular species, habitats, and resource-harvesting regions would have resulted in resource specialization extending well back in time, and in some cases these differences would have shaped patterns of resource trade and exchange that have continued to the present. All of these developments and trends led to the diverse languages, cultural groupings, territories, food systems, technologies, and belief systems that existed in the Cascadia region when the first Europeans arrived and that have continued to develop and adapt to the dramatic changes people have witnessed in the so-called historic period. In the following chapters, I examine these topics further. Conclusions The story of how humans first discovered and then learned to live – and thrive – in the vast and rugged expanse of land and waters comprising northwestern North America is only known in fragments. Much is left to the imagination, assisted by the powerful imagery of what we see today and in the recent past – the monumental architecture, ingenious wooden boxes and heroic masks, intricate baskets, and other creations of the First Peoples of the study area – and by the grand scale of the breathtaking mountains, the great rivers, and the vast Pacific itself. The immensity of these reflections of Indigenous history and landscape, however, must not be the only source of inquiry. We also need to take note of the minute details of the story, akin to the pauses and inflections of a spoken narrative. Adze marks and cut-away bare patches on ancient trees, fragments of charcoal and fire-cracked rock in a hearth site, and depressions in the ground from past houses, earth ovens, and cache pits must be combined with palaeoecological signs equally obscure to the uninformed or unobservant: microscopic spores and pollen grains, fragments of wood, soils layered with blankets of volcanic ash, or ocean sediments mixed with the remains of an ancient forest. Add to these details the sites where they occur, their locations relative to other features, and the commonalities and patterns across time and space, and the story starts to emerge a little more clearly. It is a history spanning at least 13,000 years, possibly much longer, perhaps with three or more major original groups of people and multiple pathways of entry: by land over the harsh interior landscape of Beringia and by sea along the coast (Fedje and Mackie 2005; Kari and Potter 2010a, 2010b; R.B. Walker and Driskell 2007). Having arrived in northwestern North Ameria, people must have moved on many occasions and over centuries and millennia between the coast and the interior and back again,

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travelling along the river valleys and over the ridgetops, following game or searching for new places to live. As Ames and Maschner (1999, 256) explain in their Northwest Coast cultural history, “this grand history is the result of people all along the coast, and elsewhere ... making ordinary, daily decisions, wanting and hoping for certain kinds of things to happen and acting on those intentions.” It is one thing to describe from available evidence what was occurring in one place at one particular time, but linking a specific finding or occurrence to all of the others, in an uncertain framework, is much more difficult. Even more problematic is trying to understand the reasons for patterns found – for similarities and differences in use of plants, for example. Causes and effects may be multiple, cumulative, or distantly removed from one another, and to be honest, we may never know what the links are between them in many cases. What was the cause of the observed expansion of permanent dwellings and villages and increased populations in the Late Holocene, for example? Is settling down “catching”? It may be that if one group of people settles permanently in a place and establishes their territory and the sites of their seasonal rounds in that vicinity, others may be compelled to do the same in order to prevent encroaching on others’ staked territories, even when these might be the lands they once roamed over. Was there an intensification of salmon and intertidal resources around this time, and if so, was it driven by more intensive settlement, or was the settlement and population increase a result of innovative strategies for harvesting and processing these resources? These are questions that parallel the debates on the origins of agriculture and domestication of species. The questions may actually be closer to this latter debate than we realize, since the evidence is growing for a domestication of habitats and landscapes analogous to domestication of species, and may be equally complex in terms of human influences on various ecosystems – a reconsideration of the assumed roles of “hunter-gatherers” (M.K. Anderson 2005; Deur and Turner 2005; Moss 2011; Thornton 2011). Habitat domestication would not have happened instantly, any more than the domestication of potatoes or maize elsewhere occurred overnight or even within a few centuries. These are steady, cumulative, and adaptive processes that are built on observation and experience by individuals within a family, within a community, and across communities over time and space and that simultaneously focus on a single species, a single place, groups of species, the actions and habits of animals, and the qualities, lifecycles, and productivity of plants, thus building complex systems of knowledge, practice, and belief communicated by culture and handed down over generations – in short, Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

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3 Reflections on Plant Names in Understanding the History of People-Plant Relationships

“How Yaał [Raven] Brought Highbush Cranberries to Haida Gwaii” Yaał (Massett dialect)1 [Raven] was visiting the Beaver People. Two days consecutively, he was served salmon, highbush cranberries [łaayi] and the inside parts of the mountain goat. On the second morning, yaał was taken behind a screen where there was a fishtrap in a creek filled with salmon, and several points on a lake which were red with cranberries. After the beavers had gone for the day, yaał ate the usual meal. Then he stole the salmon-filled lake and the house, rolling it up and hiding it under his arm, and climbed a tree with it. When the beavers returned, they tried to catch him by chewing down the tree, but yaał simply flew to another. Finally they gave up, and yaał flew inland and unrolled the lake there and kept the fishtrap and house to teach the people of Haida Gwaii and the Mainland how to live. Since then, there have been many highbush cranberries in Haida Gwaii. (Told by Charlie Edenshaw to Franz Boas, cited in Swanton 1905, 145–6, adapted by Turner 2004a, 111)

Introduction This story gives a clue to an enigma concerning the origin of the Haida name łaayi, or hlaayaa (Skidegate dialect), for highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule) (figure 3-1). When I first learned the Haida name in the early 1970s, I assumed that it was unique to this language; Haida is considered a linguistic isolate, and many of its plant names are indeed unique, unrelated in any obvious way to names of other languages (Turner 1974). It was therefore a surprise to me when I started working with Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax-speaking) elders of the Gitga’at Nation on plants and plant names of the Ts’msyen (Coast Tsimshian) and found that their name for highbush cranberry is virtually the same: łaaya.2 Recent

3-1  |  Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule), growing in Gitga’at Ts’msyen territory.

historical ties between the Haida and Gitga’at, and perhaps much older ones as well, are well known and widely acknowledged (Acheson 1998). Indeed, George Young, one of the Haida plant specialists I worked with in Skidegate, told me that the name he often used for red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa), laats’i, was borrowed from the Ts’msyen name, which I later discovered is ló’ots. Another plant, soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis), is named ’as in Skidegate Haida, also a Ts’msyen borrowing.3 In the case of the term laats’i, which Haida speaker George Young used for red elderberry, the direction of acquisition is unequivocal. It was known to him as a borrowed term and was used only occasionally to replace the standard Haida name for elderberries, jitl’l or jiitl’ (Turner 2004a). Furthermore, the Ts’msyen name has cognate forms (terms originating from a common ancestral form) in

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the three other related languages of the region – Nisga’a (loots, loots’), Gitxsan (loots’), and Kitasoo, or Southern Ts’msyen (lóʔots) – giving us even greater confidence in assigning Ts’msyenic origins to the term. In the case of soapberries, these bushes do not even grow on Haida Gwaii, or at least they have not done so in recent times (Calder and Taylor 1968), and the Haida acknowledge the name as borrowed.4 For highbush cranberry, however, the origin of the term hlaayaa (łaayaa) and its variants is more of a mystery. Is it an original Haida term borrowed into Ts’msyen or an original Ts’msyenic term borrowed into Haida? This question has implications extending into the realms of traditional plant management practices, resource ownership, social organization, narratives, feasting and potlatching, and intergroup relations, as well as possible human roles in plant dissemination. Apart from occurring in Coast Ts’msyen, versions of this name also occur in the closely related Kitasoo, or Southern Ts’msyen, language: łáaiyə (the berries) and sxán łáiya (the bush).5 In Haida the hlaayaa (łaayaa) etymon occurs in all of the main dialects – Skidegate, Massett, and Alaska (Kaigani) – indicating a broad and longstanding usage. As far as can be determined, łaayaa and its variants occur in no other languages aside from those mentioned, eliminating the possibility that the term was borrowed from beyond these two language families. An accepted principle in linguistics is that if a word is not analyzable into an original root or meaning, either the name is very old or it was borrowed into the language (Leslie Saxon, pers. comm., 2005). Neither Haida nor Ts’msyen versions of the name are obviously analyzable into components with any meaning other than as the name of highbush cranberry, indicating that it is a term of probable long antiquity in both languages. Indeed, highbush cranberries have evidently been known and used in both Haida and Ts’msyen territories for a long time, being an important and high-status food, a food of chiefs, that was given as marriage and potlatch gifts and, even today, is served at feasts (Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012).6 Another aspect of the puzzle is the relative distribution and abundance of highbush cranberry itself. Quite common around lakes and along creeks in Ts’msyen territory on the mainland as well as on some of the coastal islands of Alaska, it is relatively uncommon today on Haida Gwaii. This scarcity could be due in part to relatively recent impacts of browsing by introduced deer, but the plant’s sporadic distribution on Haida Gwaii has apparently extended at least over the past sixty years since even in the 1960s it was found in only a handful of sites on the islands (Calder and Taylor 1968). As an indication of its high value, it is one of the species in both Haida and Ts’msyen territories for which productive patches are or were owned and inherited by chiefs or matriarchs.7 Highbush cranberries are often mentioned in traditional narratives in their capacity as a prestigious feast food (see chapter 12). They are the food most

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frequently mentioned in the Haida stories recorded by John Swanton, especially in the context of “good food” (see Swanton 1905, 123, 164; and Swanton 1908, 537, 539, 558). The berries are often associated with salmon and were thought to be the food of supernatural beings, who ate them mixed with hemlock inner bark cakes and other high-value foods (Turner 2004a). The Haida origin story for highbush cranberries recounted at the beginning of this chapter suggests that the plants may have been originally imported to Haida Gwaii from a place where there were beavers and mountain goat (neither of which is indigenous to Haida Gwaii) and plenty of highbush cranberries. Such an event if it occurred, however, must have taken place a very long time ago. Possibly, the bushes were transplanted to, or even seeds planted at, several sites on one or more occasions, with the resulting populations developing into a relatively small number of highly coveted patches. Or maybe highbush cranberries were once far more widespread on Haida Gwaii and have since declined because of deer and logging. Without additional evidence, such as from genetic analysis of Viburnum populations or from more sophisticated linguistic attention, we may never know how, from where, or when the term łaayaa originated and how it diffused across dialects in two completely unrelated language families. This mystery is only one of hundreds that present themselves in an examination of the multitude of plant names across the languages of northwestern North America. Considering the names together with the plants’ uses, distributions, known trading patterns, and language interrelationships can assist in determining origins in many cases, but much is left to be unravelled. There are other equally puzzling conundrums related to highbush cranberry names in other language families. Kuipers (2002) identified two, apparently related, Proto-Salish terms pertaining to Viburnum: t’əls (highbush cranberry) (Proto-Salish); and tł’əl (“to crackle, pop”; “a plant providing berries or seeds”) (Proto-Coast-Salish). An examination of the names in diverse Northwest Coast languages readily shows that terms of this etymon have diffused widely, not only into Salish languages but also into Wakashan, and even possibly into Na-Dené, language families (table 3-1). As well as this suite of terms for Viburnum, there are at least two groups of cognate names across Dene (Athabaskan) languages, as well as terms in some Dene languages that are apparently unique. Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh) and Fraser River Halkomelem names for highbush cranberry are different yet again, and apparently the Chinook Jargon trade language name was drawn from one of these two languages. The Squamish name is kwúʔkwuwel’s, and the Upriver Halkomelem name is kwúkwels or kwúkwewels, whereas, according to Annie York of Spuzzum, the Chinook Jargon name is kwúkw-wns (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990).8 Complexes of names for species such as highbush cranberry, taken in overview, can give clues about the extent and antiquity of peoples’ relationship with these species and how important they have been for human use and survival.

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Table 3-1  |  Names for highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule) derived from the Proto-Salish term t’əls Language family

Language

Names for berry and/or bush

Dene (Athabaskan)

Tsilhqot’in

Salish, Bella Coola

Nuxalk

nists’elɨsh, ʔisdzelɨsh (no analysis given) (only on upper Chilco River)

st’ls (berries); slt’ls-łp (bush)

Salish, Coast

Sechelt

t’əls (berries); t’ə́lsay (bush)

Salish, Coast

Comox

Salish, Coast

Lushootseed

Salish, Coast

Twana

Salish, Interior

Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc (Lillooet)

Salish, Interior

Secwepemc (Shuswap)

Wakashan

Haisla

t’is, t’əys (berries); t’ísay (bush) tł’əlxulch (“cranberry”) (“because they pop”; cf. tł’alx ‘pop, crack’) stł’əlxuʔálsi (cf. stł’əlx- ‘pop, crack’ (“cranberry”)

tł’ə́lts (berries); tł’əlts-áz’ (bush)

tł’nis (Western dialect), tł’enís (Eastern dialect) (berries); tł’niséłp (bush – mainly V. opulus but also V. edule) t’ls, t’ḷls (berries); t’lts’as, t’ly’as (bush)

Wakashan

Heiltsuk

t’ḷts (berries); t’ély’ás (bush)

Wakashan

Kwak’wala

t’əls (berries); t’əlxwm’əs (bush)

Wakashan

Oowekyala

t’ḷḷs, t’eʔts (berries); t’ḷy’as, t’elts’as (bush)

Notes: It is possible that other Dene (Athabaskan) terms are also related: cf. Ahtna tsənłtsay, tsənłtsa; Dena’ina (Tanaina) łtsunłtsa (Inland), ełtsuntsa (Iliamna, Outer Inlet), tsunłtsa (Upper Inlet); Witsuwit’en tsəłtse; and Dakelh (Stuart/Trembleur Lake) tsałtseʔ. Sources: For a full listing of plant names, and their sources, see the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

Plant Names in Northwestern North America: An Inventory To better understand the range, selection, and nature of plant names across the languages of northwestern North America (such as the spectrum of names for highbush cranberry), I compiled listings of all of the species and all of the plant names available, not only from my work with Indigenous plant specialists and that of linguistics colleagues but also from various dictionaries of different languages in the area. I identified about 260 native species or closely related groups of indigenous species, all with names in three or more languages or major dialect groups in northwestern North America (see selections from this listing in appendix 2).9 This compilation forms the body of plant names referred to in the analyses and discussions in the remainder of this chapter.

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In addition, I prepared a database of names of about forty-five species that were introduced following European entry into the region (with two examples, turnip and potato, provided in appendix 3).10 These “newcomer” plant species are presented and discussed in chapter 4, which focuses on the colonial and more recent “historic” period.11 The lists of named species in appendices 2 and 3 (with the full databases posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space at http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091) are not definitive, but they do reflect the overall range, richness, variation, and ethnobotanical congruence across different languages and major dialects, different ecological zones, and diverse cultural homelands of plants, both native and introduced, that have obvious salience and relevance.12 The lists represent a project in progress, and it will take many more years of analysis to reveal the wealth of the collective information they contain. Nevertheless, some of the key features and general patterns for names of native species that I or others have identified so far are highlighted in this chapter. At the outset in this chapter, drawing on examples from the database and elsewhere, I discuss some overall concepts of naming and classifying plants in Indigenous taxonomies, before presenting some ideas related to the borrowing and dissemination of plant names across different languages and language families. I then focus on the relationship between frequency of plant terms in languages and the overall salience of the plants themselves. What’s in a Name? Naming is an innately human activity. We name things that are important to us so that we can communicate about them effectively with each other. Of course, plants are a major category of “things” that we name. We are selective in our naming, but in general, we apply names to many plants and botanical categories, or taxa (groups of related plants at any particular hierarchical level). In relation to this research, plant names can provide significant clues about historical, linguistic, and cultural relationships among groups, and comparisons of plant names can bring some of these relationships into focus. However, the names themselves can change and evolve, not only in linguistic form but also in terms of the plants to which they refer. In a study of names of plants and animals in languages throughout the world, Berlin (1992; see also Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven 1973) has identified a number of “universal principles,” or common ways in which we humans seem to develop and apply names for biological organisms and by which we conceptually group or organize the plants or animals around us. He suggests that the formal linguistic structure of plant and animal names is basically similar in all languages.13 There are significant differences between scientific systems of naming and “folk” systems, which have developed in every language and culture over

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millennia, including in everyday English.14 Only those plants or organisms that have particular meaning in a given society, Berlin (1992) observes, are named. Not surprisingly, however, biological names and “folk” names often converge because the “discontinuities in nature,” on which folk systems are based, are frequently mirrored, at least in part, by the genetic similarities and differences on which the biological system of classification is based. For example, the names for “skunk-cabbage” in any of the Indigenous languages in northwestern North America correspond readily to the biological species Lysichiton americanus, a unique and distinctive species with no close biological relatives in the region.15 Folk classification systems often incorporate names by association. In English folk classification, for example, the common name “skunk-cabbage” is applied due to the association of its large leaves with those of “cabbage,” combined with its characteristic skunk-like odour.16 In such names of association, the original referent (in this case, “cabbage”) can be taken as the older existing name, to which a newer term (i.e., “skunk-cabbage”) is linked by derivation. There are no “set rules” in folk systems for naming and classifying plants, only some discernable patterns and processes. Names for the most fundamental, or basic, categories of plants17 are usually primary terms, which can be either simple (represented by a single word, such as “maple”) or complex (named by a compound word, such as “gooseberry”). Secondary names, applied to subclasses of plants included within a more basic category, are almost always linguistically complex, consisting of a primary term and a modifying term (e.g., “bigleaf maple” and “black gooseberry”). In contrast with biological scientific classification, it is quite common in a folk classification system to apply one name to two or more recognizably different species. Different plants may be called by the same name because of some cultural association between them. An example is in Haida (Massett dialect), where red columbine (Aquilegia formosa) and blue harebell (Campanula rotundifolia) are both called dall-xil (“rain leaves/medicine”).18 These two kinds of flowers, along with a few others, like wild violets (Viola spp.) and shootingstars (Dodecatheon jeffreyi), are called “rainflowers” because of a belief that picking any of them will cause it to rain (see chapter 13 for further discussion on associations of plants with weather). Names are also sometimes transferred from one species referent to another, especially if they are borrowed from one language into another or if the people who hold the name move to a new area and encounter different but resonating species.19 This can result in synonymous names that often reflect different origins. The Straits Salish, for instance, have two evidently interchangeable names for camas (Camassia spp.): qwłáal (and variants) and spáanəxw. Related forms of these two names also occur in other Coast Salish languages, and terms related to qwłáal are also found in Wakashan names for camas. The term qwłáal is evidently derived from Proto-Salish qwlawl (“edible tuber”) (Kuipers 2002) and is

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3-2  |  Tsilhqot’in elder Mabel Solomon holding the peeled budstalks of cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum), an important springtime green vegetable widely used in the study region. The leafstalks are also edible and are often referred to by a separate name.

also reflected in the Interior Salish name for “onions” (cf. Nlaka’pamux qwléwe), as discussed in the preface to this book, but the origin of spáanəxw is uncertain; possibly it derives from the term meaning “buried.”20 In other cases, different names in a given language are applied to different parts of the same plant. For example, cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum) has two different edible parts, the budstalks and the leaf petioles (both fit for eating only

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in the springtime, before the plant starts to flower, and both requiring peeling) (figure 3-2). Many peoples in the study region refer to these as the “male” and “female” parts of the plant respectively. In the Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc language, as one example, the budstalks are called (n-)qayxw-xən (“man-foot”), and the petioles are called (n)múłats-xən (“woman-foot”), whereas the plant itself is called hákwaʔ.21 In Ditidaht, as with other Wakashan languages, there is no overall name for the plant, only distinct names for the budstalks and leaf petioles: huubaaq and qistuup respectively.22 Complex terms present interesting situations in processes of naming. These are names comprised of more than one morphologically distinct word, tied together into a single meaning for the name that is subtly distinctive from the meanings of its parts (as in the previous example of “gooseberry”). An example in English is “black berry” versus “blackberry,” the former being simply a descriptive term for any black-coloured berry and the latter the name of a recognizable kind of berry and/or the plant producing it, most commonly of the genus Rubus (e.g., Rubus ursinus).23 Compounding and formalizing such combined descriptive terms (i.e., converting a salient kind of “black berry” into “blackberry”) is a frequent way of generating plant names in any language, including those of the study area.24 One would need to be a native speaker of a language and intimately familiar with the plants in question to know for sure what some of these nomenclatural relationships mean and, in some cases, whether a compound term is only a description of a plant one encounters or really a designated “name.” Over time, one can turn into the other. Relationships between a plant and its associated name(s) become even more clouded when there are two or more species in a region that are visually or functionally similar. Such groups of species might be differentiated in some languages or grouped and named all together in others. There are many examples of collective names for groups of species, even those where people might recognize intellectual differences within the group of species called by the same name. Frequently, too, biologically similar species are recognized as close relatives and given a single name, even when people know that there are different kinds, as with the three species of wild strawberries occurring in the study region (Fragaria chiloensis, F. vesca, and F. virginiana),25 as well as with the several species of wild roses (Rosa spp.), wild gooseberries (Ribes spp.), and horsetails (Equisetum spp.). In a comparison with scientific taxonomies, names for these related groups might equate generally with scientific genera, but the situation is invariably more complicated and nuanced. There are often species of greater and lesser salience within such a grouping or species that are more distinctive – the diminutive dwarf, or baldhip, wild rose (Rosa gymnocarpa) among the roses, for example. Such types may have their own name or may simply be considered as outlying representatives of the named group, and the situation may vary across language groups or even between individuals in one community.

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A similar situation, sometimes referred to as a “sphere of influence” grouping, occurs when there is a central, culturally important species and others that are “look-alikes,” perhaps not as important in a culture. For example, in Nlaka’pamux Interior Salish, false Solomon’s-seal (Maianthemum racemosum; syn. Smilacina racemosa) is the central type in a group of similar-looking species. False Solomon’s-seal, the most salient of the group, is called kə́l’wet. Other, similar species include star-flowered Solomon’s-seal (Maianthemum stellatum), fairybells (Disporum spp.), and twistedstalk (Streptopus spp., especially Streptopus amplexifolius), and these are sometimes also called kə́l’wet but more commonly snúkw’eʔs e kə́l’wet (“friend/relative/cousin of false Solomon’s-seal”). Sometimes, too, false Solomon’s-seal is specifically named kə́l’wet-ʔuy (“real/original kə́l’wet”) (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). This type of associative naming complicates the picture when names are being compared across languages.26 There are higher-order categories in many languages for even broader, very general groupings (e.g., “trees,” “mushrooms,” “ferns,” “grasses and grass-like plants,” and “mosses and moss-like plants,” etc.), and some of these also have their most representative types – akin to the “Christmas tree” type of evergreen in many English folk taxonomic systems. There may be an overarching term corresponding to a higher-order botanical or mycological grouping and, within it, distinctive representatives that are typical for a given region or language group. This situation, in which a term is applied simultaneously to “nested” categories at two or more ranks or levels of generalization, is known as “polysemy” and is very common.27 Examples occur with the Nuxalk name sqaluts and with the Fraser River Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc name ʔúsaʔ, both of which pertain to “egg/berry/round object” and apply simultaneously to “berries” in general and to black mountain huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum) in particular, a favourite fruit of superior flavour – “the berry,” one could say. The Interior Salish names for “mushroom” provide another example of polysemy. Two mushroom species of high local salience in the Interior Salish area, pine mushroom (Tricholoma magnivelare) and cottonwood mushroom (Tricholoma populinum), are called respectively q’ám’es and mətł’qíʔ in Nlaka’pamux.28 Each of these names has a broader meaning as a general term for “mushroom” as well as its more specific application.29 A different kind of polysemy is seen in the Haida term xil, which means simultaneously “leaf ” and “medicine” and is applied as a suffix or prefix in the names of many herbaceous and medicinal plant species.30 (This is almost parallel to the term “herb” in English. In one connotation “herb” pertains to low, nonwoody plants, in another to medicinal plants, and in a third to plants used as flavourings in beverages and culinary dishes.) Sometimes (as with the Nlaka’pamux false Solomon’s-seal example cited previously), a prime representative of a particular group of species is distinguished from the rest of the group by an added modifier, such as “real” or

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“primary” – for example, in the Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc name for nodding onion, qwláwa-ʔúl (“real/original onion”). This distinguishes nodding onion from other kinds of onions or edible underground parts, which are called, generally, qwláwaʔ in the Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc language (see Turner 1989). A distinguishing modifier like “real” is often – but not always – added when a name is expanded to incorporate a new species, such as an introduced counterpart of an existing species or group of species. In the Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc case, the introduction of domesticated onions (Allium cepa) may have precipitated the addition of -ʔúl to the name for the wild nodding onions, with domesticated onions now simply called qwláwaʔ.31 An example of a higher-order case of application of a “typical” or “original” designation for a culturally prominent species is in the Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc word for Douglas-fir, sghap-ʔúl (“real-tree”) (cf. sgháp, “tree,” related to ghépen, “to stand something up, put it upright”). Another is the Ts’msyen name (similar in Nisga’a and Kitasoo) for western redcedar, sṃgán (“real wood”) (cf. gán, “tree” or “wood”) (Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority 2001, 50). A somewhat different but related situation occurs in some Dene (Athabaskan) languages, in which various edible greens – including mountain sorrel (Oxyria digyna), wild mountain rhubarb (Rumex acetosa ssp. alpestris), and “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule) – incorporate the general term for “leaves” in their names.32 Much can be learned about the plants themselves based on their names. Many plant names – perhaps most when they originally develop – are descriptive in some way, alluding to the plant’s form, texture, colour, scent, or some other attribute, thus conveying important identifying information that might relate indirectly to a species’ edibility or use. For example, a study of over 625 distinct plant names (including many synonyms) in Nlaka’pamux Interior Salish33 showed that over 20 per cent referred to the growth form or some other notable characteristic of the plants and that nearly 10 per cent referred to the colour of flowers or foliage. Other features encoded in the names included use, taste, and odour. Nearly 15 per cent were named by association with another plant, incorporating its name. Examples of descriptive plant names in various languages are provided in table 3-2, and examples of names referring explicitly to major uses or utilitarian aspects of the plants themselves are provided in table 3-3. Plant names reflecting associations with animals,34 birds, or fish – in some instances for plants that serve as ecological or phenological indicators and in others for plants that are to be avoided or that are inedible – are listed in table 3-4. Studying the ways that new plants and new products are incorporated into an existing lexicon, or inventory, of plant names presents excellent opportunities to test ideas about the time depth required for name acquisitions and about how knowledge accompanying names may be acquired simultaneously. The story around the introduction and rapid diffusion of the potato (Solanum tuberosum)

Reflections on Plant Names  |  127

Table 3-2  |  Selected examples of descriptive plant names Species

Language

Name

Meaning

Green pond slime or river slime (Spirogyra sp.)

Nlaka’pamux

mtolt-úym’xw

Ditidaht

puupuuxwiyʕaa

‘clotted substance under the water (on bottom)’

Sac alga (Halosaccion glandiforme)

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

sk’aang k’iis

Ts’msyen

iimgmgən

‘whiskers of the tree’

Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc (Fraser River)

kolmákst

‘yellow/ green-on-branch’

Nlaka’pamux

xəxp-éyqw

‘piling up in frills on a tree’

Haida (Skidegate)

xu t’aangalga

‘hair seal’s tongue’

‘jagged edges’ ‘resembling whale baleen’ ‘prickly’

Algae

Sea wrack (Fucus gardneri)

Lichens

Old man’s beard (Alectoria spp. and Usnea spp.) Wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina) Fungi

Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) Bryophytes

Cone-headed liverwort (Conocephalum conicum)

Ferns and fern allies

‘a lot of blown-up things on the rocks’ ‘fish’s air bladder’

Fern, general Maidenhair fern (Adiantum aleuticum) Common juniper (Juniperus communis) Pacific juniper (Juniperus maritima) Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis)

Okanagan Ditidaht

txetxítkst tł’iitł’iidqwaqsi-bak’kw

Okanagan

snts’íts’qpnaʔ

Halkomelem, Quw’utsun’ Nuxalk

p’ət’thenéʔ-iłp k’ak’patuts-łp

‘rank-smelling/ skunk-like plant’ ‘sharp plant’

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)

Nuu-chah-nulth

shaashaaxt’an’uuh

‘it’s bushy’

Vanillaleaf (Achyls triphylla)

łxwélə́ws

‘three leaves’

Nodding onion (Allium cernuum)

Halkomelem, Upriver

Dakelh (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake)

tł’otsun

‘smelly grass’

128 | part one – history

Table 3-2 | continued Species

Language

Name

Meaning

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)

Haida (Skidegate)

gaan xaw’laa

‘sweet berry’

Haisla

m’um’qwtuai hs plxh’a

‘white-white-on-top (flower)’

Arbutus (Arbutus menziesii)

Squamish

łúłuqw’ay

‘peeling tree’

Makah

xixitsbaqk’ukw

Paintbrush (Castilleja spp.)

OkanaganColville

kwelkwelágqn

‘looks like herring eggs’

Pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea)

Goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus)

Snowbrush (Ceanothus velutinus)

White clematis (Clematis ligusticifolia) Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea)

‘red-on-top’

Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc (Fraser River) Secwepemc

kw’əxm-áz’

‘rattling-plant/bush’ ‘it twists around’

Sahaptin

st’upel’qw, stept’úpelqw luts’a-ni

‘the red one’ ‘eagle down plant’ (cf. qémxwa ‘eagle down’)

Cottongrass (Eriophorum spp.)

Kwak’wala

qáqemxwala(ʔems)

Northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis)

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

stła q’iist’aa

Rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera oblongifolia)

Saanich

skw’ə́lkw’ələx

Tall Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium)

ts’ól’-ts’əl’ (berries)

‘bitter/sour’

Field mint (Mentha arvensis)

Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc (Pemberton)

Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc (Fraser River)

ts’aw’ə́x-ləqs

‘stifling-odour-tothe-nose’

Heiltsuk

yáyáw’al’as

OkanaganColville

yiw’ístn

‘dances-around tree’ (name pertains to trembling leaves in about fourteen languages)

Trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides)

Death camas (Zigadenus venenosus)

‘round-thing-youdig-out-with-yourfinger’ ‘it’s got spots’

‘causing twitching’ [poison]

Sources: For a full listing of plant names, and their sources, see the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

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Table 3-3  |  Selected examples of plant names reflecting uses Species

Language

Name

Meaning/use

Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc (Pemberton)

pəxwp

cf. púxwm ‘to blow’ (used as tinder, for “slow match”)

Snchítsu’umshtsn (and other Interior Salish languages)

maramłpalqw

‘medicine-plant-tree’

Nisga’a

haxwdakw

Gitxsan

amhat’a’l

‘bow’ (named ‘bow’ in at least eleven languages; ‘wedge plant’ in several others)

Nlaka’pamux

xwikwestn-éłp

‘scrubber plant/tree’

Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum)

Ditidaht

daqtsapt

‘drinking bowl plant’

Bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum)

Sechelt

q’émulay

Red baneberry (Actaea rubra)

Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc (Fraser River)

qwnúxw-xal

‘paddle tree’ (named after ‘paddle’ in more than six Salishan languages)

‘makes you sick’ (it is toxic)

Fungi

Cinder conk fungus (Inonotus obliquus) Conifers

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia)

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)

Flowering plants

‘good for inner cedar bark’

Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum)

Nlaka’pamux

sp’ets’n-éłp

‘sp’ets’n fibre plant’

Tsilhqot’in

nughwɨshi-tł’ugh

Cascara (Frangula purshiana)

Ditidhat

shabasiʔ

‘soapberry grass’ (used to dry and whip soapberries)

Nlaka’pamux

mlámns e x kwísit

Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)

Halkomelem, Upriver

qéethəłp

Pinegrass (Calamagrostis rubescens)

Rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera oblongifolia)

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‘laxative medicine’

‘medicine for childbirth’

‘prong of fish spear plant’

Table 3-3 | continued Species

Language

Name

Meaning/use

Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)

Sahaptin

taxts’xt-pamá tawtnúk

‘diarrhoea medicine’

qálaxay

‘digging stick plant’

Willows (Salix spp.)

Saanich (Straits)

sxwələʔ-íłch

‘reefnet-plant/tree’

Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)

Sechelt

Hardhack (Spiraea douglasii)

Halkomelem, Upriver

t’éets’əłp

‘fish-spreader plant’

Sources: For a full listing of plant names, and their sources, see the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091). Table 3-4  |  Selected examples of plant names reflecting associations with animals Species

Language

Name

Meaning/Use

Haida (Skidegate)

k’aalts’idaa gyaaʔadga

‘crow’s blanket’

Puffballs (Lycoperdon spp. and other genera)

Klallam

sxwp’iʔqw’usən ʔu skw’aʔ kw’atuʔ

‘crow’s face powder’

Puffballs (Lycoperdon spp. and other genera) Mushrooms, general

Gitxsan

delgga chisha (and variants in other dialects)

‘raven’s ochre’

Mushrooms, general

Dena’ina (Tanaina) (Upper Inlet) Haida (Massett, Alaska)

Lichens

Old man’s beard (Alectoria spp. and Usnea spp.) Fungi

Ferns and fern allies

gayda ts’uuts

‘bird’s hat’

OR kagann

‘owl hat’ and ‘mouse hat’ respectively

st’aw dajaangaa;

dajaangaa

Common horsetail (Equisetum arvense)

Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

xahdai

‘goose food’

ʔiʔpikw-áz’

‘duckling-plant’

Sword fern (Polystichum munitum)

Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc (Pemberton)

Halkomelem (Upriver)

słéwə́ls tə spéeth

‘black bear’s mat’ (alternate name)

Common horsetail (Equisetum arvense)

Reflections on Plant Names  |  131

Table 3-4 | continued Species

Language

Name

Meaning/Use

Common juniper (Juniperus communis)

Inuit (Iñupiaq) (Kotzebue)

tulukkam asriaq

‘raven’s berry’

tsuni ela

‘brown bear’s spruce bough’

Common juniper (Juniperus communis)

Dena’ina (Tanaina) (Upper Inlet) Tsilhqot’in

datsan k’achɨł

‘raven’s arrow’

Red baneberry (Actaea rubra)

Gitxsan (Western)

sganmaa’ya smex

Tsilhqot’in

tł’ughesen-nizt’an

‘black bear berry plant’

‘snake’s plant’

Red columbine (Aquilegia formosa)

Nuxalk

nunanta

‘grizzly bear’s den’

Queenscup (Clintonia uniflora)

Haisla

t’ixwa hs siakw’nał

Queenscup (Clintonia uniflora)

Nuxalk

‘berry of the wolf ’

Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea)

Sekani

sqaluts ti nutsakwaax

‘Alaska blueberry of the black bear’

Shootingstar (Dodecatheon pulchellum)

Conifers

Common juniper (Juniperus communis)

Flowering plants

Red baneberry (Actaea rubra)

sas mi-ehe, sahns myeʔ yeh

‘bear’s berry’

besini gega

‘great horned owl’s berry’

Okanagan-Colville

skwúykwi spetkwáqsts

‘curlew’s beak’

Alumroot (Heuchera chlorantha)

Haida (Skidegate)

xu’aji xilga (xuʔaji xilga)

‘grizzly bear’s leaves/medicine’

Black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata)

Dakelh (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake, Saik’uz)

susmaiʔ

‘black bear berry’

Makah

ch’aq’atq(a)bap

‘crow plant’

Nlaka’pamux

səxwsuxw-úseʔ

‘grizzly bear berry’

Ts’msyen

maayəʔol

‘black bear’s berries’

Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea)

Tiger lily or Columbia lily (Lilium columbianum)

Black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata)

Black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata)

Black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata)

Dena’ina (Tanaina) (Upper Inlet)

Nuu-chah-nulth (Hesquiaht)

132 | part one – history

ʕanixsmapt

‘great blue heron plant’

Table 3-4 | continued Species

Language

Name

Meaning/Use

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus)

Nuxalk

st’ls ti nan

Coltsfoot (Petasites frigidus)

Ditidaht

tł’uudupiits haxub

‘highbush cranberries of the grizzly bear’

‘elk’s food’

Seaside plantain (Plantago maritiima)

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

hlgid.un t’aangal

‘goose tongue’

Kaska

tłîʔ jìjèʔ

‘dog berries’

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)

Tahltan

sas-jije

Ditidaht

ts’uts’uwaxsiłiits haʔub

‘black bear berry’ (“one of them”)

‘wolf ’s food’

Twistedstalk (Streptopus amplexifolius)

Haida (Massett)

st’aw gaanaa, st’uu gaanaa; OR taan gaanaa

Twistedstalk (Streptopus amplexifolius)

Halkomelem, Upriver

st’thíms tə éłqəy

‘saw whet-owl/ witch berries’ and ‘black bear berries’ respectively

‘snake’s berry’

Haisla

k’ibat hs k’aax; OR t’ixwa hs mamḷk’imas

‘crow’s red elderberry’ and ‘black bear’s berry’ respectively

Black currant (Ribes hudsonianum)

Twistedstalk (Streptopus amplexifolius)

Snowberry or waxberry (Symphoricarpos albus)

Sources: For a full listing of plant names, and their sources, see the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

and its associated names is particularly interesting and is an important element in enhancing our understanding of ethnobotanical knowledge transmission (see chapter 4). Cognates, Borrowing, and Shifts in Meanings Languages of the same family, diverging from the same original ancestral (or proto-) language, often carry forward names derived from a common ancestral root word or name (as explained earlier in the discussion of highbush cranberry names). Using known sound-shifts and other regular changes that languages tend to undergo in their respective evolution and divergence from the ancestral language, linguists can sometimes detect what these original proto-language

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forms might be (see C.H. Brown 1999; Kari and Potter 2010a; Kuipers 2002; L.C. Thompson and Thompson 1996; and Vajda 2010). All of the names derived from the same ancestral proto-language term are known as “cognates.” Cognate plant names can tell us something about the history and origin not only of the name but also of the cultural importance or use of a given plant or plant product. In general, the more important a plant is, the more likely it is that its name will be conserved in some form even as the language evolves and as its speakers move into new territories. If they encounter a new but similar species, biologically or functionally, they might transfer the original name to that new species. Sometimes – even within the same language family but, in all cases, with languages from different, unrelated families – a term such as a plant name can be “borrowed” and readily incorporated into the vocabulary or lexicon of a second language.35 My survey of plant names showed many examples of words borrowed across language families in northwestern North America (as with the highbush cranberry term łaayaa and its variants in Haida and Ts’msyen) and that some language families, such as Salishan and Wakashan, seem to have a particularly notable proportion of borrowed plant names between their languages. The question, then, becomes: from which language or proto-language – and from where – did the original term stem? Again, linguistic expertise, and a familiarity with multiple languages, their historical relationships, and their phonological and lexemic conventions, is required to even begin to answer such a question. In the case of plant name borrowings, botanical and ecological knowledge is also required in this analysis since past and current distributions of species, the habitats in which they occur, and their relative abundance all have a bearing in determining directions of borrowing and possible parallels across suites of borrowed terms. Historical and archaeological factors are also important since they provide the context for opportunities for the knowledge dissemination and acquisition that would go along with loaned and borrowed names of plants and plant products. Social and economic factors are similarly relevant since plant names tend to come with associated knowledge and since their various cultural roles influence how and why plant names might be disseminated from one area to another and from one language to another. In northwestern North America, an intriguing example of a situation where a name was evidently transferred into a new language and took on a different meaning is with the term ts’uu. In Dene (Athabaskan) languages, ts’uu and its variants are widely used for spruce (Picea spp.) (cf. Tahltan ts’uu for white spruce, Picea glauca). In Haida, which has its own name for spruce,36 the term ts’uu applies to western redcedar.37 Another example of combined semantic shift and cross-language borrowing is the diffusion of an apparently ancient term, s-ts’ik’ or s-ts’ik, occurring in the original ancestral language of the Salish peoples (Proto-Salish), which originally evidently referred to “nut,” “acorn,” “fir or pine cone,” and/or “seed” (Kuipers

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3-3  |  Cones and seeds of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis).

2002). In some Coast Salish languages,38 the term was focused on “hazelnut” (Corylus cornuta) (and is also now more broadly applied to other introduced nuts, such as walnut and peanut). In Interior Salish languages of the northern Interior Plateau, the term came to mean “any conifer seed” but, specifically, the seeds of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), an interior montane species with exceptionally large, edible seeds (figure 3-3).39 Far to the north, along the Skeena River, the Gitxsan and Nisga’a, which are Ts’msyenic language groups, at some point borrowed versions of this term for their names for hazelnut (figure 3-4).40 Whitebark pine does not extend its range into the Ts’msyenic language territories, and even hazelnut is restricted in the northern part of the study area to a relatively small region around the Skeena and Nass Rivers (Klinkenberg 2013).41 Along what pathways and by what venues did the Proto-Salish term s-ts’ik’ disseminate from its physical and semantic origins across diverse languages and over immense geographic areas? And over what time period did these diffusions and transformations occur? In the case of hazelnuts, people possibly helped to disseminate these plants since the nuts are themselves propagules and were important trade products (Turner and Loewen 1998). Transporting

Reflections on Plant Names  |  135

3-4 | Hazelnuts (Corylus cornuta).

the nuts from place to place would increase the possibility of extending the distribution of the species and would also serve as a venue for disseminating their names. We also cannot forget the role of squirrels42 and other animals in such nomenclatural complexes and species disseminations. Long ago, at the end of the Pleistocene, red squirrels (Tamiasciurus spp.), bears, and various types of birds helped to disperse plants northward into the areas recently uncovered by melting ice. Clark’s nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana), for example, is thought to have co-evolved with whitebark pine as its major seed disperser (Lanner 1996). One Ulkatcho elder recalled that people sometimes obtained whitebark pine cones from squirrel caches (Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996), and many people recall searching for squirrel caches full of hazelnuts from around the bases of trees (Turner 1997b). It is no coincidence that squirrels are named after these nuts and that Clark’s nutcracker is called “whitebark pine bird” in Secwepemc-tsín (ibid.). The relationships among these species and the relative roles in development of language, knowledge, and practice in human societies demonstrate well the complexities of nomenclature. Sometimes names that are borrowed into a language – or even terms from earlier times within a changing language – are adapted or changed so that they are more meaningful, consistent, or relevant to the speakers of the second language or current language at a particular time in their cultural history. In their versions of the name for highbush cranberries, the Haida and Ts’msyen each use their own suffix attached to the root name łaayaa (Massett Haida łq’a.aay, “bush

136 | part one – history

or branch”; Ts’msyen sgən, “tree or bush”). Similarly, the Gitxsan and Nisga’a names for hazelnut, while retaining the Salishan root, incorporate their own suffixes for “plant.” These are thus blended terms, with elements from both original and receiving languages. Sometimes only the original meaning is retained in a borrowing, with the entire name, or lexeme, transformed into the vocabulary of the receiving language. This is called “translation borrowing” and supports the presence of biand multilingualism. An example is in the array of names for running clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum and its relatives) up and down the Northwest Coast, each having a common meaning pertaining to “belt,” especially “deer’s belt,” but each stated in the vocabulary of its respective language.43 Lycopodium clavatum has long, trailing stems, certainly reminiscent of a belt, but the array of names pertaining to this feature must have some kind of common origin, from some time period, somewhere along the coast, possibly in relation to a traditional narrative, such as the Comox story about deer and mountain goat from the Hombray Channel (Kennedy and Bouchard 1983). To further confound the picture, borrowed terms may be altered completely, coming to reflect superimposed or overlain meanings and accompanying phonological changes. Such alterations effectively disguise the original word, at least to most of the language’s speakers, but might render the word more linguistically and culturally meaningful in its new role. These transformed terms are sometimes referred to as “folk etymologies” or as words of “secondary motivation” (Sauer 1992, 396, cited in Yang 2005).44 Many equivalent linkages and shifts in meaning must have occurred in the development of plant names in northwestern North America, making efforts to decipher their origins difficult, if not in some cases impossible. Because there are no written records of early forms, identifying and tracing shifts in phonology and meaning are even more difficult than in European languages. A cautious and conservative approach is required in drawing conclusions about underlying meanings and origins of plant names. For some terms, especially very old names and borrowed names, any original derivation or etymology is deeply buried, and the term has no known meaning for speakers of a given language other than as a plant name.45 Examples of such unanalyzable names for English speakers are “oak,” “fir,” “rose,” and “maple.” In northwestern North American languages, aside from the suffixes or supplementary terms that are often attached to denote “plant,” “tree,” and/or “bush,” as noted earlier, there are many plant names that are evidently unanalyzable. Examples include Haida (Skidegate) gwaayk’yaa (false hellebore, Veratrum viride), Kwak’wala t’əxwsús (springbank clover, Trifolium wormskioldii), Halkomelem (Upriver) th’ékwa and Gitxsan ax (spiny wood fern, Dryopteris expansa),46 and Interior Salish punłp (Rocky Mountain juniper, Juniperus scopulorum; -łp is a suffix denoting “plant/tree”) (see Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998). In the study of

Reflections on Plant Names  |  137

Nlaka’pamux plants mentioned previously, of over 625 distinct plant names in the Nlaka’pamux language, almost 20 per cent had linguistic stems that were apparently unanalyzable, although many incorporated a more general category suffix or other element (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Other names, possibly just as old, have retained their original meanings over time, perhaps because of their very distinctiveness – for example, Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc (Fraser River) (s)xwúsum (“berries”); xwúsum-az’ (“bush”) for soapberry, derived (along with many other Salishan forms) from Proto-Salish xwus (“to foam”) (Kuipers 2002); and Squamish ts’exts’íx, for stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), derived from Proto-Salish ts’ix (“prickly, stinging”; “burn, fry”; “cold”) (Kuipers 2002). In some cases, original names become abridged or otherwise changed, or they may embody meanings that are not generally recognized, being identifiable only by an experienced speaker of a language. One example would be the underlying meaning of the term dlexsém (Pacific silverweed, Argentina egedii), which relates to “something long,” pertaining to the elongated edible roots, a fact evident only to an expert in Kwak’wala (Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 2009). Principles Related to Borrowed Plant Names

Because detecting borrowed names is a key component in tracing the pathways of ancient plant knowledge, I consider the evidence of borrowed terms in the study languages in a broader framework here. I propose six general principles related to the directions of origin or borrowing of plant names, drawn in part from the principles developed by Salishan linguist Thom Hess (n.d., 1987) to identify words in general that are borrowed from another language (i.e., “loanwords”) and their possible origins. 1  Analyzability of a Name

If a plant name does not seem to be analyzable (i.e., has no recognized literal meaning and cannot be broken down into meaningful elements) in any language, it is thought to be quite old and to have lost its original derivation. However, if a plant name is analyzable in one language but has an obviously related yet unanalyzable counterpart in a second language, it can be assumed that the term originated in the first language and was borrowed into the second one. An example would be in the Tsilhqot’in name for balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) root, ts’ats’el. This term has no meaning to Tsilhqot’in speakers other than as the name for this plant. In neighbouring Secwepemc territory, however, Secwepemc-tsín speakers would recognize the components of their equivalent name tséts’elq, for balsamroot (cooked roots), as deriving from ts’el (“bitter”) (with a reduplicated form, tsé+ts’e, “all over bitter”) and -elq (“stick-like”) (roots

138 | part one – history

when cooked). Adding the distributional evidence, that balsamroot’s northernmost range more or less coincides with Tsilhqot’in territory but that it is widely distributed across Interior Salish territory, gives an extra level of confidence to the conclusion that the name for this species – and, by extension, the cultural knowledge about its use, harvesting practices, and preparation, such as longterm pit-cooking – originated in Interior Salish and was borrowed into Tsilhqot’in, not vice versa (Marianne Ignace, pers. comm., 2008). Another example is the name puʔyaas or puuyaas for Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum; syn. Ledum groenlandicum) in the Nuxalk (Salish) language of Bella Coola. The term has no meaning for Nuxalk speakers other than as a name for this shrub, whose leaves are used for a popular beverage tea. However, in the neighbouring Wakashan languages (Haisla, Heiltsuk, Oowekyala, and Kwak’wala), the corresponding name, púy’ás and its variants, is recognized as being derived from the element pws- (“to swell through soaking”) (see Compton 1993b), which apparently relates to the way the dried leaves swell up when they are infused in boiling water. Thus the borrowing of the name from Wakashan into Nuxalk is the most likely explanation for this pattern of names. Variants of this name (e.g., pupuyas) are known to some Ts’msyen speakers as well (Ernie Hill Jr, pers. comm., 2009), and again no meaning accompanies the use of the word. 2  Relative Ubiquity within a Language Family

A second principle is that if plant names that are obviously similar occur widely or consistently in languages within one family or subfamily but only sparingly in one or more languages of a second family or subfamily, then (all other evidence being equal) it is likely that the original parent term was a part of the ancestral lexicon of the first language family, that it developed and diffused across this family, and that it was subsequently, or at some point in its development, borrowed into the language(s) of the second family. Nuxalk again serves as an example here, with the terms for gray currant, or stink currant (Ribes bracteosum), and bracken fern. Gray currants in the Nuxalk language are called q’is, and the bush is inq’isłp. Despite the presence of the -łp Nuxalk “plant/bush” suffix, when a cross-language comparison is undertaken, the origin is clear since all four neighbouring Wakashan languages have variants of this name for gray currant in their lexicons.47 Bracken fern shows a similar pathway of borrowing, with the rhizomes being called sakwm in Nuxalk, a term corresponding to Kwak’wala sagwṃ (ságwemi for rhizomes), as well as to the Oowekyala and Heiltsuk names for this plant. In all, there are about eight plant names in Nuxalk that may be derived through Wakashan languages, but some of these (e.g., the names for highbush cranberry and skunk-cabbage) may represent secondary borrowings from words that were originally Salishan and then borrowed into Wakashan.48

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3  Relationship of Names to Plant Distribution

A third principle in determining borrowing patterns in plant names relates to the relative distribution of the referent plant species. If a plant name in a particular language pertains to a species at the periphery or outside of its distributional range, whereas other languages with similar names for the plant are situated more centrally within its range, then it is likely that the language at the edge or outside of the plant’s range borrowed the name from languages situated more centrally to the range of the species. An obvious example here is the case of interior language names for red laver seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae) and closely related species, a marine alga completely restricted to the coastal environment but traded inland. The Dene (Athabaskan) languages, Witsuwit’en and northern Dakelh, have names that show an obvious relationship to those of Ts’msyen and many other coastal languages (cf. Witsuwit’en [Bulkley River dialect] łakits; and Dakelh [Saik’uz, Nadleh/Stellako, Lheidli] łagaʔas). In this case, one need only look at the widely recognized trade route from the coast up the Skeena River to Dene (Athabaskan) country to conclude that these terms were likely borrowed from a Ts’msyenic language. Poser (2008a, 2008b) suggests that the host language for these Dakelh dialects was most likely Gitxsan, but the Gitxsan themselves would have been intermediaries in a sequence of borrowings, either from Nisga’a łaq’askw or Ts’msyen łəʔask or from some combination of these, probably following directly along with the seaweed as a trade product (Turner and Loewen 1998).49 Another example of how relative plant distributions can give an indication of the direction of name borrowing is in the Dakelh (Ulkatcho) name for yellow glacier lily, swih. This plant is not common at all in Ulkatcho territory but is widespread, and its bulbs are a staple food in parts of Secwepemc territory, where it is called sxwixw,50 which is also its Okanagan name. It is therefore highly probable that the Ulkatcho term originated from Secwepemc, possibly through a Tsilhqot’in trade intermediary, although the Tsilhqot’in have their own name for this root vegetable, ʔesghunsh, itself an apparently unanalyzable term.51 4  Relationship of Names to Plant Use and Cultural Roles

Not unrelated but somewhat different from using a plant’s distribution to indicate direction of borrowing for its names is to look at the patterns of use and cultural roles of a plant that has related names in more than one language. For example, if a plant is named in one language after a specific role or application in that language group, and there is a related name in another language whose speakers do not use the plant in the same way, this is an indication that the plant name originated in the first language and was borrowed into the second language. An example provided by Hess (1987) is the Straits Salish (e.g., Saanich) name for willow tree (Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra and related spp.), sxwəlíʔəłch, which relates to the Straits Salish peoples’ traditional use of willow in making

140 | part one – history

reefnets, called sxwáləxʔ (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994; Turner and Hebda 2012), and for which the Straits peoples are renowned. The Northern Lushootseed call willow by a related term, sxwáluʔats, but they do not use it for making reefnets. Furthermore, the Southern Lushootseed name, sts’ápats, is different. This combined evidence points to the borrowing of the Straits Salish name for willow into Northern Lushootseed rather than vice versa. This is a clear-cut example, but in reality it is often difficult to discern the origins of particular uses of plants because species like western redcedar, salal, and wild strawberry are used similarly almost universally throughout their ranges. Furthermore, in cases where a particular use has not been recorded, it is difficult to know whether the plant was used previously in a certain way, with its use now forgotten. Another example is in the similarity between the Nisga’a name t’uuna’awkw or t’una’ax for cattail (Typha latifolia) mat and the Comox (Salishan) name túʔnexw for cattail. In this case, there is a Proto-Salish origin for the term – that is, t’unxwn or t’unxw (“innovation”) for “a plant (cattails, scouring rush)” (Kuipers 2002) – but even if this were not known, the likelihood is that the Nisga’a borrowed the term from the south since cattail is not common in Nisga’a territory but very common in Salishan territory and since Salishan peoples are almost universally well known for their skill in making cattail mats (Turner 1998). 5  Relative Complexity of the Name

A fifth principle relates to the complexity of a name for a plant. Salishan linguist Dale Kinkade (pers. comm., 2002) suggested that linguistically more complex representatives of a particular group of related names probably indicate the term’s origin. It is common (but by no means universal) for languages to simplify or truncate the names that they borrow, especially if they have no particular meaning in that language. The words tend to become abbreviated and lose some of the original elements. Consider the previously mentioned borrowed Dakelh (Ulkatcho) name swih for yellow glacier lily, as compared with the Secwepemc name sxwixw. Another example, which shows the direction of borrowing from several different criteria, is the Witsuwit’en (Dene) name for Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca), milks. First, this species is much more common along the coast than in Witsuwit’en territory, in the interior. Second, related forms of this name occur in all four Ts’msyenic languages.52 Third, the Witsuwit’en name is truncated compared with the name in neighbouring Gitxsan. For all of these reasons, the borrowing from the Ts’msyen languages into Witsuwit’en is quite clear. 6  Phonological Borrowing

Finally, as pointed out by Jan van Eijk (pers. comm., 2012), the phonological structure of a borrowed plant name (or any other lexical item) may also indicate the direction of borrowing if such a name contains a phoneme that is not native

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to one of the languages involved, while being well attested in the phonological repertoire of the other language. For example, the term for salalberry (Gaultheria shallon) is t’áqaʔ in the southern (Lower) dialect of the Lillooet (St’át’imcets) language, with a t’ that is not native to Lillooet. However, this phoneme (and the name t’áqaʔ itself, with local variations) is widely attested in the Coast Salish languages, one of which is the obvious donor of this item – and in that case, it is probably Squamish (t’áqaʔ), Sechelt (t’áqa), or Upriver Halkomelem (t’eqǝ), as provided in Kuipers (2002, 111). That salal is a coastal plant, and thus not or rarely found in the interior, also supports the coastal origin of this plant name as a donor to Lillooet. Another example is Lillooet s-xwús-um (soapberry, Shepherdia canadensis), with the s pronounced š, hence šxwúšum. In Sechelt this word is s-xwúš-um (Timmers 1977, 11). Comparative-historical Salish evidence would expect the Sechelt form to be s-xwús-um, and the unexpected š in this case occurs because this word is a borrowing from Lillooet, as supported by the fact that relations between the Sechelt and the (Lower) Lillooet (Lil’wat) were generally friendly and based on trade and by the fact that the soapberry is largely limited to the interior and rarely occurs on the coast. Confusing Origins

Using all of these criteria, and guided by the knowledge and information of speakers of these languages and by linguistic specialists who study them, it is possible to clarify and identify the origins of many names that are borrowed within or across languages. However, sometimes the above principles seem to work at cross-purposes, and the situation may be compounded by unknowns. The direction for borrowing of the highbush cranberry name łaayaa between Haida and Ts’msyen is a case in point, where more information is needed before a definitive conclusion can be reached. The term appears to be unanalyzable in both language groups. Furthermore, although there are many examples of plant names that have cognates across all four Ts’msyenic languages, this name appears only in Sm’algyax (Coast Ts’msyen) and the closely related Kitasoo (Southern Ts’msyen), with a different term for this plant in the Nisga’a and Gitxsan languages. The plant itself is more abundant in Ts’msyen than Haida territory, but this situation might be at least partially explained by the introduced deer on Haida Gwaii, which have browsed their way through large swathes of the vegetation and may well have eliminated existing patches of highbush cranberry on Haida Gwaii. All of these questions leave the origin of this term still in doubt. Another confusing situation is in the Ditidaht (Wakashan) and neighbouring Coast Salish words for licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhiza). The Ditidaht version, tl’aaʕasiip, can be analyzed and understood as pertaining to a “tendency to grow on the ground,” so it is evidently the language of origin since the Salishan

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3-5 | Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus).

versions of the term are unanalyzable and relatively simpler.53 However, the term is widely disseminated across at least seven Salishan languages, whereas among Wakashan languages it apparently exists as a plant name only in Ditidaht. If the name originated in Ditidaht, it seems that all of the Salishan terms derived at some point from an original loanword and diffused across the various Salish languages as they developed or as secondary borrowings. When and how this might have happened is not clear. An alternate explanation would be that the Ditidaht name, “tendency to grow on the ground,” could be interpreted as a “folk etymology,” or superimposed analysis of the name, which was borrowed into Ditidaht from its closest Salishan neighbour, either Straits Salish (including Saanich), whose territory borders that of the Ditidaht on the south, or Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’), bordering Ditidaht lands on the west at Lake Cowichan. The fern itself is widely distributed all along the coast and is well known almost everywhere as a medicine for coughs, colds, and sore throats, so we cannot rely on plant distribution or use to clarify the name’s origins. In the case of the Ditidaht term, tl’aaʕasiip, we have the expertise of a skilled Ditidaht speaker, John Thomas, and of an expert linguist, Dr Thom Hess, who was consulted by John (see Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). John analyzed the Ditidaht name, lending weight to the first explanation: the term did, indeed, originate from Ditidaht and was borrowed into Salish and diffused among the various Coast Salish languages.

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Table 3-5  |  Borrowed and cognate names for western skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) between some Coast Salish and Wakashan languages Language (family)

Name for skunk-cabbage

Proto-Coast-Salish

kw’ukw’

Nuxalk (Salishan)

kw’ukw’

Sechelt (Salishan)

xwuʔuk’álin

Comox (Salishan)

Squamish (Salishan)

Straits (Saanich) (Salishan) Samish (Salishan)

Klallam (Salishan)

kwúukw’ayin and variants ch’úkw’a

t’thə́kw’iʔ (cf. kw’iʔ ‘stinks when it dies’; lit. ‘rank smell’) t’chaáukw’ and variants ts’uʔkw’iʔ

ts’ákw’aʔ

Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’, Musqueam) (Salishan) Halkomelem (Upriver) (Salishan)

ch’áakw’ə, ts’áakw’ə

Twana (Salishan)

ch’ukw’áy

Lushootseed (Salishan)

ch’úʔkw’ and variants

Nlaka’pamux (Salishan)

ts’ákw’e, ts’úkw’iʔ (borr. fr. Halkomelem)

Kwak’wala (Wakashan)

k’aʔúkw’i, k’aʔukw’

Heiltsuk (Wakashan)

kw’kw’úkw’

Upper Chehalis (Salishan) Oowekyala (Wakashan)

Haisla (Wakashan)

t’ə́kwqə

kw’uukw’

k’k’ukw’, k’k’ùkw’as

Note: Terms within the Salishan language family are listed from north to south on the coast and then inland. Terms within Wakashan languages are listed from south to north. Sources: See the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

Three other examples serve to illustrate the complexities of borrowings and origins. First, there are two basic terms (etymons) for skunk-cabbage (figure 3-5), both apparently originating within Proto-Salishan languages: kw’ukw’, from Proto-Coast-Salish; and timuʔ or tamuʔ, from Proto-Interior-Salish (Kuipers 2002). Both are shared with Wakashan languages, and the latter also with Ktunaxa, as shown in tables 3-5 and 3-6. In the first case, diffusion from ProtoCoast-Salish to Wakashan seems evident, especially given a possible consistent Straits Salish derivation (cf. Saanich kw’iʔ, “stinks when it dies”; lit. “rank smell”) (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1994).54 The direction of borrowing of the second term seems more problematic because skunk-cabbage is generally more widely

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Table 3-6  |  Borrowed and cognate names for western skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) between Interior Salish, Ktunaxa, and some Wakashan languages Language (family)

Name for skunk-cabbage

Proto-Interior-Salish

timuʔ, tamuʔ

Okanagan (Salishan)

Secwepemc (Salishan)

stámuʔqn (-qn ‘head, top’)

tím’et (Western dialect), tímət (Eastern dialect)

Selish/Flathead (Spokan) (Salishan)

tímuʔu, tímuʔ (poss. cf. tiʔmu-leʔxw ‘spring’)

Ktunaxa (isolate)

tumu

Snchítsu’umshtsn (Salishan)

Ditidaht (Wakashan) Makah (Wakashan)

Nuu-chah-nulth (Hesquiaht) (Wakashan)

timú, tímuʔ

tibuut (cf. tiitłtiiy ‘to wipe,’ as with a dish) tibuút

timaat (whole plant), tinaat (inflorescence)

Sources: See the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

and densely distributed on the coast, in Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Makah territories, than in the Interior Salish region (Klinkenberg 2013). Furthermore, there is another term, provided by John Thomas, that is possibly a derivation for the Ditidaht name tibuut (i.e., tiitłtiiy, “to wipe,” as with a dish), which evidently relates to use of the large leaves in this capacity (see Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983).55 The other question relates to the disjunct distribution of this term on the coast and again in interior Washington, Idaho, western Montana, and southern British Columbia. How and when did these names “jump” from one region to the other and then disseminate not only across three Wakashan and four Interior Salish languages but also into Ktunaxa, a linguistic isolate? Interestingly, a genetic study suggests that the Nuu-chah-nulth (and Ditidaht) interacted more with Plateau groups than did, for example, the Nuxalk (Bella Coola) (Malhi et al. 2004, cited in Stone 2006, 846). A second example of a confusing situation for which some clues suggest a language of origin is the name for the edible seaweed red laver. Red laver seaweed shares a single etymon all along the coast, from Tlingit in Alaska (łaaq’ásk) to Ts’msyen (łəʔask) and Central Coast Salish (e.g., Saanich Straits Salish łə́q’əs).56 One line of evidence for the origin of this name is that it is linguistically analyzable in Kwak’wala: łəqq’əstən means “draped over the rocks” (cf. łəqq’ałła, “draped”), according to Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith and Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm. to Amy Deveau, 2011). In contrast, the Tlingit, Ts’msyen, and Salishan names apparently have no meaning except as a name for this alga,

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as would be expected for borrowed terms. Furthermore, the Kwak’wala name is arguably more complex than in the other languages. All of the peoples who use this seaweed as a food57 hold a tremendous richness of knowledge about its harvesting and processing. The Kwakwaka’wakw and Heiltsuk, as well as the Ts’msyen of Hartley Bay, Kitkatla, and Metlakatla, however, seem to have developed the most exacting ways of harvesting and processing this seaweed,58 as well as having the greatest number of different ways of using it, not only for food but also as a medicine (Turner 2003a; Turner and Clifton 2006).59 All told, the combination of an analyzable name in Kwakwaka’wakw, apparently more complex than for the other languages, added to the multifaceted processing methods, points to the central coast and Wakashan peoples as the most likely source of origin of the name, although the practice of harvesting and using this seaweed as food may predate the origin of this particular name (see chapter 2). A third example is with the Salishan terms for wapato. Historically and archaeologically, we know that wapato has long been a staple root vegetable for at least some of the Salishan peoples of the lower mainland (Suttles 1955; Spurgeon 2001), its use in the lower Fraser region extending back over 3,500 years (see chapter 2). The tubers were known to the Vancouver Island Salish through trade and may have been transplanted to a few sites on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 1999). The names in many Salish languages60 apparently derive from Proto-Salish s-qawts (“Indian potato”) (Kuipers 2002) and are also seen in the names in Halkomelem, Stl’atl’imx/ St’át’imc, Ditidaht, and other languages for the introduced potato (Solanum tuberosum). Another set of related names for wapato, however, spans a group of other languages: Upriver Halkomelem (e.g., Katzie xwaqw’ólʔs), Squamish (a synonym, xwuxwuqw’últs, said to have been borrowed from the mainland Halkomelem), Nlaka’pamux (qw’aqw’úls or qw’əqw’úl’s), and Secwepemc (tsexkwelkwelúl’s [western dialect] and xkwelkwelús or xkwelkwelul’s [eastern dialect]). In this case there is an analysis of the name in Secwepemc-tsín provided by Mary Thomas: literally “yellowed eye (affected by cataracts or jaundice)” (cf. kwel/kwal-, “yellow/green”; -us, “face/eye”) (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1997; Garibaldi 2003). Another possible derivation of the apparently cognate Upriver Halkomelem term xwoqw’óols, however, is suggested by Galloway (2009, 950), namely from the root xwóqw’ (“pole a canoe”), along with the suffix -óols (“spherical/round object, fruit, tuber, ball”). The distribution of this species is sporadic across southern British Columbia and into the central part of the province in a few sites (Klinkenberg 2013),61 and the use of wapato is much more thoroughly documented from west of the Coast Mountains than from the interior. This suggests a coastal origin for the name, and that Galloway’s analysis is more likely to reflect the original derivation, but from Mary’s interpretation of the Secwepemc name, there is a possibility that the term originated in the Interior Plateau and filtered down to the coast rather than the other way around.

146 | part one – history

There may be other clues that can help to detect the direction and even timing of borrowings. For example, names can be expected to accompany goods that are traded or exchanged, so if we know the history or pathways of trade from one place to another – for example, by finding marine shells or obsidian from known sources in archaeological sites in a region – we can conclude that other goods, such as dried berries, seaweed, or specialty wood products, might have followed a similar route, together with names and information concerning their use. However, with this approach, it may be difficult to determine the direction of borrowing unless there are other clues related to the predominant use or restricted distribution of a species since trade goods often follow a two-way route. One possibility for the transference and dissemination of the name for skunk-cabbage, discussed earlier, would be via the known trading route along the Columbia River; the trading centre at the mouth of the Columbia, for example, could have served as a pathway for Wakashan-speaking peoples to meet and interact with Interior Salish peoples. The term in question is identified by Kuipers (2002) as Proto-Interior-Salish, and if this is true, the direction of acquisition of the name would be from the Interior Plateau to the coast rather than the other way around. Such an exchange, one might surmise, had to have happened a considerable time ago – possibly 1,000 years or more – for the term to have diffused and transformed over such diverse languages in two different regions. Oral traditions and stories – such as the Haida story of Raven introducing highbush cranberries to Haida Gwaii in the introductory quotation – can also provide clues about possible introductions of plants, plant products, plant names, and plant uses. Chapter 12 discusses some examples of narratives about plants that show relationships across language and cultural groups. Naming as a Reflection of Cultural Salience The Indigenous speakers of northwestern North American languages, like those of other languages around the world, have been selective in their botanical lexicons. For example, of the over 2,300 native vascular plant species that exist in British Columbia (Klinkenberg 2013), along with hundreds of species of algae, fungi, lichens, and mosses in the region, only a small proportion are named, even if all of the plant names in all of the region’s languages are taken together. It is the same situation in our English lexicon of botanical names; very few people know the names of more than a fraction of the total number of plant species in their regions. Whether a plant, alga, moss, or fungus is given a specific name is a function of many variables, including its abundance, visibility, distinctiveness, seasonality, potential utility, and history of cultural association. In short, assigning or attributing a name to a plant species or similar taxon relates to its overall cultural salience for a given cultural or linguistic community, or

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even for given individuals and their own expertise or interests within a cultural group. One question, therefore, is: how does one measure cultural salience or cultural importance? Any effort to assess or characterize the relationship between naming and cultural salience in a structured way needs to take this problem into account. In 1988 I considered this question in a paper, “‘The Importance of a Rose’” (Turner 1988b), in which I attempted to apply simple rankings to various types of cultural roles and uses for plants in Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc and Nlaka’pamux Interior Salish cultures of British Columbia in order to assess and compare the relative cultural importance of different species. For each specific “use” or “role” of a particular plant, I suggested a three-part component – multiplying assigned numerical values for type of use or role (staple food, medicine, material, and/ or spiritual uses), relative intensity of use (how often and how extensive its use was), and relative exclusivity of use (how easy it would be to substitute some other plant in a particular application). I then added together these multiplied values assigned to each separate “use” to derive the sum of all of the values of each and every use in order to obtain the final “index of cultural significance.” The process, although tedious, worked relatively well and seemed to give a reasonable and logical range of cultural significance values for the diverse species of these two Interior Salish cultures. However, there were some legitimate criticisms of this index. The biggest problem was that, as a researcher from outside First Nations communities, I was imposing my own ideas about which “uses” should rate higher than others in assigning the values. It seemed logical at the time to use relative contribution to “survival” as my parameter for this ranking. I therefore assigned plants used as “staple food” the highest value (5), followed by major technological roles (fuel, construction, implements) (4), medicinal roles (3), use in ceremonies and narratives (2), and just having a name and being recognized (1). Several people who read the paper pointed out that it was presumptuous to assign such a relatively low value to ritual or ceremonial importance, for example, because an outsider couldn’t possibly understand the critical contribution of ceremonies to a people’s overall survival and sustainability of their way of life. In fact, ceremonies are often associated with those species having the highest cultural importance from a range of measures (Garibaldi and Turner 2004). Various other iterations of this index have been developed and applied in a number of situations where some assessment of the relative cultural significance of plants was sought (see Beckwith 1995; Kay 1993; Pieroni 2001). However, the index is not completely satisfactory, in no small measure because of the relative lack of detailed and complete ethnobotanical information available for many languages and cultural groups, especially at present, when much knowledge of previous generations has been eroded.

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Cultural Keystone Species

We developed another way of focusing attention on assessing relative cultural importance of plants through the concept of “cultural keystone species” (Garibaldi and Turner 2004). Using western redcedar, red laver seaweed, and wapato as case examples of high-profile plants from northwestern North America, we proposed a range of indicator factors, as follows (ibid., 6): • Intensity, type and multiplicity of use [Is the species used intensively (routinely, and/or in large quantities); Does the species have multiple uses?] • Naming and terminology in a language, including use as seasonal or phenological indicators, names of months or seasons, place names (Does the language incorporate names and specialized vocabulary relating to the species?) • Role in narratives, ceremonies, or symbolism (Is the species prominently featured in narratives and/or ceremonies, dances, songs, or as a major crest, totem, or symbol?) • Persistence and memory of use in relationship to cultural change (Is the species ubiquitous in the collective cultural consciousness and frequently discussed?) • Level of unique position in culture (Would it be hard to replace this species with another available native species?) • Extent to which it provides opportunities for resource acquisition from beyond the territory (Is this species used as a trade item for other groups?) In considering these factors, a five-point rating scale was developed, in which 5 represents the answer “yes, very high”; 4, “yes, high”; 3, “yes, moderate”; 2, “yes, low”; 1, “yes, although low or infrequent”; and 0, “no, not at all.” Using these factors and scale values as guides, we can gain some insights into the relative salience or importance of species. However, since one of the factors we identified that signifies relative cultural importance is naming and terminology, we have already assumed a positive correlation between cultural importance and assignment of names. Furthermore, all of these values are contingent on time and place; a species highly valued as a food or medicine in one community or by one person may not be by others, even in adjacent areas, and a plant that is a staple food at one point in a people’s history may fade into insignificance at a later time, perhaps because a more preferred plant is developed or introduced or because people moved away from the natural range of the original plant. Such a situation can be reflected in the names for plants; when one plant product functionally replaces another, it may also take on the name of the original. This may have happened in the case of the Coast Salish and Interior Salish

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names for camas and nodding onion, respectively, as discussed in the preface. Their names derived from an original proto-name, qwlawl, with one salient species (camas) assuming the original term for the Straits Salish of Vancouver Island, for example, and the other (nodding onion) retaining or assuming the term for Interior Salish peoples. (As noted previously, the Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc name for nodding onion is qwláwa-ʔúl.) Assessing the level of cultural significance of camas using the parameters listed shows that for the Vancouver Island Halkomelem or Straits Salish of about a century ago, it would have been rated highly and characterized as a “cultural keystone species.” Nodding onions, on the other hand, which are little used on the coast, have been a prominent and probably a staple food in the Interior Plateau – equivalent in cultural importance to camas on the coast of a century ago. At some point, therefore, the term ultimately came to apply to two distinct root foods, each a “cultural keystone species” in a different region. Frequencies of Plant Names The plant name database for which examples are provided in appendix 2 lists approximately 260 species (or closely related groups of species) having names in three or more languages in the study region. Table 3-7 summarizes the relative frequency of names for particular species across the range of the region’s languages and major dialect groups, along with the relative percentages of the total species in each category. Notably, and perhaps not surprisingly, there is a much higher percentage of plant species and groups of related taxa in the lower-frequency categories for names than in the upper-frequency categories (i.e., more species have fewer names; fewer species have many names). If the additional 240 species identified as having names in only one or two languages in the region were added in, this pattern would be even clearer since all of these species would be included within the lowest-frequency category. In other words, by far the greatest number of plants in northwestern North America that are named at all in Indigenous languages are named in ten or fewer languages. Obviously, familiarity with a plant is one criterion for naming it. Therefore, one general requirement for a species to be widely and explicitly named across many languages is that it must be relatively abundant and broadly distributed, either in its living form, growing in situ, or as a product of trade. As a general rule, with very few exceptions, species of limited range or abundance will be accessible and known to fewer people in fewer language areas and will therefore have fewer names. Table 3-8 lists the “top 25” species and groups of related taxa in terms of naming frequency in the region’s languages, along with their distributions. Without exception, these individual species or groups of closely related species are widespread across the study region, in terms of both their geographic extent and their broad ecological tolerance, as reflected in the wide

150 | part one – history

Table 3-7  |  Frequency of plant taxa for species or closely related groups in languages of northwestern North America Frequency

Languages and major dialects

Languages in category (%)

Examples of plant taxa, with the actual number of languages that record their names

Plant taxa with names in 3–10 languages

122.

42.1

Cottonwood mushroom (Tricholoma populinum): 5 Garry oak (Quercus garryana): 10 Smooth sumac (Rhus glabra): 6 Water-parsnip (Sium suave): 9 Mountain valerian (Valeriana sitchensis): 6

Plant taxa with names in 11–20 languages

78.

26.9

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis): 12 Field mint (Mentha arvensis): 18 Western dock (Rumex aquaticus var. fenestratus): 20 Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia): 16 Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii): 12

Plant taxa with names in 21–30 languages

40.

13.8

Northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis): 21 Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor): 27 Trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus): 24 Tule (Schoenoplectus acutus): 29

Plant taxa with names in 31–40 languages

30.

10.3

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilnum): 36 Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta): 39 Salal (Gaultheria shallon): 32 Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca): 32 Yellow pond-lily (Nuphar lutea ssp. polysepala): 37 Bitter cherry (Prunus emarginata) and pin cherry (P. pensylvanica): 34

Plant taxa with names in over 41 languages

20.

6.8

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii): 42 Western redcedar (Thuja plicata): 52 Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis): 46 Cattail (Typha latifolia): 41 Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica): 51 Oval-leaf blueberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium): 43

Total

290.

100.

Notes: The number of languages and major dialect groupings surveyed totalled about fifty-five. For practical purposes, “plant taxa” also incorporates species and broader related groups of algae,

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fungi and lichens, and bryophytes, as well as vascular plant species and closely related groups. “Languages” also incorporates some major dialect groups, where there are notable differences in their botanical lexicons (e.g., the Pemberton and Fraser River dialects of the Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc are counted separately). Sources: See the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

Table 3-8  |  “Top 25” plant species named in Indigenous languages and major dialects in northwestern North America, with the number of languages that record their names, as well as distributions of the plants Plant species or closely related groups; family

Languages

Ferns and fern allies

Distribution

38–9

Common and widespread throughout British Columbia, lowland to subalpine; CWH major zone; 12 BGC zones; north to Alaska and Yukon; south to California; east across North America; circumpolar

Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta); Pinaceae

39.

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii); Pinaceae

Common and widespread throughout British Columbia, sea level to subalpine, bogs and wetlands to rocky hilltops; SBS major zone; 17 BGC zones; north to Alaska; east to Alberta; south to Colorado

42.

Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa); Polypodiaceae Conifers

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata); Cupressaceae

52.

Flowering plants

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium); Asteraceae

45.

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia); Rosaceae

45.

152 | part one – history

Common and widespread across south half of British Columbia, moist to dry slopes, lowlands to montane; IDF main zone; 13 BGC zones; east to southwestern Alberta; south to California and Mexico

Widespread across southern and cental British Columbia, especially on coast and in Interior Wet Belt; CWH major zone; 11 BGC zones; moist lowland forests to montane; north to southeastern Alaska; south to northern California; east to Montana

Common and widespread throughout British Columbia in a multitude of habitats in all zones; IDF major zone; 17 BGC zones; north to Alaska and Yukon; east across North America; south to Mexico; circumpolar

Common and widespread in western North America, especially in the southern interior, lowland to subalpine; IDF major zone; 14 BGC zones

Table 3-8 | continued Plant species or closely related groups; family

Languages

Distribution

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi); Ericaceae

46.

Common and widespread throughout British Columbia and across North America, lowland to lower alpine; IDF major zone; 17 BGC zones; circumpolar

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium); Onagraceae

43.

Wild strawberries (Fragaria spp.); Rosaceae

Common and widespread throughout British Columbia in open, disturbed sites, lowland to alpine; SBS major zone; 17 BGC zones; north to Alaska; east across Canada and northern United States; circumpolar

51.

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum); Apiaceae

47.

Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus); Araceae

41.

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus); Araliaceae

43.

Cottonwood, or balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera); Salicaceae

51.

Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum) and trapper’s tea (R. neogland­ ulosum); Ericaceae

39.

3 species: F. chiloensis coastal, F. vesca and F. virginiana both widespread; IDF major zone; about 12-16 BGC zones, lowland to subalpine; circumpolar

Common and widespread throughout British Columbia in open meadows, lowland to alpine; ESSF major zone; 15 BGC zones; north to Alaska; across Canada and northern United States; amphiberingian; also in East Asia Common and widespread on the coast and in the Interior Wet Belt; swamps and lake edges, lowlands to montane, southern two-thirds of British Columbia; CWH major zone; 12 BGC zones; north to southeastern, southern, and central Alaska; south to California; east to Montana

Common and widespread in British Columbia, except the northeast, moist forests and stream courses, lowlands to subalpine; ICH major zone; 11 BGC zones; north to Alaska; east to Alberta and Montana; disjunct in Ontario; related species in Asia Widely distributed across British Columbia, except Haida Gwaii and outer central coast; BWBS major zone; 14 BGC zones; river bottoms and floodplains, lowlands to montane; north to Alaska; east across Canada and northern United States; south to California

R. groenlandicum common throughout most of British Columbia, bogs and moist forests, lowlands to montane; BWBS major zone; 13 BGC zones; north to Alaska; east across Canada and northern United States; R. neoglandulosum common in interior British Columbia, montane areas

Reflections on Plant Names  |  153

Table 3-8 | continued Plant species or closely related groups; family

Languages

Distribution

Wild gooseberries (Ribes divaricatum and related spp.); Grossulariaceae

40.

Frequent on Vancouver Island and adjacent mainland, moist thickets, woodlands, shoreline; south to California; R. inerme frequent but scattered in southern and central interior

Wild roses (Rosa spp.); Rosaceae

55.

Wild raspberry (Rubus idaeus); Rosaceae

41.

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus); Rosaceae

48 .

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis); Rosaceae

40.

Willows (Salix spp.); Salicaceae

49.

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa); Caprifoliaceae

43.

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis); Elaeagnaceae

46.

Cattail (Typha latifolia); Typhaceae

41.

154 | part one – history

3 main species, especially R. acicularis (interior, northward) and R. nutkana (coastal and interior, southward); IDF major zone; genus widespread throughout British Columbia and across North America; circumboreal; Eurasian

Common throughout British Columbia, except Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii, and mainland west coast; mostly east of Cascade and Coast Mountains; clearings, open woods, scree, lowlands to montane; circumpolar

Widespread in western North America and British Columbia, especially southern and central interior, lowlands to subalpine; ICH major zone; 12 BGC zones; from southern Alaska east to Ontario; south to southwestern Unites States; ranging across North America; south to California

Common and widespread in western British Columbia, sporadic in central interior, moist swamps and woodlands, lowlands to montane; CWH major zone; 11 v zones; north to Alaska; south to California

Various spp. (e.g., S. sitchensis, S. barclayi, S. scouleriana) widespread around British Columbia; south to California; north to Alaska and Yukon; east across North America; Salix is circumpolar genus

Widespread in British Columbia and western North America; CWH major zone; 14 BGC zones, including ICH and SBS; lowland, steppe, and montane; Alaska and Yukon; east to Alberta; south to southwestern United States

Common and widespread throughout British Columbia, except Haida Gwaii, northern Vancouver Island, and adjacent northern coast, lowlands to subalpine; IDF major zone; 13 BGC zones; across northern North America

Common in southern British Columbia, coast and interior, marshes and wetlands, lowlands to montane; less frequent northward; IDF major zone; 9 BGC zones; circumpolar

Table 3-8 | continued Plant species or closely related groups; family

Languages

Distribution

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica); Urticaceae

51.

Oval-leaved blueberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium); Ericaceae

Widespread but scattered across British Columbia, moist areas, lowlands to lower subalpine; more common in southern and central interior; SBS major zone; 13 BGC zones; circumpolar, with closely related spp. (Hultén 1968)

43.

Common and widespread in moist forests throughout British Columbia, especially in lower two-thirds; ICH major zone; 12 BGC zones; north to Alaska; south to Oregon and Montana; disjunct in eastern United States; also in East Asia

Abbreviations: BGC (biogeoclimatic vegetation), BWBS (Boreal White and Black Spruce Zone), CWH (Coastal Western Hemlock Zone), ESSF (Engelmann Spruce--Subalpine Fir Zone), ICH (Interior Cedar Hemlock Zone), IDF (Interior Douglas-fir Zone), SBS (Sub-Boreal Spruce Zone). Sources: See the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091). For references and descriptions related to plant distribution, see Klinkenberg (2013).

spectrum of vegetation zones in which they occur in British Columbia (Klinkenberg 2013) and, by extension, in the rest of the study region. In addition, almost all of the “top 25” are trees or shrubs; only seven are herbaceous species. All have a high level of cultural importance as foods, materials, and/or medicines, and most are used for more than one purpose. Although it is impossible to identify and analyze all of the factors that might influence the naming of plants and the spread of names across languages, some comparisons are in order. To this end, I selected the first ten species listed within the lowest category of naming frequency (named in only 3 to 10 languages or major dialects), the last ten species listed within the highestfrequency category (named in over 40 languages), and ten species from the numerical median in the centre of the middle category (named in 21 to 30 languages). These selected groups of plants are listed in table 3-9, along with summaries of the plants’ botanical/environmental information, cultural use, and linguistic information.62 This sample of thirty plants (table 3-9) – ten each at the lowest, highest, and middle levels of naming frequency – reflects a number of trends related to nomenclature. Regarding botanical/environmental factors, whereas some of the species in the lowest category of naming frequency are quite limited in their distribution (e.g., vanillaleaf, Achlys triphylla; and Geyer’s onion, Allium geyeri), others (e.g.,

Reflections on Plant Names  |  155

Table 3-9  |  Comparing and contrasting factors involved in naming plants across three levels of naming frequency for plant species and closely related groups of species in northwestern North America Species and closely related groups of species a

Languages that record names

Use entries from northwestern North America b

Language families c

Low herbaceous perennial; southwestern BC (CWH); 6 BGC zones

8 entries (medicine, insect repellent)

5 Salishan (2 cogn.) 1 Sahaptian

Low-medium herbaceous perennial; widespread, sporadic (SBS); 13 BGC zones

16 entries (medicine, poison)

Low herbaceous perennial; common in southern BC; sporadic in northern BC (ESSF); 15 BGC zones

7 entries (medicine, latex chewed)

1 North Coast 2 Dene (Athabaskan) 1 Ts’msyenic 5 Salishan 1 Other

Botanical/ environmental factors

Lowest frequency of naming: 3–10 languages

Vanillaleaf (Achlys triphylla)

6 (5 distinct terms)

Red baneberry (Actaea rubra)

10 (12+ distinct terms)d

Mountain dandelion (Agoseris glauca)

5 (3 distinct terms)

Geyer’s onion (Allium geyeri)

7 (1 distinct term; all Low herbaceous perennial; names related) sporadic on Vancouver Island and in southern interior (CDF); about 4 BGC zones

Wild chives (Allium schoenoprasum)

7 (6 distinct terms)

Low herbaceous perennial; sparsely distributed in BC interior (ESSF); 3 BGC zones

1 Dene (Athabaskan) 4 Salishan (3 cogn.)

2 entries (bulbs as food)

4 Salish (all cogn.) 2 Sahaptian 1 Other

9 entries (greens, bulbs as food)

3 North Coast 4 Dene (Athabaskan) (2 cogn.)

8 entries (medicine, Low herbaceous perennial; common and widely distributed, padding, scent) especially in southern and central BC (CWH); 15 BGC zones

Pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea)

9 (9 distinct terms)

Pacific anemone (Anemone multifida)

8 (8 distinct terms)

Kneeling angelica (Angelica genuflexa)

10 (10 distinct terms) Medium-tall herbaceous perennial; dispersed in wetlands across BC, especially in central interior (SBS); 11 BGC zones

Seacoast angelica, or seawatch (Angelica lucida)

5 (5 distinct terms)

Field pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta)

4 (5 distinct terms)

Low herbaceous perennial; widely 0 entries (but known by 2 Dene (Athabaskan) dispersed across BC (IDF); 15 BGC Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc as skin 1 Ts’msyenic zones irritant and medicine) 5 Salishan 11 entries (medicine, scent, 2 North Coast hollow device) 1 Dene (Athabaskan) 2 Ts’msyenic 1 Wakashan 2 Salishan 1 Sahaptian 1 Other

Low herbaceous perennial; mostly 21 (medicine, food) coastal, sporadic in interior (CWH); 4 BGC zones

low herbaceous perennial; widespread across southern BC, especially in interior (IDF); 16 BGC zones

Medium frequency of naming: 21–30 languages

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana)

1 Ts’msyenic 3 Wakashan 4 Salishan 1 Other

25 (11 distinct terms) Large marine alga; common in marine environment along BC coast (CWH); marine

3 North Coast 1 Dene (Athabaskan) 1 Wakashan

0 entries (general medicine)

1 Wakashan 2 Salishan 1 Sahaptian

42 entries (stipes as fishing line; bulbs, stipes as containers, conduits; food preparation; medicine)

4 North Coast (2 Haida cogn.) 2 Dene (Athabaskan) (2 cogn.) 3 Ts’msyenic (2 cogn.) 7 Wakashan (6 cogn.) 9 Salish (8 cogn.) 1 Other

Table 3-9 | continued Species and closely related groups of species a

Languages that record names

Botanical/ environmental factors

Use entries from northwestern North America b

Language families c

Licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhiza)

30 (about 16 distinct terms)

Low herbaceous perennial; common and widespread along BC coast (CWH); 8 BGC zones

33 entries (rhizomes as medicine, flavouring, sweetener)

Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii)

25 (9–12 distinct terms)

18 entries (medicine; Evergreen coniferous tree; materials for weaving, common and widespread lining; pitch chewed) throughout BC interior, merges with P. glauca (ESSF); 15 BGC zones

4 North Coast (2 Haida cogn.) 3 Ts’msyenic (3 cogn.) 7 Wakashan (2 + 2 cogn.) 15 Salishan (7 etymon with Ditidaht, 1 with Kwak’wala) 1 Sahaptian

Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis)

29 (13+ distinct terms)

Evergreen coniferous tree; common along BC coast, hybridizes with other Picea (CWH); 9 BGC zones

White pine (Pinus monticola)

27 (21 distinct terms)

Evergreen coniferous tree; widespread across southern BC only (ICH); 9 BGC zones

133 entries (medicine; roots for baskets, cordage; wood for construction, implements, fuel; pitch and buds chewed; caulking; inner bark eaten; ceremonial role)

25 entries (medicine; seeds, cones as food; bark for canoes, vessels; wood for construction)

12 Dene (Athabaskan) (9–11 cogn.) 3 Ts’msyenic (2 cogn.) 8 Salishan (3 + 2 + 2 cogn.) 1 Sahaptian 1 Other 4 North Coast (2 Haida cogn.) 1 Dene (Athabaskan) 4 Ts’msyenic (2 + 2 cogn.) 7 Wakashan (3 + 2 cogn.) 13 Salish (10 cogn.)

1 Dene (Athabaskan) 3 Wakashan 20 Salishan (4 + 3 + 2 cogn.) 2 Sahaptian 1 Other

Salal (Gaultheria shallon)

32 (about 12 distinct terms)

Low to tall evergreen shrub; common along BC coast, sporadic in southern interior (CWH); 8 BGC zones

Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)

27 (12 distinct terms) Medium to tall deciduous shrub; common across southern BC; disjunct on central coast (IDF); 9 BGC zones

Tiger lily, or Columbia 21 (15 distinct terms) Medium herbaceous perennial; lily (Lilium columbianum) common in southern BC, especially on Vancouver Island and in interior (IDF); 12 BGC zones

Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium, M. nervosa)

29 (11 distinct terms) Low to tall evergreen shrubs; common in southern BC, especially on Vancouver Island and in interior (IDF); 12 BGC zones

76 entries (berries as food, dye, flavouring, medicine)

60 entries (wood for implements; fruits, plants for medicine) 27 entries (bulbs as food)

49 (M. aquifolium) and 31 (M. nervosa) entries (berries as food; plant as medicine; bark, berries as dye)

Wild lily-of-the-valley 21 (13 distinct terms) Low herbaceous perennial; 15 entries (medicine, (Maianthemum dilatatum) common along BC coast; sporadic berries as food) in southern interior (CWH); 10 BGC zones

3 North Coast (2 Haida cogn.) 3 Ts’msyenic (3 cogn.) 7 Wakashan (4 + 2 cogn.) 17 Salishan (about 13 cogn.) 1 Sahaptian 1 Other

5 Wakashan (2 + 3 cogn.) 20 Salishan (9 + 2 + 2 + 7 cogn.) 1 Sahaptian 1 Other

2 Dene (Athabaskan) (2 cogn.) 3 Wakashan (2 cogn.) 13 Salishan (6 + 2 cogn.) 1 Sahaptian 2 Other 2 Dene (Athabaskan) 3 Wakashan (2 cogn.) 21 Salishan (8 + 8 + 3 cogn.) 2 Sahaptian (2 cogn.) 1 Other

3 North Coast (2 Haida cogn.) 3 Ts’msyenic (2 cogn.) 2 Wakashan (2 cogn.) 8 Salish (3 cogn.) 1 Other

Table 3-9 | continued Species and closely related groups of species a

Languages that record names

Botanical/ environmental factors

Highest frequency of naming: 41 or more languages

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

52 (about 27 distinct terms)

Cottonwood, or balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera)

51 (26 distinct terms) Deciduous tree; widely distributed across BC, except Haida Gwaii and outer central coast (BWBS); 14 BGC zones

Wild roses (Rosa spp.) 55 (about 20 distinct (large-flowered species) terms)

Evergreen large coniferous tree; widespread across southern and central BC (CWH); 11 BGC zones

Tall deciduous shrubs; genus widespread throughout BC and across North America

Use entries from northwestern North America b

Language families c

About 368 entries (wood for construction, canoes, houses, implements, fuel; fibrous bark for basketry, clothing, cordage; roots, branches for rope, baskets; boughs as medicine; spiritual role)

4 North Coast (2 Haida cogn., related to Dene (Athabaskan) Picea) 6 Athabaskan (3 cogn.) 4 Ts’msyenic (4 cogn.) 7 Wakashan (about 3 + 2 cogn.) 27 Salishan (about 11 + 4 + 4 cogn.) 3 Sahaptian (2 cogn.) 1 Other

98 entries (medicine from buds, inner bark; wood for canoes, fuel; bark for containers, lining; inner bark for food) About 170 entries (from 3 major spp.) (medicine from leaves, stems, petals; hips as food and famine food; shoots for tea; wood for implements; spiritual protection)

4 North Coast (2 Haida cogn.) 12 Dene (Athabaskan) 4 Ts’msyenic (all cogn.) 6 Wakashan (2 + 3 cogn.) 20 Salishan (5 + 7 + 8 cogn.) 2 Sahaptian (2 cogn.) 2 Other

4 North Coast (2 Haida cogn.) 12 Dene (Athabaskan) (8 + 4 cogn.) 4 Ts’msyenic (4 cogn.) 8 Wakashan (3 + 2 cogn.) 23 Salishan (10 + 4 + 3 + 3 cogn.) 3 Sahaptian (2 cogn., related to 3 Salish names) 1 Other

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)

48 (about 26 distinct Medium to tall deciduous shrub; terms) widespread in western North America and BC, especially south and central interior (ICH); 12 BGC zones

91 entries (berries and shoots as food; leaves in food preparation; leaves, stems as medicine)

Willows (Salix spp.)

49 (21+ distinct terms)

Medium deciduous shrub to low tree; various spp.; widespread in BC; about 14–16 BGC zones

About 137 entries (buds, shoots eaten; medicine; fibrous bark and stems as cordage, for basketry)

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa)

43 (about 16 distinct terms)

Tall deciduous shrub; widespread in BC (CWH); about 14 BGC zones

About 112 entries (berries eaten cooked; bark, stems, leaves as medicine; poison; stems hollowed for pipes, whistles)

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis

46 (9 distinct terms)

Low to medium deciduous shrub; common and widespread throughout BC (except Haida Gwaii) (IDF); 13 BGC zones

About 114 entries (berries as food, whipped, as juice; branches, leaves as medicine)

3 North Coast 5 Dene (Athabaskan) (2 cogn.) 4 Ts’msyenic (4 cogn.) 7 Wakashan (3 cogn.) 25 Salish (about 12 + 5 cogn.) 3 Sahaptian 1 Other

5 North Coast (3 related) 12 Dene (Athabaskan) (11 cogn.) 2 Ts’msyenic 7 Wakashan (2 cogn.) 19 Salishan (6 + 5 + 2 + 4 cogn.) 2 Sahaptian (2 cogn.) 2 Other

4 North Coast (3 related) 4 Dene (Athabaskan) (Tsilhqot’in related to Wakashan) 4 Ts’msyenic (4 cogn.) 7 Wakashan (3 + 4 cogn.) 22 Salishan (about 16 cogn.) 2 Sahaptian (2 cogn.) 2 Other

3 North Coast (2 related) 11 Dene (Athabaskan) (9 related to Ts’msyenic; 4 cogn., related to 11 other languages) 7 Wakashan (6 cogn., related to Salish) 19 Salish (all cogn.) 1 Sahaptian 1 Other

Table 3-9 | continued Use entries from northwestern North America b

Language families c

41 (27 distinct terms) Tall herbaceous perennial; common in southern BC (IDF); 9 BGC zones

About 79 entries (fibrous leaves for weaving; seed fluff for stuffing, diapering, etc; rhizomes, shoots as food; medicine)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica)

51 (22 distinct terms) Medium to tall herbaceous perennial; widespread but scattered across BC (SBS); 13 BGC zones

119 entries (medicine; stem fibre as cordage; food; ceremonial or protective role)

6 Dene (Athabaskan) (2 cogn.) 2 Ts’msyenic (Nisga’a related to Salish) 5 Wakashan (2 cogn.) 23 Salishan (5 + 9 + 5 + 3 + 4 + 2 cogn.) 3 Sahaptian (2 cogn.) 2 Other

Oval-leaf blueberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium)

43 (about 29 distinct terms; overlapping with 3 language families; overlapping with other Vacciniums)

Species and closely related groups of species a

Languages that record names

Cattail (Typha latifolia)

Botanical/ environmental factors

Medium to tall deciduous shrub; common and widespread throughout BC (ICH); 12 BGC zones

69 entries (berries as food; leaves for medicine, smoking)

4 North Coast (2 Haida cogn.) 7 Dene (Athabaskan) (4 + 2 cogn.) 4 Ts’msyenic (4 cogn.) 7 Wakashan (3 cogn.) 25 Salishan (2 + 17 + 2 cogn.) 2 Sahaptian (2 cogn.) 2 Other

4 North Coast (2 Haida cogn.) 11 Dene (Athabaskan) (2 + 3 cogn.) 4 Ts’msyenic 7 Wakashan (5 related) 16 Salishan (5 + 2 + 3 cogn.) 1 Sahaptian 1 Other

a

Selection includes groups of 10 species from the highest, middle, and lowest levels of naming frequency, out of a total of 290 species and closely related groups (see appendix 2). b These entries are from the Moerman ethnobotanical database (Moerman 2003). The number of entries in this computerized database reflects a North American survey based on literature not restricted to the study region of northwestern North America. The numbers presented are a subset of the overall database, representing only those cultural groups from the study region in northwestern North America. Some of the language groups in the study region are not represented in the database, due either to a lack of published literature or to their absence from the survey. Nevertheless, the numbers serve as a general reflection of the plants’ overall cultural importance. The general categories of use are also drawn from the Moerman database, as well as from other general sources (e.g., Turner 1995, 1997a, 1998). c The figures reflect the number of languages and major dialect groups having one or more names for a plant species or closely related group of species. Some languages have two or more synonymous names, but for practical reasons, these are not counted separately. Cognates are assumed when linguistic terms appear for the same or similar species in languages within the same family (unless there is some reason to conclude otherwise). When terms from languages in different families are similar, they are assumed to be borrowings. Terms, either cognate or borrowed, that are linguistically related are considered together to comprise an etymon. Terms that are counted as “distinct” thus include those terms that do not appear to be related to any other term and terms that are considered to be in the same etymon, as either cognates or borrowings. Note that “North Coast” languages include Inuit, Yupik, Tlingit, and/or Haida. The “Other” category includes Ktunaxa (linguistic isolate) and Quileute (Chimakuan language family). Determinations of linguistic relationships between terms are conservative; there may well be others that are not obvious. d Excluding a possible Ahtna name, which is uncertain in terms of identity.

Abbreviations: BGC (biogeoclimatic vegetation), BWBS (Boreal White and Black Spruce Zone), CWH (Coastal Western Hemlock Zone), ESSF (Engelmann Spruce– Subalpine Fir Zone), ICH (Interior Cedar Hemlock Zone), IDF (Interior Douglas-fir Zone), SBS (Sub-Boreal Spruce Zone). Sources: See the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091). For references and descriptions related to plant distribution, see Klinkenberg (2013). For references related to language families, see appendix 2.

mountain dandelion, Agoseris glauca; red baneberry, Actaea rubra; and field pussytoes, Antennaria neglecta) are quite widespread. Some of the species from the middle and higher categories of naming frequency are also regionally restricted in range (e.g., bull kelp, Nereocystis luetkeana, is obviously confined to the coastal marine environment, except as a harvested product), but the majority in both the middle and upper groups are widespread and common within their range. It can therefore be concluded that having a broad regional and ecological distribution increases a species’ chances for widespread salience and cultural recognition but is not in itself a determinant of whether a plant is named or not. As noted previously, there are many other plant species that are broadly distributed across many territories and vegetation zones yet not named specifically in any Indigenous language. Relative size or obviousness of a plant also influences its frequency of naming. It is perhaps no coincidence that all ten species in the lowest category of naming frequency are relatively low-growing herbaceous plants that die back in winter. Of those in the middle category of naming frequency, there is the large, highly visible bull kelp, three herbaceous perennial species, one tall deciduous shrub, two evergreen shrubs, and three evergreen trees. As a group, therefore, these plants are considerably more prominent and visible than those of the first category – the one with the fewest names. In the highest category of naming frequency are two herbaceous perennials (both highly distinctive), five deciduous shrubs (mostly quite tall), two deciduous trees, and one evergreen tree (western redcedar). Overall, therefore, it can be concluded that large plants – especially trees and shrubs – have a significantly higher chance of being named than do smaller, nonwoody plants. However, one cannot separate size and habit from culturally important attributes. Woody shrubs and trees, for example, have obvious practical applications in tool making, construction, and fuel, which would lead to high cultural salience and, in turn, a higher frequency of naming. In relation to the “use” frequencies for the species listed in table 3-9, aside from the previously stated relationship of size and habit to cultural utility, there is, not surprisingly, definite congruence between the frequency of names for each species and the frequency of uses for cultural groups in northwestern North America, as reflected in Moerman’s (2003) ethnobotanical database. The average number of use entries for the ten species in the lowest category of naming frequency is 8.2; for those in the middle category, 47.8; and for those in the highest category, 135.7. Thus the greater the frequency of names for a species, the higher the frequency of uses, or, in reverse, the greater the cultural role played by a species, the greater the likelihood of its having a distinct name. Finally, is there anything this examination of the naming frequencies for plants can tell us about shared botanical names within and across language families? With one notable exception (i.e., the seven names for Geyer’s onion, all of which are evidently related either as cognates or borrowings across three

164 | part one – history

language families), there is a very low incidence in the lowest category of naming frequency of name similarity across the languages, with only a couple of Salish cognates and one pair of cognates in Dene (Athabaskan) for the other species. The incidence of cognates and borrowings increases recognizably (therefore decreasing the relative number of distinct terms applied to each species) for the ten species in the middle category. The ratios of distinct terms to overall numbers of names for the group of species with the highest naming frequency remain about the same as for the middle group: the average ratio for the middle group is 0.51 and for the higher group 0.47. This indicates, based on this particular group of species, that after a certain threshold of naming frequency is reached, the relative numbers of cognates and borrowings for a plant’s name do not necessarily increase.63 Some plant name etymons are particularly widely distributed, both within and across language families. Soapberry is one of these. It has the highest level of congruence of names of any of the species in this table, with only 9 distinct etymons out of a total of 46 languages having names for this plant. Massett and Alaska Haida names reflect borrowing from the Tlingit name, 9 out of 11 Dene (Athabaskan) names are related to the Ts’msyenic names, 6 out of 8 Wakashan names are apparently borrowed from Salish, and all 19 Salishan names belong to the same etymon, originally derived, as noted earlier, from the Proto-Salish term xwus (“to foam, froth”) (Kinkade 1989; Kuipers 2002; Turner and Burton 2010). There are also relationships between Dene and Salish, with a reconstructed Proto-Carrier-Chilcotin term, as identified by Cecil Brown (pers. comm., 2010), possibly being borrowed from Salish and also borrowed into Sekani. One might ask what it is about soapberry that makes it so widely named and its names so consistent over northwestern North America. It is an ancient shrub in the region, with its pollen identified from some of the earliest post-Pleistocene forests on the coast, and it is widespread geographically and ecologically. Although it does not occur presently on Haida Gwaii, nor is it common in coastal regions generally (except in some places on Vancouver Island and the Gulf and San Juan Islands),64 it was formerly an integral component of the ancient forests. Its berries have a distinctive foaming property due to the presence of saponins, and this attribute is directly connected to its name and its use, in the form of a whip, as a highly valued ceremonial and feast food, despite its rather bitter taste. The berries are relatively easily preserved by drying and therefore lend themselves as a product for gifts and trade (Turner and Burton 2010). Another feature of soapberry, however, is the sporadic nature of its berry production; it is a dioecious species, so only the female plants produce berries. The bushes are common but only in certain places, and they are highly productive only in certain years. They are one of the species whose abundance and productivity were managed by landscape burning and pruning (Turner 1999; Turner and Peacock 2005). The unpredictable nature of berry production, somewhat

Reflections on Plant Names  |  165

ameliorated by management practices, has probably enhanced the worth of this food. The berries are considered to be particularly health-giving as a food, and they are used medicinally, in their whipped form or as a drink, to treat influenza and other ailments, and as a blood tonic. The leafy branches and roots are also valued for a range of medicinal purposes, from cleansing and purification for hunters and others seeking spiritual powers to treatment of tuberculosis and use as both a stomach tonic and a wash for skin ailments and swellings (Moerman 2003, citing many references and specific uses). All of these attributes undoubtedly contribute to a high naming frequency and a high degree of nomenclatural fidelity for soapberry. As well as the generic-ranked names for many plants, generally corresponding one to one with a species or group of closely related species in a genus, plants of high cultural importance are often named in more detailed ways, with specialized terms relating to their harvesting, processing, and serving, as well as, in some cases, to contrast sets of names at a varietal level – corresponding with Berlin’s (1992) “folk specific.” Examples of specialized terminology related to specific plants include the plethora of terms related to western redcedar. Many Northwest Coast languages incorporate distinct names for mature and young cedar trees, inner and outer cedar bark, cedar branches, and cedar roots (see Compton 1993b). Another example is the proliferation of related terms around devil’s-club (wíq’ás) in Heiltsuk: wíq’ása (“to eat devil’s-club”); wíq’ás’pala (“smell of devil’s-club”); wíq’ástala (“devil’s-club shavings in water”); and wíx-wiqa (“to chew devil’s-club bark shavings”) (Rath 1981). Saskatoon berry, designated in coastal languages by only one term per language,65 is named in Nlaka’pamux, Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, and some other Interior Plateau languages by a general inclusive term, as well as a number of more specific names for different recognized varieties (see appendix 2). For example, in the Fraser River dialect of Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, as well as the general name (s-)tsáqwəm for saskatoon berry, five recognized varieties are designated: stsaqwəm-ʔúl (“real/original saskatoons”) (typical variety); (s)pə́qpəq (“whitewhite”) (a low variety with whitish calyx hairs); (s)wəłkwaʔúʔsaʔ (“red-berries”) (red-berried variety); (s)tł’əxl’ús (“sweet-eye/face/berry”) (sweet variety); təxl’ús (“bitter-eye/face/berry”) (bitter variety); and nəq’-nəq’úq’saʔ (“rotten-berries”) (a variety whose berries are poor-tasting and “rotten” even when ripe) (Turner 1974). Similarly, the Gitga’at recognize and name at least four different varieties of moolks (Pacific crabapples) in the Sm’algyax, or Ts’msyen, language, based on taste, colour, shape, stem length, and other features.66 Many coastal languages also incorporate special names for the different colour forms of salmonberry: golden, ruby, and very dark. For the Nuxalk, the “white,” or light-coloured, variety of salmonberry is called by the same name as the white-fleshed form of spring salmon (Turner 1973). Similarly, different colours of chokecherry fruits

166 | part one – history

– reddish and dark purple forms – are given distinct names in some Interior Salish languages (see Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). In all, the data from table 3-9 and the database from which appendix 2 is drawn show that using plants generally coincides with naming them. Corollaries to this would be, first, that the more plants are used, the higher the expected frequency of naming and, second, that the more widespread and visible a plant is, the greater the likelihood of its being named. Furthermore, the names of many plants are retained and evolve within developing and diverging languages along with the continued use and salience of a species, and plant names are widely shared across both related and unrelated languages. Names may shift in reference to new or different species if the original plant named is no longer known or used, but when this happens, the new plant referent is usually functionally similar to the original one – for example, as noted earlier, the application of similar terms for nodding onion and blue camas in different Salishan languages. Historical relationships between language groups and their territorial boundaries, past and recent, in terms of habitats and vegetation encountered, obviously play a role in the development, diffusion, and transference of plant names. For terms that suggest long-distance relationships (as with the Nuuchah-nulth and Interior Salish names for skunk-cabbage), historical opportunities for communication between groups or between their intermediaries are key, and searching for patterns or clusters of species showing similar name distributions may reveal otherwise unrecognized links between cultural and linguistic groups and geographic areas – for example, the possible connection of Wakashan- and Interior Salish–speaking peoples at the trading centre at the mouth of the Columbia River, in the case of skunk-cabbage, as noted previously. Developing and Applying Plant Names Each language and language family, with its associated cultural groups, has its own history of association with particular landscapes and vegetation that has influenced its patterns of using and naming plants. Each language group would also have its own particular modes of word generation, its own mechanisms for conserving, transforming, or innovating plant names and terms, and its own relationships with a region’s biodiversity, all of which would influence the ultimate composition and application of its plant name inventory. In addition, each group would have its own unique opportunities for and history of interaction with neighbouring peoples, whether linguistically related or not, through shared resource areas, intermarriage, trade ties, warfare, and slavery. All of these variables, added to the diverse cultural and biological factors that relate to the utility, availability, and versatility of the plants themselves, are

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what yield such wide variation in plant names, as seen in the database from which appendix 2 is drawn. Matson, Coupland, and Mackie (2003) suggest that the unusually high number of Indigenous languages on the Northwest Coast – in fact, the greatest linguistic diversity anywhere in the New World, except perhaps California – may be the result of both very high population density and a high stability in subsistence. In other words, the relatively high biological productivity of the region and peoples’ ability to use and exploit this productivity have allowed groups of sufficient size to support distinct speech communities to exist and live well in relatively confined territories. One might add to this idea that periodic contacts and exchanges with neighbouring peoples – and even peoples considerably distant – allowed ideas, products, techniques, and terms to overflow the confines of a given language and cultural group, helping to feed innovation and support the overall biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the region. Koppel (2001) suggests that the presence of many, diverse languages in a region can be interpreted as an indication that the languages, and the people speaking them, have been in an area for an extensive time period. Conversely, the presence of fewer, more closely related languages spread out over a large area indicates more recent migration of the speakers of those languages into the area. It is still not possible to put a time frame on rates of acquisition and dissemination of plant names, any more than it is possible to pin down the dates of separation of specific language groups and relate them to the archaeological record (Ames and Maschner 1999), although sophisticated efforts to estimate language divergence through multiple lines of evidence and computer analysis of key terms are currently underway (see C.H. Brown 2010; Kari and Potter 2010a; and Nicols 2008). Ethnobotanical evidence can contribute to an understanding of language diffusion and of knowledge transmission and acquisition, and vice versa. Combined linguistic and archaeological data, as well as oral history accounts, suggest some shifting of peoples along the Northwest Coast, and some expanding and contracting of territories, but no major migrations at least over the past 3,000 years, with the exception of Dene (Athabaskan) speakers moving onto the coast into southern Oregon and northern California, which evidently occurred around 1,500 years ago (Ames and Maschner 1999; Kari 2010). In the Interior Plateau, the way of life, similarly, has remained fairly stable at least for the past 3,500 years, with people participating in what has been called the Plateau Pithouse Tradition, generally associated with Interior Salish peoples of today (Stryd and Rousseau 1996; Matson and Magne 2007). This is not to say that new peoples have not been accommodated and amalgamated. Many oral histories allude exactly to this: people moving into a region from some other area and generally being accommodated, their traditions, practices, and vocabulary being incorporated into a more general mix, with the dominant language being

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retained but changed in many ways by the new influxes of people, ideas, and names (R.E. Ignace 2008). This is a significant observation in terms of plant names because there is good evidence for a great deal of mixing of names for plants (as well as algae and fungi) both within the major language families and to some extent across language family boundaries, as can be seen from the species summarized in table 3-9 and from the names in appendix 2 and the broader associated database. This mixing can lead to the embedding of particular names for the most prominent species in the vocabularies of neighbouring languages, and in some cases, this can result in a chain of borrowings or diffusions of key culturally significant and dominant species as people, knowledge, and practices move from place to place to place. This was evidently the situation with soapberry names, as described previously. Those plant species most likely to be discussed and used in common by neighbouring peoples, or people at “cultural edges,” are most likely to have their names shared. As well, those species that are culturally the most important and salient would be expected to retain their names in most cases even as languages diverge. This situation is demonstrated in the names of plants in the Skidegate and Massett dialects of Haida; there is a higher congruence between these two major dialects for species of high cultural value and utility than for those of lower cultural value (Turner 1974). Similarly, for the Ts’msyenic language family, of the over thirty plant species whose names are related, and probably cognate, across all four Ts’msyenic languages (see appendix 2 and associated database), all but one (red columbine, called “bleeding nose,” with showy red flowers) could be classified as having moderate to high importance as food, material, and/or medicinal plants.67 Most of these also have a wide incidence of cognates and shared names across Wakashan, Salishan, and Dene (Athabaskan) languages as well. Not surprisingly, the three northern Wakashan languages (Haisla, Heiltsuk, and Owekyala) have particularly high levels of affinity in their plant names, as do the three southern Wakashan languages (Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Makah). Both the Coast Salish and Interior Salish subfamilies share high affinities in plant names within these subgroups and, to a lesser extent, between them. Dene (Athabaskan) languages also show many commonalities in their names, particularly within the various Dakelh (Carrier) dialects but in some cases extending from Dena’ina (Tanaina) and Tahltan south to Tsilhqot’in. The “edges” of the language families show the highest degree of congruence from borrowing across family boundaries. Again, both borrowed names and widespread cognates generally reflect plant species of higher cultural importance and the highest levels of salience. Notably, the “top 25” species in terms of naming frequency (see table 3-8) also, as a group, have a high incidence of cognates and borrowings.

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At broader, more inclusive taxonomic levels, plant classification systems can also tell us something about language development. For example, a study of the underlying structure of major plant categories between three major languages – Haida, Nuxalk, and Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc – revealed some significant differences (Turner 1974). Two of these languages (Haida and Nuxalk) are situated in similar Northwest Coast environments, whereas Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc speakers, especially of the Fraser River dialect, are situated in the dry Interior Plateau. Nuxalk and Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc are Salishan languages, whereas Haida is linguistically unique. Linguistic ancestry is evidently a strong determinant of the fundamental structure of the plant categories, with the two Salishan languages in this study following the same basic pattern of having a major number of terms – the majority of names for shrubs and trees – that incorporate into their plant names a suffix (-łp in Nuxalk; -az’ in Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc) denoting “plantness.”68 Haida, in contrast, employs one of three suffixes (xil, “leaf/medicine”; hlk’a’ii [łq’aʔii] [Skidegate], “branch”; and hlk’amaál [łq’amaál] [Skidegate], “bough”) attached to its plant names, often optionally, to denote “leafy plants” (usually herbaceous), “deciduous trees and shrubs,” and “evergreen trees and shrubs” respectively. Plant names often reflect peoples’ belief systems and oral histories, and I will discuss this further in succeeding chapters. Stories associated with plant names like “deer’s belt” (running clubmoss), “Raven’s canoe” (giant vetch or beach pea), “Wigat’s spoon” (queenscup, Clintonia uniflora), and “Tsamson’s bread” (Fomitopsis pinicola and other tree fungi) are examples of this. Sometimes, as with the “deer’s belt” example, described earlier, these names disseminate, apparently with the story themes themselves, across languages and even language families. In the following sections, two case examples are presented to show how peoples’ histories direct and shape their relationships with and names for plants. The first focuses on the Dene (Athabaskan) peoples and the second on Salishan peoples. These groups have each received considerable attention, both linguistically and archaeologically, and hence provide a basis for exploring ethnobotanical relationships. Plant Use and Nomenclature in Dene (Athabaskan) Languages Dene (Athabaskan) speakers are among the most comprehensively studied linguistic group in terms of their historical migrations, their linguistic history, and how it connects to their archaeological history (as reviewed by Matson and Magne 2007; Kari and Potter 2010a, 2010b). Dene (Athabaskan) languages, therefore, can serve as a case study for considering how peoples’ names and uses of plants might fit the generally understood patterns of movement and

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subsistence as documented and suggested by archaeologists and linguists. The Dene (Athabaskan) peoples are culturally and linguistically, and to some extent genetically, distinct from most other Indigenous peoples of North America.69 Their ancestors may have arrived on the North American continent as part of the earliest wave of human settlement, some 14,000 to 13,000 years ago (Kari 2010). Some archaeologists associate ancestral Dene (Athabaskans) with the microblade tradition in the north, suggesting that microblade technology accompanied this group from Asia into the New World, although microblades are not always found in association with Dene (Athabaskan) sites (Ames and Maschner 1999; Matson and Magne 2007). There are other traits, such as Kavik points (i.e., small contracting stemmed points) and rectangular, gabled buildings, which also indicate Dene (Athabaskan) traditions, at least in the interior of British Columbia (Matson and Magne 2007). Linguistically, estimates based on the rates of differentiation of languages from a common proto-language indicate that there may have been people speaking a form of Proto-Dene (Athabaskan) (including Eyak) as early as 12,000 years or more ago (Kari 2010). The Northern Archaic Tradition in northwestern North America, foreshadowing more recent Dene (Athabaskan) cultures in central Alaska and the Yukon, spans more than 6,000 years (Bielawski 2007; Kari and Potter 2010a). Based on hunting, fishing, and foraging in a cold Subarctic environment, this tradition incorporated a skilled knowledge of lithics, such as the manufacture and use of stone scrapers, and a sophisticated knowledge of butchering animals, still reflected in the vocabularies of the northern Dene languages (Kari 2010). Riverine travel, too, is still embedded in peoples’ languages, as is the snowshoe. In fact, as Kari (2010, 217) declares, “The snowshoe should be regarded as the emblem of Athabascan prehistory.” Obsidian from known volcanic mountains found its way along trails 800 to over 1,200 kilometres long, probably transported in large part by travellers on snowshoes, which were emblematic not only of Dene (Athabaskan) prehistory but also of ancestral Dene’s skills in working with woods of the boreal and sub-boreal forests – for example, paper birch, white and black spruce, and balsam poplar, or cottonwood (Andre, Karst, and Turner 2006). Between about 2,900 and 1,500 years ago, Dene (Athabaskan) peoples started moving away from their interior southern Alaska-Yukon homeland, and distinct Dene languages would have been developing from the ancestral proto-language. By the time the Europeans arrived in western North America, Dene-speaking peoples had expanded their territories westward to the coast of southwestern Alaska; eastward and northward into what is now the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, as far as the Arctic Ocean, and into present-day Saskatchewan and northern Manitoba; southward into what is now British Columbia over a vast area of the Stikine and Skeena Rivers and the northern Fraser River drainage; and even farther south to coastal enclaves in southern Oregon and northern

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California and – probably via the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains – as far as the American Southwest. Today, over fifty Dene (Athabaskan) languages are recognized, and within these, about twelve have territories falling within the study area.70 Groups within the region for which there are well documented plant names are fewer.71 Two key events took place around 1,800 and 1,200 years ago respectively, when massive volcanic eruptions occurred at White River, in the Yukon, causing dense ash falls over the entire region (Ives 2010; Matson and Magne 2007). The first ash fall may have initiated a Dene (Athabaskan) expansion northward into most of central Alaska and eastward into Great Bear and Great Slave Lakes. The second eruption, which has been dated to 803 CE and caused an ash fall in the southern Yukon over an area of about 800 square kilometres, apparently initiated another major migration of peoples away from the region.72 In any case, around this time, groups of Dene moved southward toward the Interior Plateau, eastward to the far side of the Rocky Mountains and into the Great Plains, and northward along the McKenzie River into the Arctic. In relation to the study area, Dene languages like Witsuwit’en, Dakelh (Carrier), and Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin) are likely representatives of this divergence, sharing many commonalities in vocabulary and culture. Kari (2010) suspects that Dene (Athabaskan) languages, due to their unique word formation processes, are particularly homogeneous and conservative in their vocabulary retention. Even between the Dakelh (Carrier) and Navajo, despite a probable separation of 1,200 years or more and a considerable difference in environments, there is surprising linguistic similarity, including in their botanical vocabulary (Kay 1993). Following their initial migration into the area, the Dakelh have apparently remained in place in central British Columbia for a considerable time period; their dialects have deep subdivisions (especially between Ulkatcho and the central Dakelh). The Tsilhqot’in are most closely related to the Ulkatcho Dakelh and evidently separated from them around 600 years ago, arriving in the Anahim Lake area possibly soon after 1300 CE and later moving westward toward the Fraser River, replacing or merging with Secwepemc peoples along their eastern border (Tyhurst 1984; Matson and Magne 2007, 134). Ecologically, the territories of the Tsilhqot’in and Ulkatcho are quite similar, both situated at the northern edge of the Interior Plateau; their common ancestry and their mutual interaction, as neighbours, together with the apparent linguistic conservatism of Dene (Athabaskan) languages, would have contributed to the undeniable similarity of their use of plants and their botanical lexicons. Tsilhqot’in territory also borders the northern extent of Interior Salish (Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc and Secwepemc) territories. At places like Eagle Lake in present-day Tsilhqot’in territory, there is an inferred former twin existence or overlap of Athabaskan and Plateau Pithouse Traditions, the latter deriving from

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Interior Salish peoples, with the Tsilhqot’in having occupied the area for about 350 years (Matson and Magne 2007).73 Along with the original Dene (Athabaskan) names of plants came the knowledge and technologies surrounding their use. Matson and Magne (2007, 150) suggest that the Tsilhqot’in and other Dene peoples retained the primary skills of their northern ancestors – hunting, fishing, harvesting berries and other plant foods, and utilizing birches, willows, spruce, and other plants in their technologies and medicines – even as they moved into ecologically different areas: “It is not an accident that this environment [boreal forest] is occupied exclusively by Dene (Athabaskan) speakers and that they form dialect chains, as there are no clear breaks in subsistence practices in this range, despite the presence of mountain ranges and rivers. It was surprising to us to find out how similar the environments of the Chilcotin and Tutchone were, extending even to preferred site locations [for camps and settlements].” As noted previously, even the earliest Dene peoples had already developed patterns of long-distance overland and ice travel by foot and snowshoe, as well as river and lake travel by birchbark canoe, with spruce roots for lashing, spruce pitch for waterproofing, and white spruce or birch wood for the frames (Bielawski 2007). As well as hunting and making the required implements, they also would have known how to harvest the sweet cambium and inner bark of lodgepole pine, to pick and dry soapberries, mountain blueberries (Vaccinium caespitosum), and other northern berries, and to prepare medicines from spruce pitch (e.g., black spruce, Picea mariana), juniper boughs (Juniperus communis), and crowberry stems (Empetrum nigrum) (Andre and Fehr 2000). These adaptations – whether for the Dene (Athabaskans) who moved onto the Great Plains or for those who migrated into the Interior Plateau – included highly mobile and very seasonal patterns of settlement. In both cases, the people accessed reliable major food resources of the region – bison on the Plains and salmon along the Fraser River and its tributaries in the Plateau. Versatility and ability to respond to opportunities that presented themselves, as well as to react to adverse circumstances, gave them a survival advantage in difficult environments. Matson and Magne (2007) also maintain that social traits of Dene (Athabaskans) – industriousness, generosity, individual autonomy, and the ability to form alliances with neighbouring groups – were a basic ingredient of Athabaskan society throughout the Subarctic that evidently allowed them to settle into new areas and merge with peoples already living there. A key advantage for the Dene was, according to Matson and Magne (ibid.), having a culture pre-adapted to sending out independent, psychologically healthy, small groups with the flexibility to explore new territory and adapt rapidly to new conditions. Limiting the size of such groups allowed greater mobility since, as a group becomes larger, the tendency to be sedentary increases. Movements into new

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territories were undoubtedly preceded by reconnaissance and contact with existing people there and possibly by generations of living in proximity, sharing resources, exchanging knowledge and stories, and developing relationships and alliances. Furthermore, Dene were evidently adept at living in marginal areas and at taking advantage of abandoned or little-frequented territories of others. Plant names reflect, at least to some extent, some of the archaeological and other cultural and linguistic evidence for Dene (Athabaskan) migrations. Few plant names remain from the Nicola Athabaskans, but those that were recorded reflect their relationships to Tsilhqot’in.74 The Tsilhqot’in, for their part, are an excellent group to examine in terms of their ethnobotanical vocabulary because they are at present the southernmost main group of Dene (Athabaskans) in British Columbia, and their entry into the territory they now occupy is relatively well documented (Matson and Magne 2007). A survey of Tsilhqot’in plant names75 shows that they have retained a number of terms from their boreal forest ancestral homeland but have also encountered new species not found in their ancestral lands and have developed (or in some cases, borrowed) new names for these species, as well as for others with which they would have been familiar but to which, for some reason, they applied new and different names. Table 3-10 lists twenty-four Tsilhqot’in terms that are related to those of other – sometimes several other – Dene (Athabaskan) languages. Almost all of these species are common and widespread throughout Dene territory in northwestern North America and the boreal and sub-boreal forests of Canada. A significant number of them are monosyllabic, terms that are unanalyzable and presumably very old (see Poser et al. 1999). As noted, however, the Tsilhqot’in also developed or acquired new plant names that are distinctive in comparison with other Dene languages. Table 3-11 lists some Tsilhqot’in plant names that are evidently unique as Dene (Athabaskan) words or that may be found in neighbouring Dakelh languages but are assumed to have originated with the Tsilhqot’in.76 Of the thirty-one plant species listed in this table of distinctive Tsilhqot’in plant names, twenty-one (two-thirds) have distributions restricted largely to the southern third of British Columbia, mostly in the Interior Plateau, and can be assumed to have been encountered and named relatively recently by the Tsilhqot’in; all have known uses or salience for the Tsilhqot’in, and some (e.g., saskatoon berry,77 yellow glacier lily, spring beauty, or mountain potato, whitebark pine, and Indian-hemp) are particularly important and well known. Of the ten-plus species that have evidently unique Tsilhqot’in names but are more widespread, ranging well into the northern half of the study area, several are also highly important as foods: saskatoon berry, cow-parsnip, wild raspberry, and highbush cranberry. In these cases, the reasons why their original Dene names were replaced with new names are not known.

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Table 3-10  |  Examples of Tsilhqot’in plant names with cognates in other Dene (Athabaskan) languages Plant name

Lichens and Fungi

Wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina)

Mushrooms, general

Bryophytes

Moss, general Ferns

Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa)

Conifers

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) Common juniper (Juniperus communis) Spruce (Picea glauca, P. engelmannii) Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Flowering Plants

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)

Nodding onion (Allium cernuum)

Tsilhqot’in name and Dene (Athabaskan) affinities

Distribution of species in British Columbia

tagha, tełax-tsugh ‘yellow on it [branch]’: cognate with Dakelh (Ulkatcho), possibly Sekani, Tahltan

Widespread in interior

ʔests’ibadzagh, ʔełts’ibadzagh ‘plant with the big ears’: related to Dakelh (Ulkatcho, Saik’uz), Chipewyan

Widespread; many different kinds

nintses: related to Tanaina, Chipewyan, Tahltan, Slavey

Widespread; many different kinds

ʔax: related to Tanaina, Dakelh (Stuart/Trembleur Lake, Saik’uz, Ulkatcho), Ahtna; also related to all 4 Ts’msyenic languages

Widespread throughout the province, especially in montane areas

ts’utsen: cognate with Slavey, Chipewyan, Tahltain, Sekani, Kaska, Dakelh, Witsuwit’en

Widespread, especially in montane areas

ts’u: cognate with Tahltan, Gwich’in, Chipewyan, Slavey, Witsuwit’en, Dakelh; also related to Haida name for Thuja plicata

Widespread throughout the region

tsintsen: cognate with Dakelh dialects

Widespread in southern half of the region; sporadic northward

datsan k’achɨł: contains element ‘raven’ in common with Slavey, Chipewyan, Witsuwit’en, Dakelh dialects

Widespread, especially in montane areas

chendi: cognate with Dakelh dialects, Witsuwit’en

Widespread throughout the region

dłunichi: cognate with Tahltan; related to Dakelh, Ulkatcho

Widespread and common

tł’ets’en: cognate with Dakelh dialects, Witsuwit’en, possibly other languages

Widespread in southern part of region, sporadic northward

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Table 3-10 | continued Plant name

Tsilhqot’in name and Dene (Athabaskan) affinities

Distribution of species in British Columbia

Alders (Alnus spp.)

ch’es: cognate with Tahltan, Slavey, Gwich’in, Kaska, Sekani, Witsuwit’en, Dakelh dialects

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)

dɨg: possibly a contraction of dɨnsh-gige ‘blue grouse berry,’ which would be cognate with Kaska; perhaps cognate with some Athabaskan names for thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)

Widespread throughout the region, especially in moist and montane areas

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera) Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) Wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana, F. vesca) Grass, general

Black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata) Field mint (Mentha arvensis) Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) Wild roses (Rosa spp.)

Widespread throughout the region

denɨsh (berries); denɨsh-t’an, denɨshchen (plant): cognate with Ahtna, Tanaina (Upper Inlet), Tahltan, Chipewyan, Witsuwit’en, Dakelh dialects; also with Nicola; also related in Tlingit, Haida, Inuit

Widespread throughout the region, especially dry, open forest

guns, gus: cognate with Tahltan, Slavey, Chipewyan, Sekani, Kaska, Witsuwit’en, Dakelh dialects; possibly related to Ts’msyenic language family words

Widespread and common

ch’i: cognate with Ahtna, Tanaina, Tahltan, Gwich’in, Slavey, Chipewyan, Sekani, Kaska, Dakelh dialects

Widespread throughout the interior, especially in moist areas

ʔundziny: cognate with Tahltan, Chipewyan, Dakelh dialects

Widespread and common

tł’ugh: cognate with Ahtna, Tanaina, Chipewyan, Witsuwit’in, Dakelh dialects

Widespread and common

tł’ech’i danłtsen ‘meadow smell’: called by similar names in Chipewyan, Kaska, Dakelh dialects

Widespread, especially in moist areas

xwes (bush) ‘prickle, thorn’: cognate with Ahtna, Tanaina, Tahltan, Kaska, Sekani, Dakelh dialects

Widespread and common

sesmali-chen ‘bear’s berry bush’: called ‘bear’s berry’ in Witsuwit’en and Dakelh dialects

Widespread in moist places

nelguns, melguns: cognates in Dakelh (Stuart/Trembleur Lake, Ulkatcho)

Widespread in the interior; somewhat sporadic in the north

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Table 3-10 | continued Plant name

Tsilhqot’in name and Dene (Athabaskan) affinities

Distribution of species in British Columbia

Willows (Salix spp.)

k’i: cognate with Ahtna, Tahltan, Slavey, Chipewyan, Sekani, Kaska, Witsuwit’en, Dakelh dialects

Widespread and common

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis)

False hellebore (Veratrum viride)

nughwɨsh: related to names in Tahltan, Slavey, Sekani, Kaska, Witsuwit’en, Dakelh dialects; also related to Ts’msyenic language names, to Haida (Skidegate), possibly to Salishan and Wakashan xiłdɨł, qiłdɨł: related to Dakelh dialects

Widespread throughout the interior; less common on the coast

Widespread, especially in moist and montane areas

Note: Species not included but for which there are Tsilhqot’in and other Dene (Athabaskan) names include yellow pond-lily (Nuphar lutea ssp. polysepala), cottonwood (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa), trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides), gooseberries (Ribes divaricatum, R. lacustre), red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa), tule (Schoenoplectus acutus), and cattail (Typha latifolia). The origins of these names are difficult to determine; they may be related to other Dene (Athabaskan) names, but the relationships are not obvious. Sources: See the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

Table 3-11  |  Tsilhqot’in plant names that are apparently unique to Dene (Athabaskan) (i.e., not occurring in other Dene languages) or restricted to Tsilhqot’in and neighbouring Dakelh Plant species

Tsilhqot’in name

General range of species in study area

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis)

ʔests’i chen; cf. also Dakelh (Ulkatcho) k’əsts’iz chən (ʔests’i is evidently borrowed from Salish)

White pine (Pinus monticola)

chenzuł

Mostly southern half of the region in montane of Interior Plateau and Chilcotin

Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa)

tsiłtsił

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

chenzuł (see also Pinus monticola); cf. also Dakelh (Ulkatcho) chunzool and Dakelh (Saik’uz) chunzooł

Mainly Interior Plateau and Chilcotin and southern coast

Mainly Interior Plateau and Chilcotin

Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; Northwest Coast; rare in northern interior, except in Cariboo Wet Belt

Reflections on Plant Names  |  177

Table 3-11 | continued Plant species

Tsilhqot’in name

General range of species in study area

Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum)

Interior Plateau and Northwest Coast

Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum)

tasun; cf. also Dakelh (Saik’uz, Stuart/Trembleur Lake) khasdzoon

taxbinł

Silverweed (Argentina anserina)

chìnsdàd

Northern wormwood (Artemisia frigida)

tł’esen ‘strong-scented grass’

Mostly Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; sporadic in northern interior

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata)

tł’esdzi

Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata)

Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata) Black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii)

Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; related to spreading dogbane (A. androsaemifolium), which extends farther north

Widespread throughout interior, from prairies to montane regions Interior Plateau and Chilcotin

ts’ats’el; borrowed from Secwepemc-tsin tséts’elq

Interior Plateau and Chilcotin

súnt’iny, súnt’i; cf. also Dakelh (Ulkatcho) sunt’ih (said to be borrowed from Tsilhqot’in) and Dakelh (Stuart/Trembleur Lake) sundi (“round shallot”)

Mainly Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; sporadic in central easternmost part (Rocky Mountains)

k’elatam, k’alatan; possibly related to Dakelh (Ulkatcho) deltəm, dultəm

Interior Plateau and northward

xwes-mal ‘thorn-round/berry’; cf. also Dakelh (Stuart/Trembleur Lake) whəschomai

Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; sporadic somewhat farther north

Yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum)

ʔesghunsh; cf. also Dakelh (Stuart/Trembleur Lake) əsghuh (“long shallot”)

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum)

sul, sul-chen

Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; sporadic in central easternmost part (Rocky Mountains)

Widespread in moist areas

Alumroot (Heuchera cylindrica)

nists’i dan

Interior Plateau and Chilcotin

Giant wildrye grass (Leymus cinereus)

tł’εgwεlzεyx

Silverberry (Elaeagnus commutata)

Wild pea (Lathyrus ochroleucus)

naset’i ‘it’s stretched here and there’

178 | part one – history

Widespread in interior Mainly Interior Plateau and Chilcotin

Table 3-11 | continued Plant species

Tsilhqot’in name

General range of species in study area

Tiger lily, or Columbia lily (Lilium columbianum)

sáchén ‘sun stick’; OR tsáchεn ‘beaver stick’; cf. also Dakelh (Stuart/Trembleur Lake) tsachən ʔest’anchis (cf. ʔet’an, ‘leaves’; chis, ‘to fry’); related to other Dene (Athabaskan) terms for edible greens

Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; southern coast

“Wild celery,” or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule) Tall Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium)

beghwesdinin, baghwesdinín

Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; patchy on southern coast Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; southern coast

Fragile prickly pear cactus (Opuntia fragilis)

xwes ‘spine prickle’ (this term also found in name for wild rose and devil’s-club)

Common reedgrass (Phragmites australis)

tł’ekw’a, tł’eqw’a; possibly borrowed from Nlaka’pamux

Stink currant (Ribes bracteosum)

statsemal

Wild raspberry (Rubus idaeus)

texaltsel

Blackcap (Rubus leucodermis)

nitsan nibaxalyish ‘it takes away one’s dress’

Snowberry, or waxberry (Symphori­ carpos albus)

bidagusdzan

Dwarf mountain blueberry (Vaccinium caespitosum) and black huckleberry (V. membranaceum)

nelghes

Both species common and widespread throughout region, especially in montane areas

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule)

nists’elɨsh, ʔisdzelɨsh (apparently related to Proto-Salish name)

Death camas (Zigadenus venenosus)

sesdan ‘black bear leaves’ [identity not positive]

Common and widespread in moist areas throughout region

Cattail (Typha latifolia)

Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; isolated populations in northeast near Alberta border and on southern coast

Sporadic in Interior Plateau and Chilcotin and toward southern coast Widespread on Northwest Coast; sporadic in interior, including northern regions

Widespread in area, mostly east of Coast Mountains Interior Plateau and Chilcotin; southern Northwest Coast

Widespread in region

tł’etíl (apparently related to other Dene terms for Carex spp. and some grasses)

Widespread in wetlands in southern part of territory; sporadic farther north

Southern part of region; two sites farther north

Sources: See the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091). Reflections on Plant Names  |  179

Salishan Plant Name Evolution Ames and Maschner (1999) note that the ancestors of the Coast Salish peoples of southern British Columbia may be associated archaeologically with the Pebble Tool Tradition. Both archaeological and linguistic evidence places the ProtoSalish homeland in the lower Fraser Valley (Kinkade 1989; Kinkade and Mattina 1996). Between about 5,000 and 3,500 years ago, these early Salishan peoples began spreading out from this region, with one or more groups moving up the Fraser River drainage into the Interior Plateau, where, according to oral tradition, they settled among people already living there. These new people are known in Secwepemc traditions as the Stspetékwł, or Transformers. The newcomers’ language is said by some to have merged with the language of the existing peoples to become Proto-Interior-Salish (R.E. Ignace 2008). Their practices – including traditions of plant use – also would have merged, to create a relatively stable Interior Plateau lifestyle, characterized archaeologically as the Plateau Pithouse Tradition (Stryd and Rousseau 1996; D.E. Walker 1998; Matson and Magne 2007). In the millennia that followed, Interior Plateau peoples faced continued climatic fluctuation and change, and as a consequence, they developed new survival strategies, more and more refined technologies, and more complex social organization to allow them to utilize the resources of the land effectively. For example, the Keatley Creek site above the Fraser River near “The Fountain” (Xaxl’ep) and Pavilion, described in the previous chapter, shows a period of increasing complexity and size in pithouses between about 700 and 400 years ago, with development of a more complex form of social and political organization (Hayden 1992). Over hundreds, if not thousands, of years, the Salishan people moved across the interior, probably in small exploratory groups, and settled throughout the areas now known as southern interior British Columbia, northeastern Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana, continuing to mingle with existing inhabitants. As they spread out, these people developed new vocabularies and new ways of speaking; the Interior Salish languages differentiated. The Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc separated from other Salishan peoples in the western interior, their territory straddling the central Fraser Valley and the Coast Mountains, eventually as far northwest as the Pemberton Valley. Following this divergence, the Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux separated, maintaining ties of kinship and language with their neighbouring communities, and in some cases, as in the Hat Creek Valley, these three northern Interior Salish peoples continued to maintain some contact, sharing hunting and root-harvesting territories, not to mention plant names and stories. Even today, speakers of Secwepemc (Shuswap) and Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) can understand quite a bit of each other’s languages and are able to communicate with each other across their respective languages

180 | part one – history

(R.E. Ignace 2008). The name Secwepemc actually means “spread out people” (R.E. Ignace 2008; Kuipers 2002), an apt name for this group, who extended their territory and established permanent communities all along the valleys and upriver areas of the Fraser River, including Xats’uł (Soda Creek), the Quesnel area, and beyond (Teit 1909). Originally, settlements associated with Interior Salish peoples were established in what are now Tsilhqot’in and perhaps Dakelh Dene (Athabaskan) areas, as indicated by the remains of concentrated pithouse villages along salmon streams north and northwest of ethnographic Salishan territory (Matson and Magne 2007). The Secwepemc also moved up the North Thompson River across Yellowhead Pass as far as the Jasper area and across the upper reaches of the Canoe and Columbia Rivers, thus encompassing the largest territory of any single language group in British Columbia. The southern Interior Salish peoples similarly branched off and separated into differentiated language groups. For example, the Snchitsu’umshtsn (Coeur d’Alene) and Selish (Flathead and related dialects) are neighbouring language groups that share about 55 per cent of their total vocabulary, probably having separated from each other some time over 2,000 years ago (G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003). All of these peoples either retained their plant names or borrowed these names liberally from one another (Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998). Although the Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux share about 75 per cent of their general vocabulary as cognates (Elmendorf 1965), a survey of affiliations of Secwepemc plant names that are related to those of other Salishan languages (table 3-12) shows that less than 50 per cent of plant names are shared between these two languages. Of a total of 140 Secwepemc plant names, approximately 24 per cent are unique, without any obviously related names in other languages. A total of twenty-nine terms (just over 20%) have affiliations with plant names in Coast Salish languages. Of these, ten names (7.1%) have limited occurrence in Interior Salish languages (found in just one or two interior languages, including Secwepemctsin), whereas nineteen (13.6%) occur more widely in Interior Salish as well as in Coast Salish languages. Some of these names represent notable semantic shifts from use with a particular species to broader use or to use with a different species. An example is Proto-Salish qwlawl (“edible tuber”), which refers to edible camas (Camassia quamash) on the coast and to nodding onion (Allium cernuum) in the interior, as described previously. The shift from “nuts and seeds” (Proto-Salish s-ts’ik’ or s-ts’ik; e.g., hazelnut, Corylus cornuta) on the coast to whitebark pine seeds in the Interior Plateau has also already been mentioned. Another interesting shift is shown in the Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux names for mountain valerian (Valeriana sitchensis), kíkwe and kíkuʔ respectively. These names are related to the Sahaptin (kw’íya), Northern Paiute (kuyi), and Shoshone-Bannock (kwiyi) names for the larger edible valerian (V. edulis), whose roots are known to have an “awful” or “disagreeable” smell but are nevertheless pit-cooked or boiled and eaten by these groups (Eugene Hunn and M. Dale

Reflections on Plant Names  |  181

Table 3-12  |  Affiliations of Secwepemc plant names Category of Secwepemc terms

Terms out of 140 (%)

Examples

Apparently unique to Secwpemc-tsín

34 (24.3)

Affiliated with Coast Salish terms but of limited distribution in Interior Salish (one or two Interior Salish names)

10 (7.1)

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum), white pine (Pinus monticola), wild ginger (Asarum caudatum), mariposa lily (Calochortus macrocarpus), cascara (Frangula purshiana)

Affiliated with Coast Salish terms but also widely distributed in Interior Salish (three or more Interior Salish names)

19 (13.6)

Affiliated with Nlaka’pamux and/or Stl’atlimx but with no other Interior Salish or Coast Salish languages

19 (13.6)

Affiliated with Nlaka’pamux and/or Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc and with other (southern and eastern) Interior Salish languages

32 (22.8)

Affiliated only with one or more southern and eastern Interior Salish languages

22 (15.7)

Other

4 (2.9)

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium), “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule), thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus), wapato (Sagittaria latifolia), black mountain huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum)

Mosses and moss-like plants (gen.), whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) (cf. Proto-Salish for hazelnut, Corylus cornuta), nodding onion (Allium cernuum) (ProtoSalish for “edible tuber”), paper birch (Betula papyrifera), devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus), red elderberry/blue elderberry (Sambucus racemosa; S. nigra ssp. cerulea) Desert parsley (Lomatium macrocarpum), prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.), wild raspberry (Rubus idaeus), tule (Schoenoplectus acutus), cattail (Typha latifolia)

Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), water-hemlock (Cicuta douglasii), spring beauty (Claytonia lanceolata), mountain valerian (Valeriana sitchensis) and edible valerian (V. edulis) in Great Basin names

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata), balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) (one term), yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum) (also related to Ulkatcho Dakelh and Sahaptin), wild strawberries (Fragaria spp.), dwarf mountain blueberry (Vaccinium caespitosum)

Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi) (related to Sahaptin, Ktunaxa names), smooth sumac (Rhus glabra) (related to ProtoSalish name for tobacco, Nicotiana)

Sources: Based on an examination of the terms listed in the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

182 | part one – history

Kinkade, pers. comm., 1998). Mountain valerian, on the other hand (whose roots also have a notably unpleasant odour), is used by the Plateau Salish only as a medicine, such as for coughs and flu, and is not eaten. Other names shared in Secwepemc and other Salish languages between the coast and interior (e.g., names for devil’s-club and “wild celery,” or barestem lomatium) have apparently retained their original referents or have been borrowed into the interior more recently. With a few exceptions (e.g., names for balsamroot – one term out of two; chokecherry; and false hellebore), most of the thirty-four species with names that are evidently unique to Secwepemc could be considered of lesser importance in terms of their broad application across Interior Salish territories. In contrast, virtually all of the species whose names are widely used across Salishan languages (and, as noted earlier, in some cases borrowed into Wakashan as well) are culturally important as foods, materials, or medicines. Nevertheless, there is no easily discernable way to predict which species – of those that are widely used and wide-ranging – might retain their original names in a developing language such as Secwepemctsin or which might be given new names, derived either from local vocabulary or borrowed from other languages. Cow-parsnip is a case in point: its Secwepemctsin name, being derived from Proto-Interior-Salish xwt-ałp (Kuipers 2002), is cognate with names in all of the Interior Salish languages except Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc and Nlaka’pamux. In this case, Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc and Nlaka’pamux share a cognate name (cf. Nlaka’pamux hékwuʔ) exclusively between them, but the origins of this latter term are unknown. Cow-parsnip and most other species that have cognates or borrowed names across the Interior Salish subfamily are also used similarly in most cases, so what circumstances would have resulted in this particular pattern of its names in Interior Salish are not easily determined. In the case of Secwepemc tree terms (Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998), several species whose ranges are disjunct between the coast and the Interior Wet Belt, with gaps across the Interior Dry Belt (e.g., western redcedar), apparently lost their original coastal Salishan names and acquired new names or shared names with Okanagan, Selish (Flathead), and other southern Interior Salish languages. However, a survey of the entire body of Secwepemc plant names does not show such a pattern. Only about half (sixteen) of the thirty-two Secwepemc terms affiliated only with Nlaka’pamux and/or Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc and other (southern and eastern) Interior Salish languages represent species that would not also commonly occur on the coast (e.g., Indian-hemp and spring beauty), and less than half (about eight) of the twenty-two Secwepemc terms affiliated only with one or more southern and eastern Interior Salish languages have distributions that are more or less continuous in suitable habitats between the coast and the Interior Plateau. These data generally support the ethnographic and archaeological evidence that Secwepemc contact and interchange with Interior Salish neighbours was common and resulted in, and from, frequent

Reflections on Plant Names  |  183

intermarriage. There is a general similarity of traits – including ethnobotanical traits – between the Secwepemc and their Salish neighbours, and this is likely the result of common cultural origins as well as diffusion at a later date (see Teit 1909; Boas 1890; Dawson 1892; Ray 1939; and G. Palmer 1975b). As well as moving eastward from the lower Fraser Valley, early Salishan peoples also spread westward across to the Gulf Islands and onto a major part of Vancouver Island, southward into Puget Sound, and northward to the Sechelt Peninsula and vicinity, with some remaining more or less in situ on the lower mainland. The transition these people faced, ecologically speaking, was not as great as for those who moved inland and encountered, along the Fraser Canyon on the east side of the Coast and Cascade Mountains, dry, desert-like conditions and an entirely new suite of vegetation. With some exceptions, the vegetation over most of the Coast Salish area is quite similar to that in the lower Fraser Valley, being situated mostly in the moist, mild, heavily forested Coastal Western Hemlock Zone at lower elevations and transitioning to the colder, snowier Mountain Hemlock Zone at upper elevations. Southeastern Vancouver Island, the Gulf and San Juan Islands, and some areas farther south in Washington are drier than the Fraser Valley, being situated in the rainshadow of the Olympic Mountains and Vancouver Island Ranges, with vegetation consisting of open woodlands dominated by Douglas-fir and, in the drier areas, Garry oak woods interspersed with fire-maintained prairies. Also, there are few large rivers in this zone, and the Salish developed a strong maritime-oriented culture, similar to that of their Wakashan neighbours to the west and north. As in the interior, the Salishan peoples moving out along the coast would have met and merged with other, existing peoples, developing blended knowledge systems and technologies. For example, the people around the Gulf of Georgia, associated archaeologically with the Marpole Tradition, with their expertise in creating tools of chipped stone and in woodworking technologies, may have been replaced by Salishan peoples sometime between about 2,400 and 1,600 years ago. Alternatively, these people represent continuity with the ancestral Salish and simply transformed their technology at this time. Within a short period, the chipped tools and heavy ground-slate points and ground-stone vessels of the Marpole peoples all but disappeared, to be replaced by bone and finer stone tools.78 Salishan peoples were well established in the region by about 1,000 to 800 years ago and had extended their settlements over to the west coast of Vancouver Island, around present-day Port Alberni, to be replaced later by the Nuuchah-nulth, who have evidently lived in some parts of the windward side of Vancouver Island for over 4,000 years (Y. Marshall 1993). Salishan peoples also extended northward along Johnston Strait to the region around Powell River, Comox, and Quadra Island, where they were also later replaced by Wakashan speakers of the Kwakwaka’wakw. Some populations were vanquished through

184 | part one – history

Table 3-13  |  Proto-Salish plant names incorporated into Wakashan languages Plant species

Proto-Salish or Salishan term and Salishan languages where it occurs

Wakashan languages reflecting Salishan borrowing

Sword fern (Polystichum munitum)

Central Salish root palaʔ ‘one’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Squamish pálapála (also in Klallam)

Ditidaht pilaapilaapt (also in Makah and Quileute, a Chimakuan language)

Local Coast Salish element paxlaqw ‘yellow-cedar’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Saanich páshələqw (also in Squamish, Halkomelem, Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, Nlaka’pamux)

Makah bachłapbap (also in Ditidaht)

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)

Proto-Salish manəxw, manəx ‘to smoke (tobacco)’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Nuxalk milixw

Oowekyala mímulxw (also in Haisla, Heiltsuk)

Black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii)

Nuxalk q’ay ‘poor, humble’ (berries), aq’iłp (bush); Comox q’áʔan (berries), q’áʔanay (bush); as well as Sechelt Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier), Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, Nlaka’pamux

Kwak’wala q’aq’aniy

Central Salish t’iliqw ‘strawberry’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Sechelt t’elíqw (berries) (also in Saanich, Squamish, Halkomelem, Lushootseed, Twana)

Ditidaht t’uʔulq (fruit)

Comox hám’uhay and Sechelt hamáy’, hamáʔay [second term uncertain]

Kwak’wala həmmums, ham’úm’s (bark), ham’úm’sm’es (tree)

Yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis) Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera)

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium)

Wild strawberries (Fragaria spp.) Wild strawberries (Fragaria spp.) Cascara (Frangula purshiana)

Proto-Salish ts’apaʔx ‘cedar root’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Nuxalk ts’a’pax (cedar bough tips)

Oowekyala ts’ap’ax ‘cedar branches’ (also in Haisla)

Proto-Salish qwəłin ‘birch’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Squamish qwéłiʔn (also in Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, Nlaka’pamux, and 4 other Interior Salish languages)

Kwak’wala łenxwm’es (applied to bitter cherry, Prunus emarginata)

Proto-Salish ts’ayx, ts’uyx ‘fireweed’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Nuxalk ts’ayx and Secwepemc ts’ixnéłp, ts’yxnełp (Western, Eastern dialects) (also in Moses-Columbian)

Nuxalk kwululuuxwu (berries), kwululuuxwułp (plant)

Oowekyala ts’a’ix (also in Haisla, Heiltsuk)

Oowekyala qḷúlu, qḷuluxw (berries)

Reflections on Plant Names  |  185

Table 3-13 | continued Plant species

Proto-Salish or Salishan term and Salishan languages where it occurs

Wakashan languages reflecting Salishan borrowing

Salal (Gaultheria shallon)

Proto-Coast-Salish mikw’əł ‘salalberry’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Nuxalk mikw’ł and Tillamook wich’úł (berries); cf. Proto-Salish t’aqaʔ (berry sp.; also various Salishan names for salal)

Haisla nkw’ł (berries), nkw’as, nkw’las (plant) (also in Heiltsuk, Oowekyala, Kwak’wala); cf. also Kwak’wala t’əәqqa ‘dried berry cakes’

Proto-Coast-Salish kw’ukw’ ‘skunkcabbage’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Nuxalk ukw’uk’ (also 11 other Salishan languages, including Nlaka’pamux)

Haisla k’k’ukw’, k’k’ùkw’as (also in Heiltsuk, Oowekyala, Kwak’wala)

“Wild celery,” or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule) Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) (see table 3-5)

Saanich q’əxmín (cf. sq’əx ‘to put a curse on someone’ – uncertain derivation) (term also in nine other Salishan languages, including Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, Nlaka’pamux)

Kwak’wala q’exemín, Ditidaht ts’axmíin

Nuu-chah-nulth (Hesquiaht) timaat (whole plant), tinaat (also in Ditidaht, Makah)

Black cottonwood (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa)

Proto-Interior-Salish timuʔ, tamuʔ ‘skunk-cabbage’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Secwepemc tím’et, tímət (Western, Eastern dialects) (also Selish [Flathead], Okanagan, Snchítsu’umshtsn, and borrowed into Ktunaxa)

Salishan root niqw’ (possibly pertaining to ‘fluttering’); cf. Squamish qw’əníqw’ay (also Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc, Nlaka’pamux, possibly Comox)

Gooseberries (Ribes divaricatum and other Ribes spp.)

Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Comox t’ám’exw (berries), t’ám’exway (bush) (also in Nuxalk and 14 other Salishan languages)

Blackcap (Rubus leucodermis)

Proto-Salish and Proto-InteriorSalish mətsə́kw ‘blackcap’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Comox methkw (berries) (also in Tsamosan, Tillamook, Twana, and probably Musqueam and all 7 Interior Salish languages) (Kinkade 1986)

Kwak’wala t’émxwel’i (berries), t’émxwmes (bush), Ditidaht tłabuuxway (also in Haisla, Heiltsuk, Oowekyala, and Cowlitz, a Sahaptian language)

Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) (see table 3-6)

186 | part one – history

Kwak’wala kw’aniqw, qw’eniqw’i (uncertain) (possibly also in Haisla, Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Quileute, a Chimakuan language)

Kwak’wala mədzəkw (berries; also garden raspberries, R. idaeus), mədzəkwməs (bush)

Table 3-13 | continued Plant species

Proto-Salish or Salishan term and Salishan languages where it occurs

Wakashan languages reflecting Salishan borrowing

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa)

Proto-Coast-Salish k’ipt ‘red elderberry’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Nuxalk k’ipt (berries), ink’iptłp (bush)

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis)

Proto-Salish xwus ‘to foam’, s-xwus-m ‘soapberry’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Comox xwúsum (berries), xwusúm’ay (bush) (and in 18 other Salishan languages)

Oowekyala k’ìbat (berries) [also in Haisla, Heiltsuk, and Cowlitz (ch’ipt), a Sahaptian language]

Kwak’wala nəxwəskən (also in Heiltsuk, Oowekyala, Nuu-chahnulth, Ditidaht)

Proto-Salish t’əls ‘highbush cranberry’; Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əl ‘to crackle, pop,’ ‘a plant providing berries or seeds’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Nuxalk st’ls (berries) (also in 6 other Salishan languages)

Kwak’wala t’əls (berries), t’əlxwm’əs (bush) (also in Haisla, Heiltsuk, Oowekyala)

Bog blueberry (Vaccinium uliginosum) and Canada blueberry (V. myrtilloides) Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule) (see table 3-1)

Local Coast Salish elements mul’sm, mal’sm ‘blueberry sp.’ (Kuipers 2002); cf. Saanich mal’səng (berries), mal’səng-íłch (bush) (also in Comox, Sechelt, 7 other Salish languages as V. uliginosum and/or V. myrtilloides)

Nuu-chah-nulth muunisaq (various dialects), Ditidaht bool’sixd (V. myrtilloides)

Note: As well as these plant names, there are others shared across Wakashan and Salishan languages that may have different derivations, whose names may have originated in Wakashan languages (e.g., red laver seaweed, Pyropia abbottiae, from Kwak’wala; or licorice fern, Polypodium glycyrrhiza, possibly from Ditidaht) (see table 3-9). Other terms that may have been borrowed into Salishan languages from Wakashan include names for nodding onion (Allium cernuum) (Comox máqw’eth’, related to four Wakashan names, such as Kwak’wala meqw’ets’í); giant horsetail (Equisetum telmateia) (fertile shoots) (Klallam maʔəxw, related to Ditidaht and Makah baʔax); tree fungus (Laricifomes and other spp.) (Nuxalk kani, kanani, related to Kwak’wala kanaay, kani and North Waksahan terms); bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) (Nuxalk sakwm, related to Kwak’wala ságwemi and two North Wakashan cognates); and Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum) (Nuxalk puʔyaas, puuyaas, related to Kwak’wala púy’as and names in three North Wakashan languages). Sources: See the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

warfare; others were apparently replaced through gradual incursion and intermarriage. Significantly, at some point or points, a number of plant names were transmitted across the language family boundary from Salishan to Wakashan languages. Some of these names have already been mentioned: names for

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highbush cranberry, skunk-cabbage, and soapberry. The others, with a total of nineteen, are listed in table 3-13. Looking at the actual species involved shows a group of plants that are all culturally important, including thirteen food species, nine species important in technology, and eight medicinal species (with some overlap across these categories). This list does not include species whose names indicate borrowing from Wakashan into one or more Salish languages. Conclusions What can plant names tell us about peoples’ interactions and about the acquisition, transmission, and adaptation of ethnobotanical knowledge? First and foremost, the names are a reflection of the cultural salience of plants. The more important and relevant a plant is, the more likely it is to be talked about and named, to have its name retained and embedded within the language over generations, and to have its name and associated knowledge and practice transmitted and shared across languages and language families. Language and plant names are tied to places, to narratives, to technologies, and to seasons. They are key to communicating local ecological knowledge and therefore key to people’s survival and to the continuity of their knowledge, practice, and belief. Understanding a people’s history can give clues about their acquisition and development of plant names. Cultural and ecological edges (Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty 2003) – for example, in Tsilhqot’in territory in the northern part of the Interior Plateau or between the Salishan and Wakashan peoples of Vancouver Island – provide particularly productive opportunities to study the transmission and transformation of plant names and associated knowledge systems. The complexities can be overwhelming, but focusing on particular examples in the context of the entire body of plant names can bring some insights to the processes and practices of botanical naming. It is not always possible to distinguish historically based similarities and differences between terms without deep linguistic analysis. Terms can seem very similar yet be unrelated. Another confounding factor in cross-language comparisons of plant names is knowing whether two or more terms are similar due to their development from a common proto-term, over the course of divergence from a common ancestral language, or whether they are the result of one term having been borrowed back from another language at some subsequent time after the languages separated.79 Sometimes, too, a term is entirely changed when absorbed into the new language, although the meaning may be retained – a “translation borrowing.” Alternatively, a term may be borrowed and retained but the meaning changed to some other more culturally appropriate application – a semantic shift. This can happen to terms within a language, as well as to those that are borrowed. In fact, this is one of the main ways that languages and

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vocabulary develop in any language – through extension and new applications of terms. Terms can also expand to a broader meaning (“expansion of reference”) or can become restricted to a more specific meaning (“restriction of reference”). There are no rules, except those guided by the language and its speakers, and no real ways of predicting what will happen to any word or name in a given circumstance. Nor is there any easy way of casting back to the origins and pathways of a word and its meanings, especially in languages that are not written down. In understanding the derivations of plant names (as well as of other life forms), the picture is further complicated by the unequal distribution of and access to particular types of species. Furthermore, the ranges of species, as of humans, have changed over time. The entire system of relationships reflected in botanical vocabulary, for example, is a dynamic one, and the recent introduction of a whole suite of new species into the region following the arrival of European (and Asian) newcomers provides a compelling case study in how people accommodate and adapt to change linguistically. The botanical lexicon of any group is developed through a combination of retention of existing terms, expanding, modifying, adapting, and shifting the meanings of these terms, creating and developing new terms, borrowing terms from neighbouring peoples and languages (enabling better communication for trade, for example), and semantic shifting and expansion of terms, old and new, to enable communication about relevant topics in a changing world. As new species enter into people’s experience, these are often seamlessly incorporated into the vocabulary through descriptive designations that become codified into actual names as more and more people use them in conversation. Often they are named in reference to known existing species or through similarity to some other entity. This is a group process but can be led by individuals (e.g., leaders, parents, and those who travel) who might have particular expertise, which is in turn reflected in a group’s collective vocabulary. It is also important to note that borrowed or “loaned” words almost always imply a degree of bilingualism or multilingualism on the part of one or more individuals in a family or group; this could be a woman married into a group, or the children of that woman, or someone who travels routinely between different speech communities.80 These would be the individuals who introduce the words from one language into another, sometimes together with specific products and sometimes simply as a new name for something already known (C.H. Brown 1999). The two detailed examples from the previous sections describing the migrations of Dene (Athabaskan) and Salishan peoples illustrate how diverging linguistic groups, as the people moved from their original proto-language homelands into new territories with different environments and new species, tended to retain some of their original botanical names and adapt them to their new

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situation, as well as borrowing or developing new terms. Sometimes the original proto-names were simply expanded or shifted semantically to accommodate new species.81 In other cases, new terms were apparently borrowed from neighbouring peoples already familiar with them.82 If people moving into a new territory remained in contact with their ancestral relations and neighbours of their original homelands – or renewed contact with them at a later time – their botanical lexicons became even more complex, with combinations of original terms, newly developed terms, and terms borrowed through interaction of various types and at various stages from related and unrelated languages. The Dene (Athabaskan) and Salishan languages exemplify all of these types in their botanical vocabularies. Understanding these patterns of naming is important, not only because they reflect peoples’ historical interactions but also because they probably reflect how other types of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge disseminated, diverged, amalgamated, and changed as people moved away from each other, connected with other landscapes, other plant resources, and other peoples, and then, in some cases, reconnected with original ancestral groups and landscapes. In the chapters to come, similar ranges of complexity are seen in peoples’ use of food, materials, and medicines, as well as in their stories, beliefs, and other facets of their cultures. As will be seen in the following chapter, the botanical lexicons and knowledge systems of all of the Indigenous peoples within the study area made dramatic adjustments when a wave of new species was introduced.

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4 Change, Loss, and Adaptation of Plant Traditions

A man by the name of McKay came to build his house on that place [at the mouth of the Kingcome River on the central coast of British Columbia] as well as the other whitemen who also came and built their houses there. This McKay took for himself the land where our forefathers always got their food. We know this place where the women used to take the [edible] roots out of the ground ... They put down stakes [to] mark the boundary lines for each one, and to our surprise this whiteman came and just took the place and ... our women were surprised to be ordered away from that place and they don’t know why they were ordered away. (Chief Cesaholis, cited in Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Columbia 1914)

Introduction The time following the arrival of the first Europeans in northwestern North America witnessed tsunami after tsunami of tumultuous change to the lifeways of First Peoples, including to their complex systems of plant use and relationships with their environments. Although there is evidence of contact between Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America and people of distant places from well before Europeans arrived,1 there is no question that the European entrance precipitated the most rapid, extensive, and all-encompassing transformation to the lives of Indigenous peoples that they had experienced since their initial arrival in North America – a transformation reflected in almost all aspects of ethnoecological and ethnobotanical knowledge systems. The circumstances and effects of exploration and trade, colonization, participation in the wage economy, and globalization all manifest themselves differently across diverse regions, languages, and cultural groups, but there are

many commonalities in terms of ultimate consequences of these changes. In this chapter I examine some of the direct and indirect outcomes from the period of contact, colonization, industrialization, and urbanization that relate to the systems of plant use and environmental relationships of First Peoples in northwestern North America and examine the ways that this knowledge was transmitted, communicated, and adapted to meet the needs of the new age. The newcomers and their introduced goods, attitudes, policies, and agendas led to a host of consequences, with massive economic, social, and environmental restructuring, both intentional and unintended. Waves of disease epidemics – most dramatically, smallpox but also measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, influenza, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and in the southern parts, malaria – struck villages and entire nations, reducing populations drastically (Boyd 1990, 1992). The devastation caused by these epidemics was equivalent to or worse than the ravages of the Black Plague in the Middle Ages in Europe. In some cases, entire villages were practically exterminated.2 Infants and children were often the most severely affected, and in some bands in parts of the Interior Plateau, for example, very few survived to adulthood, especially among those peoples closest to major white settlements (Teit 1909). Within a single generation, or at least within one lifetime, the predominant occupation of the lands and territories of northwestern North America shifted from Indigenous peoples to settlers of European origin, who also appropriated the resources of these areas and changed the landscapes to their own purposes. In their assumptions of superiority and outright arrogance in some cases, the colonial officials and religious leaders imposed and enforced laws and restrictions on the Indigenous peoples throughout northwestern North America, regulations that privileged the newcomers and impacted virtually every aspect of the lives of the original inhabitants, who were already reduced in strength and numbers by the waves of disease. Much has been written about the effects of the different eras of post-European appearance, from the time of the early explorers and fur traders to the colonial era and more recent times (Duff 1997),3 but few have focused specifically on ethnobotanical and ethnoecological aspects of these periods of immense change. Across the entire area, Indigenous people experienced direct impacts on virtually every aspect of their food systems, technologies, medicines, and Traditional Land and Resource Management systems, including ceremonial practices and belief systems. They also faced many hidden or “invisible” impacts, such as on their ability to pass on Indigenous knowledge, due to changing demographies, languages, and political, economic, social, and educational systems and to the loss of control over lands and resources (Turner, Gregory, et al. 2008). The social structures and power dynamics of these peoples changed dramatically, as high mortality rates wreaked havoc with hereditary and customary roles and leadership. Loss of children through disease and enforced schooling

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in distant places, banning of the potlatch (in 1885), missionization, and the new wage economy, in turn, affected whole systems of resource use and exchange, along with pathways of learning and knowledge transmission. All of these changes, added to the new goods being brought in and new lifeways, occurred within a relatively brief time frame: mainly from the late 1700s and early 1800s in the study region. Kwakwaka’wakw chief Cesaholis’s presentation to the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Columbia (McKenna-McBride Commission) in 1914, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is just one small illustration of how white settlers’ intrusions on Indigenous peoples’ territories – in this case, the territory of the Tsawataineuk in the Kingcome River Valley – changed the lives of the original residents in major ways (Deur et al. 2013; Turner and Turner 2008). The livelihoods of over 600 people who had their root gardens, their crabapple-harvesting areas, and their hunting and fishing areas in the Kingcome River estuary were impacted by the settlers’ intrusions (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 1994). Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (pers. comm., 1994) described this situation from her perspective: At the mouth of the [Kingcome] river, there’s a plain just below the village. That’s where their plant gardens were. But, along came an Indian agent who was looking for a ranch and he saw this beautiful land that our people had been cultivating all these years and decided that’s what he wanted. So he went in there and took over that land and completely removed all the old plants, all the old plants that grew [there]. And he brought in cattle that also destroyed a lot of the old roots and ... one of the other roots was the sagwṃ or bracken [fern] root. Another one was tsakus or fern root [spiny wood fern, Dryopteris expansa] and another one was t’əxsús, [springbank] clover root [also dlexsém, Pacific silverweed; and xúkwem, northern riceroot]. These were the roots my people just craved, as my grandmother said. Although there have been some obviously positive outcomes for Indigenous peoples resulting from the European presence – including greater mobility for people, new materials and technologies for artistic expression, more opportunities for social interaction, improvements in healthcare, and rejection of slavery – it is equally obvious that much of the European presence has not been advantageous to First Peoples’ overall well-being or to the native plants, fish, and wildlife of the area, almost all of which have declined in abundance and productivity over the past two centuries (British Columbia Ministry of Environment 2007; World Wildlife Fund 2008; Ommer et al. 2007). Major environmental restructuring began during the fur trade era with the near extinction of the sea otter and fur seal on the Pacific Coast and of beaver in the streams and wetlands

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across western North America over just a short period of time (Burley, Hamilton, and Fladmark 1996) due to massive overkill supported by the fur trade companies and assisted by Indigenous hunters themselves, whose usual constraints against overuse were confounded by the new industrial economy. One of the ironies of the losses in lands and resources that Indigenous peoples incurred due to the newcomers’ economic enterprises is the way that the First Peoples were conscripted – with the promise of better lives and jobs in the new wage economy – to work on the very projects and ventures that would ultimately impair their ability to maintain their own cultures. Whether it was helping the Hudson’s Bay Company build its forts;4 piloting boats transporting prospectors and miners up rivers to seek their fortunes in the Gold Rush era; building dams, dykes, and river diversions that eliminated or restricted salmon runs; cutting down the giant trees and dragging them out to log dumps through fish spawning channels; working in the innumerable canneries that sprang up along the coast and fishing to supply the vast international markets; or clearing land for farming and settlements – Indigenous people participated, often in the belief that there were no other options for them to keep their families fed and sheltered during these new times of European dominance and inevitable change in lifestyles (Lutz 2008). Many Indigenous leaders, seeing prospects for forging new connections with neighbouring groups and with these newcomers who had seemingly limitless resources, worked to develop relationships with them and to gain advantages over others in controlling access to the new goods and opportunities. They were enterprising and adaptive; when opportunities in the fur trade declined, they found other sources of income. For example, the Haida, Nuxalk, and others began to cultivate potatoes and sell them to the traders and residents at Fort Simpson, as well as to their Ts’msyen neighbours (some of whom also grew potatoes themselves). Long known for their superb canoes and general woodworking abilities, the Haida in particular turned their artistic expertise toward producing goods for trade and sale to the newcomers. Haida artworks in the form of woodcarvings, painted spruce-root hats and baskets, and intricately carved poles, pipes, plates, and other pieces made of argillite were sought widely by immigrants, visitors, traders, and museum collectors and soon became worldfamous (Fisher 1992; Hoover and Macnair 2002). Thus these products helped to provide a source of income for some of those whose traditional means of subsistence had been disrupted. At the same time, however, the immense spiritual symbolism embodied in this art was being eroded by the missionizing efforts of the Christian churches, and objects that were held as sacred and others symbolizing family histories and lineages (such as many of the cedar-wood totem poles and other monumental figures that marked villages up and down the coast) were taken, given away, sold, or destroyed, resulting in profound cultural and social losses.

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Women as well as men participated in these new endeavours, and often while the men were travelling or working in distant places, the women were the ones who kept their families fed and clothed through their skills in basketry and buckskin work, and later knitting and sewing. The women – and children as well – also helped to clear land, build flumes, and process fish, and they worked in the burgeoning agricultural industry as well as working as maids and housekeepers in urban centres. Whereas entire families and kin groups had always moved together to different parts of their territories over the seasonal round, with the advent of new economic opportunities, families moved farther afield, sometimes permanently, and patterns of movement were changed to accommodate the needs of the expanding agricultural and fisheries industries and the growing urban settlements. Much of what we know about early Indigenous cultures and ethnoecological knowledge is drawn from the written journals, letters, and other accounts of European chroniclers: explorers like Alexander McKenzie, David Thompson, James Dixon, Simon Fraser, and James Cook, among dozens of others; biologists and naturalists like Archibald Menzies (see Newcombe 1923), C.F. Newcombe, David Douglas, George Dawson, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, James Swan, and Robert Brown; colonial officials like James Douglas; and ethnographers like Franz Boas, James Teit, John Swanton, and Edward Curtis. Their observations were in some cases exceedingly detailed and were accompanied by drawings and, later, by photographs that today are priceless, providing glimpses of earlier lifeways and environments. Nevertheless, like the archaeological record, these different sources by no means provide a complete understanding of the forces, issues, and circumstances at play over this time period. For example, elite men of the Indigenous communities were the ones most commonly portrayed and featured from the early contact times since they were the ones most often encountered and who generally served as the representatives of their families, clans, and communities. They tended to travel more, and they were more often engaged in the new economic roles as fishers, hunters, and agriculturalists. Therefore, women and women’s knowledge and activities – including much plant-based knowledge – were less commonly featured. Even the most observant outsider cannot capture with complete accuracy the subtle details and nuances of another people’s culture, and many of these individuals reflected serious biases in their chronicling, unable to break through the constraints of their own upbringing and worldviews. Their interpretations are tempered by assumptions of racial superiority, by their own religious beliefs, or in some cases, by romantic views of Indigenous peoples engendered by the writings of Henry David Thoreau (1854) and other writers of the American Romantic period. Some of the accounts reflect relatively respectful and sympathetic attitudes – including an appreciation for the help and sustenance provided by

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the Indigenous people the newcomers encountered – whereas others are more negative in their assessments. Other perspectives were blinded by self-interest and greed. Early Contact Period: Exploration and Trade Although many of the changes to peoples’ lifeways that ultimately transpired following European contact were incremental, major changes were often heralded or triggered by a single occurrence, such as the arrival of a particular explorer or the establishment of a trading post in a people’s territory. Such happenings led to chains of events that had profound and long-lasting consequences for plant use and knowledge across many, diverse aspects of people’s lives. First Contacts and Plant Products

The journals of early explorers such as Captains James Cook and George Vancouver, Simon Fraser, and Lewis and Clark, mentioned previously, provide glimpses into an earlier era of Indigenous peoples’ lives and environments, but it cannot be supposed, on the one hand, that their accounts are complete or entirely accurate or, on the other, that they represent any kind of previous static state of cultures and ecosystems. As reflected in archaeological records, oral histories, and language development, change has always been a part of people’s lives. The coming of Europeans was just one more example of ongoing interactions among different groups and between people and their environments. Yet, undeniably, these newcomers and the goods and species they brought with them were on a different scale, and ultimately they wrought changes that were collectively far more extensive and profound than people had previously experienced. Pacific North America, the region west of the Rocky Mountains, was entered by European explorers and traders much later than most of the rest of the continent. Yet Indigenous peoples in the region felt the European influence even before people saw the first European newcomers. Disease epidemics were already ravaging Indigenous communities in some places, but some of the new “goods” that found their way into Indigenous peoples’ lives before the white people themselves arrived were more welcome. Horses, for example, were brought to the Americas by Spanish conquistadors. They entered the native trade networks perhaps as early as the late 1500s and had reached the Columbia Plateau sometime during the 1730s or 1740s, as will be described later. Other coveted new goods, from cloth and woolen blankets to glass beads and, perhaps above all, iron, copper, and other metals, were acquired early on through trade networks and put to use in all aspects of Indigenous peoples’ lives. Eventually, as the trading posts were established, steel traps, flintlock muskets,

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powder, ball and shot, axes, tomahawks, steels and flints, knives, iron, copper kettles, brass finger-rings, bracelets, and tobacco became commonplace – but still highly valued – items, purchased with beaver skins and a range of other indigenous goods. For the Secwepemc trading with the Hudson’s Bay Company, for example, these included “large quantities of furs of all kinds, dressed skins, moccasins, dried roots and berries, dried meat, fat, dried salmon, dogs and horses” (Teit 1909, 537). In the spring of 1778, Captain James Cook, directed by the British Admiralty to seek a possible Northwest passage between Europe and Asia, arrived on the west coast of Vancouver Island near Estevan Point. The first European to land on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, he was completely impressed by the vast rainforests with their tall, straight trees that formed “a beautiful prospect” (J.K. Barnett 2008, 80). He was met by Nuu-chah-nulth residents in thirty-two cedar dugout canoes and was given two “beaver” (probably sea otter, which was called “sea beaver”) skins. At times, he noted, over 100 canoes clustered about his ships. He spent four weeks there at Nootka Sound, preparing new masts and spars (the first recorded instance of Europeans using timber of Vancouver Island) and obtaining various provisions for his ships, including grass for their goats and sheep, wild onions (probably Allium cernuum) and nettles (Urtica dioica) as food for his men, and evergreen boughs, probably western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) or Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), to make more of the famous antiscorbutic “spruce beer” he gave to his men, successfully, to prevent scurvy (Turner 1978; Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Parrish, and Solberg 2007). The advent of Europeans and other newcomers into the area created numerous occasions of confusion due to the limitations of communication. Some of the misunderstandings resulted in profound injustices, whereas in other cases they led to incidents of puzzlement and even humour, at least retrospectively. Many Indigenous peoples were bilingual or multilingual and, through use of gestures and expressive actions, were skilled communicators. The resident people were understandably amazed at the arrival of these light-skinned strangers in their large, chunky boats or – from the east side – in eastern-style birchbark canoes. These new people, seeking food, water, fuel, and other supplies, brought some seemingly strange products with them – not only bright metals and glass beads but also unfamiliar exotic foods: bins of rice, whose grains resembled maggots; barrels of flour that looked like mussel shell shavings used as a talc on the bare leg to alleviate chafing when one was rolling stinging nettle twine (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983); dark shrivelled raisins that looked like flies; round whitish pilot biscuits that resembled tree fungus; and oranges that were tough and bitter-tasting if one didn’t realize that they had to be peeled before they were eaten (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2003; Marsden 1992). Vile-tasting spirits, dried beans that looked like little periwinkle shells, sweet, dark molasses that somewhat resembled congealing blood, and brown sugar that moved as if

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it were alive – all were received, tasted, evaluated, and in some cases incorporated easily and readily into peoples’ existing food systems, as well as into their languages (see C.H. Brown 1999). The Potato

Of all of the new plant foods brought by the newcomers, perhaps the most widely embraced was the potato (Solanum tuberosum) (Suttles 1951a; Norton 1985). Tasty and easily grown and prepared, this generous tuber fitted well into the assemblages of root vegetables people were already using and, in some cases, cultivating, depending on the region: camas bulbs, wapato, riceroot (Fritillaria spp.), silverweed roots (Argentina spp.), spring beauty, or mountain potato, and wild nodding onions (Deur and Turner 2005; McDonald 2003). It was easy to understand the instructions for planting, harvesting, and cooking these potatoes, especially for the Haida and Tlingit, who were already cultivating tobacco in a similar way (Turner and Taylor 1972). Potatoes could be seamlessly incorporated into existing root-harvesting grounds, planted in the spring “as soon as the snow melts” (Krause and Krause 1993, 165, for the Yakutat Bay Tlingit, 9 April 1882), and left to grow unattended over the course of peoples’ seasonal movements, before being dug up in the fall, to be cooked and served in large quantities cold or hot at feasts and family meals. Rich in carbohydrates, easily stored, transportable, and tradable, they would have been highly appreciated by physically active, widely travelling peoples (Charles R. Brown, pers. comm., 2009). Eaten dipped in oulachen5 grease, cooked with halibut or salmon heads, seasoned with seaweed, and accompanied by herring eggs on kelp or by various kinds of game, they offered nutritious and convenient meals. Rumours that some of the coastal names for potato – sgawsid (Haida), sgusí (Kitasoo), and so forth – originated from the English words “good seed” (said to have been pronounced by the newcomers as they attempted to explain the role of seed potatoes and how to plant them) may be correct. However, another explanation is that these terms, whose variants are found commonly in central and northern coast languages, are derived from Proto-Salish s-qawts, for “Indian potato,” including in some languages wapato and in other cases possibly Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) (Kuipers 2002; Suttles 1951a, 2005; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972). These terms are listed in appendix 3 (along with the various names for turnip), drawn from a broader database available through the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091) that lists names of introduced species, both cultivated and weedy, from different languages of the study region. Potatoes became such a commodity, especially on the Northwest Coast, that they sometimes spread even faster than the white explorers and traders who introduced them. For example, in 1842, when James Douglas arrived at the site

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4-1  |  Haida potatoes, said to be genetically similar to the “Ozette” potato of Washington, originally introduced to Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island.

of what was to become Fort Victoria, he noted, “We are certain that Potatoes thrive and grow to a large Size, as the Indians have many small Fields in cultivation which appear to repay the Labour bestowed upon them, and I hope that the other Crops will do as well” (cited in Scholefield 1914, vol. 1, 462–4). The Klallam across the strait were also growing “very fine potatoes” at this time, as reported by Douglas (cited in ibid., 467). Also by 1842, in the Interior Plateau, the Snchitsu’umsh were cultivating a superior strain of potatoes in the Spokane Valley (Thwaites 1969). So important were potatoes when they were introduced that the Stl’atl’imx and others referred to them as “Chief ” (Hayden 1997, 24). One particular type of potato – known by some on the northern coast as “Haida potato” (Primrose Adams, pers. comm., 2003) and in the area around the Olympic Peninsula and the west coast of Vancouver Island as the “Ozette potato” or “Makah potato” – is apparently a descendant of the earliest potatoes introduced by the Spaniards at Nootka Sound in the late 1700s, probably originating from Mexico or Chile (Zhang et al. 2010) (figure 4-1). This type was introduced very early on to the northern coast as well, probably as early as 1825. Genetic work on this potato, which is light brown, elongated or knobbly, and very tasty, was undertaken by crop geneticist and potato specialist Charles R.

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Brown (pers. comm., 2008; see also Zhang et al. 2010) of the United States Department of Agriculture and his colleagues. He wrote, Ozette [potato] is a bit of a world traveler and at this point I would not be surprised to get others from distant locations that turn out to be Ozette. It is so weedy that it persists without being planted for years. So far I have identified four distinct potatoes: 1) Makah/Ozette (= Ozette, the Makah Nation agreed to this new name because it is being commericialized by Slow Food in the Puget Sound and they wanted to honor the Makah Nation); 2) To-Le-Ak, a purple skin purple flesh potato grown by the Quillayute [Quileute] Nation; 3) Maria’s potato, a potato grown by the Tlingit Nation (obtained from Nora and Richard Dauenhauer’s garden in Juneau); and 4) Kasaan, a potato from that village grown by the Haida Nation. These potatoes are Native American and Alaska Native potatoes in the sense that I think they got them from the Spanish explorers probably in the second half of the eighteenth century. Makah/Ozette, Maria’s and Kasaan are closely related as judged by SSR genetic markers in an almost bizarre way, suggesting a common origin. John Work (1945, 45), who was the Hudson’s Bay Company factor at Fort Simpson in the 1830s, considered potatoes “a great acquisition, as they serve to enable the people to be fed with salt fish.” John Dunn (1844, 294), who was also at Fort Simpson in the 1830s, estimated that some “500 to 800 bushels” of potatoes were brought to the fort by the Haida each year. Within a ten-day period in 1840, the fort had acquired 1,119 bushels of potatoes from the “Queen Charlotte Islanders,” arriving in “no less than 48 Canoes” (Hudson’s Bay Company n.d.; Newcombe 1897–1916; Work 1945, 76, 78). Skidegate was the Haida Gwaii centre of potato growing, but most Haida villages on the islands had potato gardens at that time. For example, at SGang Gwaay the potato garden was located in the meadow area behind the houses at the south end of the village (Hebda, Pellatt, et al. 2005, 63). The Ts’msyen at Kitsumkalum were also known as “potato people” and supplied potatoes to Fort Simpson starting in its first year of operation in 1835 (McDonald 2003, 58). European Views of Land

The European newcomers, in turn, had their own agendas, seeking new wares, new forms of wealth, and new ways to enhance their own survival and that of their families and communities in distant lands. They “discovered” lands rich in game, with vast forests of immense trees, rivers teaming with salmon, and valleys full of promise for settlement and conversion to wealth through agriculture, logging, mining, and other enterprise (R.C. Harris 1997; Scholefield 1914;

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Whitford and Craig 1918). Not only did they have little hesitation to engage in environmental transformation of these landscapes, but many also considered it their God-given right and duty to do so. The combination of self-interest, prejudice, ignorance, and misunderstanding allowed the colonial government and church officials, and the settlers themselves, to readily overlook the existing complexity of social and ethnoecological systems that were already in place and that were helping to maintain and support the resources rather than waste and destroy them (M.K. Anderson 2005; Deur and Turner 2005; McDonald 2003; Thornton 2008; Turner, Deur, and Lepofsky 2013). As an example, in 1842, representing the Hudson’s Bay Company in surveying southern Vancouver Island for a site on which to build a new fort, James Douglas described the region around Victoria in a way that reflected his company’s quest for agricultural lands for settlement: The finest and only District of Vancouver’s Island which contains any considerable Extent of Clear Land is situated immediately on the Straits of De Fuca, beginning at Point Gonzalo, the Southeast Corner of the Island, and running Westward from it to the Point of Sy-yousung; from whence, to the South-west Point of the Island opposite Cape Flattery, there are no safe Harbours for Shipping and the Country is high, rocky, and covered with Wood ... Being pretty well assured of the Capabilities of the Soil as respects the Purposes of Agriculture, the Climate being also mild and pleasant, we ought to be able to grow every Kind of Grain Raised in England. (Douglas’s report, Fort Vancouver, 12 July 1842, cited in Scholefield 1914, vol. 1, 460, 463) So it was that the newcomers found not only a potential source of valuable furs but also places with promising agricultural potential, especially for grains, that might support the fur traders and their families and, possibly, many others to follow. Trading Posts and Their Influences

By the very early part of the nineteenth century, a network of forts and furtrading posts had sprung up throughout the region.6 These posts, built by different fur-trading companies, including the Canadian North West Company, the British Hudson’s Bay Company, and the American Pacific Fur Company, served as catalysts for communication and exchange between Indigenous leaders and fur traders, and they often established new social orders as people moved to intervene between the newcomers and other Indigenous communities, gaining advantage as middlemen. At Fort Kamloops, for example, the local Kamloops band at first received furs from other Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux communities,

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and even from Iroquois, and sold them along with their own furs to the traders at the fort, but after a while the other bands started to deal directly with the post (Teit 1909, 536). Fort Langley in the Fraser Valley was another hub of exchange and production that had an immense influence on Indigenous peoples from Vancouver Island to the lower mainland and beyond (R.S. Mackie 1997; Maclachlan 1998; Suttles 1951a). The main goods that were purchased from the local Halkomelem Coast Salish here were furs and salted salmon, but there was also a market in bog cranberries (Vaccinium oxycoccos) and wapato (Sagittaria latifolia), which were major components of the Fraser River Halkomelem people’s diet. Barrels of cranberries were shipped to San Francisco, among other destinations. Hudson’s Bay blankets were a major medium of exchange, but other items, including tobacco, were also used to pay the First Peoples for their furs and other products as well as for their labour. Salmon and cranberries were also added to the larders of the company employees in all of the forts west of the Rocky Mountains, supplemented with agricultural crops produced in the fertile prairielands near the fort.7 In 1839 an agreement between the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC ) and the Russian American Company for the HBC to lease the Alaskan Panhandle resulted in a contract to supply the Russians with wheat and butter from its farm operations, which extended over prairielands in the vicinity. A large prairie known as the Great Langley Prairie, a few kilometres upriver from the original Fort Langley, aided in this expanded agricultural enterprise becoming the HBC farm. Meanwhile, the fort continued to export thousands of barrels of salted salmon to the Hawaiian (Sandwich) Islands, Australia, and other destinations. Langley Farm exceeded 800 hectares and produced potatoes, barley, peas, and wheat, as well as hundreds of pigs and cattle, supplementing the food supplies of many of the company’s forts, as well as its vessels, like the SS Beaver, which served to link the coastal communities and forts. The forts at Kamloops, Langley, and elsewhere became major nodes of interaction, with exchange of both goods and knowledge (as well as occasional conflict) among the surrounding Indigenous communities. Many of these were culturally diverse, with employees representing a whole range of ethnicities: English, Scottish, French Canadian, Hawaiian, and Iroquois. Wives taken from the local First Nations communities became translators and cultural intermediaries, as well as serving as an unofficial workforce for their husbands and the company. They cared for children, made baskets, and helped with gardening and housework, sharing their knowledge and experience in unobtrusive ways. It was a time of tremendous economic, cultural, and social interchange. There were also enhanced exchanges among different First Nations at the time. The Secwepemc at Simpcw (North Thompson), for example, developed trading relations with Cree from east of the Rockies, who had moved into the

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region as fur trade voyageurs. The Secwepemc provided the Cree with dried salmon, salmon oil, marmot robes and other furs, and dentalium shells from the coast in exchange for moose skins and Cree-made clothes. The Secwepemc occasionally also sold dentalium shells to the Ktunaxa (Kootenai) and Stoney peoples to the south and east (Teit 1909). Along with these goods were probably many others of botanical origin, including edible roots, berries, fuel, wood for manufacture, baskets, and even medicines. It may be through such connections, for example, that wild-rice (Zizania aquatica) from eastern North America was obtained from the Cree and planted and grown by the Stó:lō in some locations in the Fraser Valley (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). The knowledge of sweetgrass use (Hierochloe sp.) by Nlaka’pamux and others may also have originated at this time from interactions with Cree and other peoples from east of the Rockies.8 Similarly, a recently discovered population of sweetflag (Acorus americanus) in Neskonlith Secwepemc territory, in the delta of the Salmon River where it flows into Shuswap Lake, may have been planted there in the past, obtained from Cree, Sekani, or other Indigenous visitors to the region (figure 4-2).9 Early Gardens

The European newcomers, even the early traders, made a point of establishing gardens wherever they stayed. For example, in 1786 British fur trader Captain James Strange, on arriving at Nootka Sound, immediately assigned one of his crew to plant a garden of European vegetables. In 1789 the crew of Spanish explorer Esté José Martínez built a garrison at Nootka Sound and planted cabbage, turnips, radishes, lettuce, onions, and potatoes. The next year, the Spaniards under Captain Pedro Alberni established Fort San Miguel at Friendly Cove in Nootka Sound. They planted nineteen different grains, legumes, and vegetables and built an irrigation ditch to bring water to the garden. This garden was intended to test the viability of different crops and their potential to provide a complete food source for the men at the fort. Spanish naturalist José Mariano Moziño, who visited Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1792, under command of Alessandro Malaspina,10 listed the following European vegetables growing in the gardens established by the Spanish there (cited in Justice 2000, 81): barley (Hordeum vulgare) pepper (Capsicum annuum) potato (Solanum tuberosum) and several other Solanum species (possibly eggplant, S. melongena) beetroot (Beta vulgaris) carrot (Daucus carota ssp. sativa) angelica (Angelica archangelica)

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4-2 | Sweetflag (Acorus americanus) in the Salmon River estuary, Shuswap Lake, Neskonlith Secwepemc territory, showing a portion of the rhizome. A blue-listed species of very limited distribution in British Columbia, it was possibly introduced by Cree or Sekani traders in the 1800s or perhaps brought much earlier.

parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) celery (Apium graveolens) onion (Allium cepa) rape (Brassica napus) cabbage (Brassica oleracea) lettuce (Lactuca sativa) chick pea (Cicer ariethinum) globe artichoke (Cynara scolymus) Other early explorers – Spanish, British, and American – planted gardens at different points along the coast, including at Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula and at Point George at the mouth of the Columbia River. In 1811 Daniel Williams Harmon, a North West Company employee, planted a garden of potatoes, barley, turnips, and other crops at Stuart Lake, later known as Fort St James. This was apparently the first garden on the mainland of what was to become British Columbia. In 1813 North West Company workers planted a garden of turnips, potatoes, cabbage, and other vegetables at Spokane House, and in 1825 the Hudson’s Bay Company planted three acres of peas, one-quarter acre of beans, and 100 bushels of potatoes at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia. By the 1840s apple trees and other orchard crops were being brought in and planted widely by both newcomers and Indigenous peoples. Apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, and domesticated currants, gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries, as well as rhubarb, soon took their place in Indigenous peoples’ settlements and gardens and were seamlessly embraced into the languages and food systems, usually by extension of names and applications of indigenous counterparts (Turner and Brown 2004; see also appendix 3 and the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space [http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091]). Today, in many places, remnants of orchards with early varieties of apples, pears, plums, and other fruit can be seen at many old village sites and campsites (figure 4-3). Many other crop and garden species were introduced over the succeeding decades. By the turn of the twentieth century, for example, the Nlaka’pamux, although still fishing, hunting, and harvesting wild plants, were depending increasingly on produce from their gardens – potatoes, squash, peas, beans, corn, carrots, turnips, onions, melons, tomatoes, apples, and cultivated berries – along with store-bought items, including flour, rice, sugar, tea, coffee, oatmeal, and beans. They were also raising cattle, hogs, and chickens (Teit 1900, 237; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Around this time, too, the Tlingit of Alaska were growing strawberries, raspberries, rhubarb, bunch beans, parsnips, rutabagas, cauliflower, Swiss chard, and turnips: “just about any kind of vegetable you want” (Kake 1989, 31).

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4-3  |  Plum trees spreading out in an old orchard at a traditional campsite on the central coast of British Columbia.

Soon, too, new species of grasses, clover, and other crops were imported for livestock forage, and with all of these came weedy species like burdock (Arctium minus), lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), pineappleweed (Matricaria matricarioides), and thistles (Cirsium spp.), which soon became commonplace in many parts of the area and in some cases were adopted for use in various ways as food, medicine, and for other purposes (Turner and Brown 2004; Cole and Lockner 1989). For example, some Secwepemc people used pineappleweed as a scent for pillows and also as a beverage and medicinal tea and as a flavouring. Mary Thomas’s grandmother mixed it with soapberry juice for a summertime drink (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994).

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Introduction of the Horse

Horses had been introduced to the Interior Plateau by 1720, probably acquired by Cayuse, Nez Perce, and Selish (Flathead) peoples via Northern Shoshones on the upper Snake River, and had spread throughout the Plateau by the end of the 1700s (see Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; and Teit 1930, 350). By the early 1800s, fur traders and missionaries of the southern Interior Plateau noted individual chiefs and families owning up to 1,000 or 2,000 horses, and Lewis and Clark reported that herds among the Nez Perce of 50 to 100 horses were common by 1803 (cited in Kirk and Daugherty 2007). When Simon Fraser and his men descended the Fraser River in 1808, he encountered Tsilhqot’in people at the mouth of the Chilcotin River with plenty of horses as well as large numbers of EuroAmerican goods (Lamb 1960). Then, by the 1820s, horses were in use among Nisqually (Southern Coast Salish), who had acquired them from their upriver Sahaptin-speaking neighbours (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990). For many, these useful animals became a major form of wealth and prestige. The importance of horses in facilitating transportation and increasing mobility was immense. Horses for riding and packing enabled longer-distance travel for food harvesting, trade, and raiding (Cutright 2003; Dawson 1892; Hayden and Schulting 1997; Teit 1900, 1930; Turner and Loewen 1998) (figure 4-4). Kirk and Daugherty (2007, 70) note that, with their harvests transported by horse, “A single family of 7 or 8 could collect half a ton of fresh and dried berries.” Dried camas-bulb cakes and berry cakes were noted to be easy to carry when people were travelling by horse, especially when made in small squares or rounds that were perforated for stringing (Gorman [1905–15]). Old flat-sided kerosene cans were also adopted for berry picking and harvesting, partly because they were easier for horses to carry than barrels or baskets (Minnie Charleyboy, pers. comm., 2003). In some cases, the use of horses resulted in changes to the actual routes that people took in their travels since it was often easier to ride along higher ridgetops and upland slopes than in the valley bottoms (Teit 1930, 252). Horses also allowed changes in relative times required for processing fish, meat, roots, and berries at harvesting camps in the mountains or other locations distant from the village sites since the animals were able to carry larger, heavier loads more quickly and efficiently than when people had to transport their harvested goods by foot. This meant that meat carcasses and fresh roots and berries could often be brought back to people’s winter homes, to be further processed and dried for storage, rather than having to be completely dehydrated at the harvest sites (see Turner 1992b; and Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). However, bringing horses to harvest sites for transporting people and packing goods also required development of more substantial trails and accommodation of pasturelands in the vicinity of camps – in some cases, resulting in the

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4-4  |  Tsilhqot’in family travelling by horse and wagon on the road to Bella Coola, near Hanceville, BC , 1959.

introduction of weedy plants and exotic grasses that were brought in with feed for the horses. Kirk and Daugherty (2007) suggest that the need for maintenance of grasslands for horse pasture may have resulted in an increase of landscape burning during this time. With the adoption of horse-based cultures, a body of knowledge developed around production of hay and forage crops, wild plant foods preferred for horses, medicinal treatments for horses, dyeing and weaving with horse hair, and construction of saddles and bridles with wood, fibrous plants, and other plant materials (Turner 1997b; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). It is little coincidence that many Tsilhqot’in and Interior Plateau peoples became expert ranchers and developed a deep knowledge of and reliance on horses that exists to this day (Bhattacharyya 2012). Whereas some worked for the white ranchers, others became skilled and successful ranch owners, growing their own hay crops and breeding their own horses and other livestock.

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Their lifeways and seasonal rounds became completely integrated with caring for, pasturing, and using horses, and for at least a century and a half, horses were a dominant form of transportation for Indigenous peoples and their goods over much of the Interior Plateau region (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Turner 1992b). Social life also changed with the advent of horses. For example, horse racing had become a major pastime by the late 1800s and early 1900s in many locations, such as in Botanie Valley in Nlaka’pamux territory (Hanna and Henry 1995; Turner 1997a) and on the southern flank of Mount Adams (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). At Botanie, women harvesting sk’amets (yellow glacier lily bulbs), tetuwen (spring beauty corms), and other edible roots on the slopes and ridges would sometimes use their harvest as collateral for betting on the horse races they could view below in the valley bottoms (Turner 1997a; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). With the advent of ranching and raising cattle, rodeos also became a major activity for some peoples, such as those of central Washington and the Chilcotin and Cariboo districts of British Columbia. People followed welltravelled trails to attend and participate in the annual regional rodeos at towns like Lillooet and Williams Lake and also held smaller community rodeos in villages and camps, such as at Nemiah Valley and up on Potato Mountain (Tsinuzchéd) in Tsilhqot’in territory (Mellott 2010). These events provided excellent social opportunities for men, women, and children to exchange news and learn about new foods and technologies. In the north, herds of horses were brought in during the Klondike goldrush to transport goods over the passes to the Yukon and Klondike Rivers. Many of these animals perished in the impossible conditions, but their introduction left a legacy of weeds like lambsquarters (Chenopodium album) that still exist. Anore Jones (1983, 64) notes that lambsquarters grows thickly on the Kiana Bluffs in Kotzebue, Alaska, for example, and that “the first seeds were probably introduced with bales of hay brought in for horse feed during the goldrush.” Cattle and other livestock were also imported during the goldrush era to provide food for the miners and other workers, and weedy species would also have been brought with their feed. Early Trade Routes

The trails and water routes linking the various trading posts became, not surprisingly, major connectors for the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and vocabulary as well as of trade goods. Many of these were based on foot trails and transportation networks that had been developed and used previously by generations of Indigenous people (R.E. Ignace 2008). With the establishment of the forts and trading centres, these courses became even more intensively used as venues of interchange and communication for First Peoples and newcomers

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alike. Thus Fort Kamloops soon became a significant stopping point on the old Brigade Trail between Fort Okanagan and Fort Alexandria on the middle Fraser River, where the Hudson’s Bay Company established a stud farm to breed and pasture its horses, “the beautiful ranges in the vicinity affording an abundance of rich pasture” (Scholefield 1914, vol. 1, 391). For many decades, Fort Langley served as a central depot for exchange in the Fraser Valley. European goods of all types were transported up the Fraser River from the coast by canoe or steamer and sent inland to Kamloops and other centres. In turn, outgoing furs, salmon, and cranberries were prepared for export and sent down the Fraser to the coast for shipment to California, to Europe via Cape Horn, and elsewhere around the globe. By the mid-1800s, there were several intensively used routes extending from Fort Langley, including up the Fraser River to Fort Hope, Fort Yale, and Spuzzum, northward from Douglas Portage to Cache Creek and Fort Alexandra, and from Spuzzum eastward to Coldwater, Nicola Lake, and Fort Kamloops and southeastward to the Similkameen, providing venues for communication and exchange of goods and knowledge for Indigenous peoples, as well as fur traders and, later, miners, prospectors, and settlers (Laforet and York 1998; Ormsby 1976). Secwepemc scholar Dr Ron Ignace (2008) describes the immense network of trails and passages known and used in his own grandparents’ time, noting that travel by horse was a natural extension of pre-existing routes of communication and transportation. For example, people routinely travelled by trails and over water, facilitated by dugout or birchbark canoe, from Shuswap and Adams Lakes down to Kamloops and Kamloops Lake, northward up the North Thompson, and westward along the Thompson River to the Fraser. He noted that other travel routes taken by his own people extended through the mountainous areas from Three Valley Pass and Revelstoke down the Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes on the Columbia River drainage, where the Secwepemc people met Ts’weñemc (Okanagan or Nsilx). These routes, originally established as well-trodden foot trails connecting navigable waterways, thus became horse trails and eventually wagon roads. Then, during the twentieth century, many thoroughfares were widened further and developed into the highway system that exists throughout the region today (ibid.). Along the coast, the “grease trails” – the ancient network of foot trails and routes over which people transported oulachen grease and other goods from the coast to the interior and brought back interior products in exchange – were adopted as routes for exploration by the newcomers. Alexander McKenzie and his men, seeking an overland route to the Pacific, for example, travelled along one of the main Nuxalk-Carrier-Chilcotin “grease trails,” arriving at the head of Bella Coola Inlet in 1793 (approaching very closely the area of the coast where Captain Vancouver was exploring at the same time). Many of the old “grease

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trails” are still in use today for travel, recreation, hunting, and trapping (Birchwater and Ulkatcho and Nuxalk elders 1993). The expansion and intensified use of these trade routes resulted in many changes for Indigenous peoples, including increased opportunities for cultural interchange. For example, in Alaska and northern British Columbia, augmented trading activities resulted in stronger connections between the Tlingit and Tahltan, with increased intermarriage, general acceptance of Tlingit as a language of trade, and the Tahltan’s adoption of many Tlingit social customs and aspects of social organization, including potlatching traditions (Albright 1984, 16). Similar strengthening of ties and exchanges across cultural and linguistic boundaries occurred widely elsewhere due to people’s greater mobility and excellent opportunities for interacting at the new nodes and centres established by the traders. During this period, as noted previously, there was also widespread exchange and interaction between Indigenous people and the newcomers, with many of the traders taking wives or partners from local Indigenous communities. Women thus served a pivotal role, and some of them became influential as translators, caregivers, and also as mothers of children whose heritage crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries. Several notable botanical products – along with salt for preserving salmon and other foods – were introduced from the traders and explorers in these early times, beginning an accelerating process of dietary and lifestyle changes that ultimately impacted peoples’ diets and health in major ways (Turner and Turner 2008). These included, among others, tobacco, sugar and flour, tea, and alcoholic beverages. For example, Krause and Krause (1993, 157), on visiting the Chilkat Tlingit in the early 1880s, wrote, “the most marketable articles are woolen blankets, calico, tobacco, flour and sugar.” The botanical products of the trade era are considered here in more detail, along with tea and alcohol. Tobacco

Two different types of indigenous tobacco were being used in the study region at the time of European arrivals.11 When the first explorers and traders introduced commercial tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), in the form of plugs or leaves, it was adopted readily, especially by those people who were used to smoking. On the southern coast, however, it took a little longer for people to acquire a smoking habit. The Hesquiaht and other Nuu-chah-nulth, for example, apparently did not smoke tobacco or other substances originally. Later, it was said, the missionary Father Brabant brought chewing tobacco in big blocks to Hesquiaht village. According to oral history, people first thought it was candy and kept swallowing it. However, they soon learned to cut off fine shavings of tobacco and smoke it in pipes (Turner and Efrat 1982).

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4-5 | Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), whose leaves were adopted for smoking, alone or with tobacco, along the Northwest Coast in the fur trade era.

Tobacco leaves came to be a form of currency. By the 1840s, at Fort Victoria, James Douglas noted that salmon could be bought at Cape Flattery (from the Makah) for two leaves of tobacco each, and at Camosun (Victoria) the price for a salmon was two charges of ammunition (Scholefield 1914, vol. 1). The Hesquiaht and other Northwest Coast peoples also learned to mix tobacco with kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) leaves as an extender (figure 4-5).12 This practice – and the technique of sun drying and toasting kinnikinnick leaves over a fire and then mixing them with tobacco – was evidently learned from interior peoples, who themselves may have borrowed it from the Cree and Algonquin peoples. Smoking kinnikinnick was evidently established earlier in the Interior Plateau, but according to Teit (1909, 574), “Kinnikinnic or bearberry leaves were seldom

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mixed with tobacco in smoking until after the introduction of the strong white man’s tobacco. Then the use of these admixtures became universal.” The Hesquiaht and some others noted that it is best to smoke kinnikinnick in the evening because it makes one drowsy; others say it can make one dizzy (Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972). When Simon Fraser met with Secwepemc peoples along the Fraser River in 1808, he brought plugs of tobacco and noted, “This tribe is extremely fond of smoking ... They make use, in lieu of tobacco, of a kind of weed mixed with fat” (cited in Lamb 1960, 86–8), evidently referring to Nicotiana attenuata, as further elaborated by Teit (1909, 574): After being gathered, it was cut up fine in a dish, and then spread on a large flat stone before the fire until quite dry. It was then thoroughly saturated with mountain-ram’s grease, mixed over, and rolled or rubbed with another flat stone for several hours. Instead of this it was sometimes put in a mortar and worked with a small stone pestle. It was then dried slightly and put away in bags made of a ram’s scrotum, which were hung up in the lodge. Any person watching the process was entitled to a free smoke of the tobacco ... Tradition relates that the first white man’s tobacco smoked by the Indians was some black twist given to them by Simon Fraser. It is said that it made many of them sick. The high profile taken on by the newer, evidently stronger tobacco during the fur trade era was further described by Teit (ibid., 574–5) for the Secwepemc and neighbouring peoples: In later times the chief of each Shuswap band received annually a present of tobacco from the Hudson Bay Company’s post at Kamloops. The chiefs of distant bands sent young men to Kamloops to receive the annual present. Each chief was given a piece of twist-tobacco two fathoms long, and a message was sent with it to the effect that the chief receiving it must induce his people to trap diligently fur-bearing animals, that he must desist from wars, and always be friendly and helpful to the white employees of the company, who were travelling through the territory. Upon receiving the gift, the chief called all his men together, gave a feast in which all smoked and talked for from two to four days, and then he divided the remaining tobacco equally among all present. For the Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux, and other Interior Plateau peoples, all councils and many feasts began with smoking ceremonies, originally using native tobacco and tubular pipes carved of soapstone, antler, or kinnikinnick root;13 when “twist-tobacco” was introduced, it was mixed with kinnikinnick and

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smoked in pipes with upright bowls. Teit (ibid.) noted that by the early 1900s, wooden pipes bought from the whites were virtually the only type used. Thus the new tobacco and the new ways of consuming tobacco, both mixing with kinnikinnick and chewing and smoking in upright pipes and later in cigars and cigarettes, spread throughout the region and entirely replaced the use of the two former species of Nicotiana, although the ceremonial and social functions of tobacco remained in some areas. At least into the 1880s, tobacco played a role in events such as funerals. The Krause brothers, visiting the Tlingit in 1881–82, observed a number of occasions when tobacco served in this way. For example, on attending the funeral of a woman at Klukwan village of the Chilkat, Aurel Krause wrote, “the following evening, after the cremation ... First the guests are treated with berries, sugar and tobacco. The berries are served by the spoonful directly into the mouth or hand, likewise the sugar. The tobacco is passed around in large pipes carved with figures.” Blankets and money were also passed out (Krause and Krause 1993, 146). In addition, the practice of using shredded tobacco or tobacco from cigarettes as a spiritual offering by those harvesting medicine or seeking supernatural assistance continues today in many areas (see also chapter 11). Sometimes a small amount of tobacco is burned at a harvest site, accompanied by prayers, or a bit of tobacco is laid or sprinkled at the base of a tree or a patch where harvesting is to take place. These practices, although using an introduced substance, are evidently quite old and fit in with the “prayers,” or words of praise, that are described by Boas (1930) and many others as traditional and routine rituals of respect and appreciation for the spirits of the plants, animals, and places that provide for people (Turner 2005). Likewise, smudging (or cleansing) one’s body or implements with the smoke of burning plants is probably an ancient practice, although some of the species used today for this purpose, including tobacco, sagebrush, and sweetgrass, may have derived from Indigenous traditions east of the Rocky Mountains. There is some evidence, however, that sweetgrass (Hierochloe hirta) has been used ceremonially by the Nuxalk at Bella Coola and possibly other coastal peoples for many generations (Turner 1973). Even today, many people use smudges or solutions of devil’s-club, Sitka spruce, or other coastal species for ritual cleansing of tools and hunting and fishing gear, a practice that would have had the added benefit of masking the human scent and increasing the chance of success of procuring food, as well as protecting berry pickers and others venturing into remote places against predators (Turner 2009; see also chapter 7). Sugar and Flour

Although carbohydrates have been a part of Indigenous diets in the region for millennia, refined carbohydrates, especially starch, were rarely consumed. Even

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in the Interior Plateau and on the southern coast, where people included relatively high proportions of carbohydrates in their diets, mostly in the form of root vegetables, many of the carbohydrates consisted of complex forms like inulin that were partially broken down into simpler sugars only with prolonged cooking and storage. Northwest Coast peoples were said to have made a type of “bread” from the baked and pounded rhizomes of bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum), and some have referred to the flattened, dried, pit-cooked bulbs of camas as “bread,” but these were quite different from the biscuits, cakes, bannock, and wheat bread products of the Europeans. Furthermore, the original sources of carbohydrate were consumed together with a diversity of other foods, including plenty of dietary fibre, which slows the intake of carbohydrates into the body. With the exception of Garry oak acorns, hazelnuts, and pine (Pinus albicaulis and other spp.) seeds, most of the Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America were not seed eaters either, and there is little evidence over most of the study region that people had eaten the grains of grasses before contact with Europeans.14 In contrast, Native Californians were heavy consumers of several types of acorns, and in addition, they collected, parched, and ate a variety of seeds and grains,15 which would have contributed carbohydrates along with proteins and oils (M.K. Anderson 2005; Colville 1902; Felger and Moser 1973). The main sources of directly digestible sugars for the northwestern peoples were certain types of berries, like wild strawberries, huckleberries, saskatoon berries, and Rubus species – thimbleberry, blackcap, wild raspberry, wild blackberry, and salmonberry – sometimes made into a type of fruit leather. In the mountains of the dry interior, an unusual trisaccharide sugar was produced under uncommon conditions from Douglas-fir boughs (Davidson 1919), but this was a rare and unpredictable treat, called by the same name as “breast milk” in some Interior Salish languages. Inulin-producing root vegetables that were hydrolyzed through pit-cooking to fructose – camas, nodding onions, and balsamroot – were other notably sweet foods, and some people recalled that these were considered “dessert” and “candy” when they were cooked and dried. Another source of sweetness was the edible cambium of certain trees, most particularly of lodgepole pine, which was also characterized as “candy” (Dilbone 2011). John Ross (2011, 242) notes that a particularly sweet tree could be identified from evidence of porcupine chewing it and that there were particular “groves” of pines with very sweet cambium. Ross also mentions that the Spokan occasionally dug and roasted the fleshy white rhizomes of both cattail and tule as food and sometimes crushed and boiled them to make a sweet syrup. When wheat flour, pilot biscuits, bannock, bread, cakes, molasses, and sugar were introduced by the early traders, these foods were greatly and universally appreciated by the First Peoples. These carbohydrate-rich foods were, along with potatoes, among the first to be brought in by the newcomers, and like

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potatoes, they soon became staples, still served to this day with most meals in many households (Nuxalk Food and Nutrition Program 1984; Turner and Turner 2008). For example, pilot biscuits, the hard ship’s biscuits that were kept in barrels and boxes as part of the stores, were given to the Nuu-chah-nulth of Nootka Sound by Captain Cook in March 1778. Farther north, in 1787, when Captain James Colnett and his two ships arrived in their territory, the Gitga’at were also given the sea biscuits, which they immediately saw as resembling tree fungus (Marsden 1992). The latter event is remembered in Gitga’at oral tradition today. This association of fungus with pilot biscuits is reflected in a number of the northern coast names for tree fungus: Tlingit ʔaas daagáadli (“tree biscuit”), Massett Haida kug galaanggaa (“wood pilot-biscuit”), Skidegate Haida gyallgas naanga (“pilot-biscuit’s grandmother”), and Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) ʔàdagán (“bread”). The reactions to some of these new foods by the Nuu-chah-nulth of Nootka Sound were documented by Mexican-born botanist-naturalist and physician José Mariano Moziño, mentioned previously, who lived with the Mowachaht for over four months in the spring and summer of 1792 (Moziño 1970) and detailed many aspects of their language and culture. He observed both favourable impressions of products such as bread and sugar and reticence concerning certain other foods: Our contact has introduced bread to them, and they have demonstrated particular liking for it. Also as a result of this contact they have chocolate, sugar, brown sugar, and all the confections. They like coffee and tea excessively, but milk, butter, cheese, olive oil and vinegar, and all the spices that we ordinarily use cause them inexplicable annoyance. Now they are overcoming to a great degree the repugnance which our foods have caused them. They have become accustomed to soup, as long as it is not of vermicelli, noodles, and so forth; to cooked vegetables, excluding only cabbage; to roasts of mutton, beef, or deer, but not to chicken; and to salads of lettuce or broccoli only. Beans for them are the most delicious dish; they call them Tais-frijoles, which is to say “dish of the Kings.” There was someone who wanted to indicate the great appreciation which this legume merited by not permitting it to be known in the future by any name other than frijoles [beans]. (Ibid., 21–2) Moziño (ibid., 21) described at the outset how, when he was at Nootka Sound in 1792, bread became an immediate commodity for the Nuu-chah-nulth, as their ships were surrounded by canoes, “and the islanders, filled with happiness, were ready to conduct our sailors to the shore for nothing more than the small token of a piece of bread.” He also witnessed their rejection of one of the edible native species that the Spaniards enjoyed: “I doubt that they [the Mowachaht] like garlic [probably Allium cernuum] because, even though they came in their canoes to sell it, it annoyed them greatly to see it on our tables.” 216 | part one – history

Sugar in various forms – cane sugar, brown sugar, molasses, and later, corn syrup – soon became an essential, not only for use in cakes and baked goods but also in the form of jams and sweetened drinks and as a condiment both for dipping traditional foods like thimbleberry and cow-parsnip shoots and for mixing with root vegetables like northern riceroot and Pacific silverweed roots. Many elders remember the pleasure, as children, of going out with a pocketful of sugar and dipping the food they picked in the sugar as a treat. For some people, like my Gitga’at friend Chief Ernie Hill Jr (pers. comm., 2009), it has almost become a joke that when I ask him how a particular food is eaten, the answer is invariably the same: “with sugar and grease!” Tea, Coffee, and Labrador Tea

As noted by Moziño (1970, 21), the Nuu-chah-nulth at Nootka Sound “like[d] coffee and tea excessively.” This seems to have been the case quite widely among the Indigenous peoples of the region. Not only was English tea served in homes, but it was also a predictable beverage at feasts, such as the Gitga’at feasts hosted by Eagle matriarch Lucille Clifton at Hartley Bay in the first half of the twentieth century, where there was always “quite a bit of strong tea” provided, as recalled by her son Chief Johnny Clifton (pers. comm., 2003; Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012). In January 1882 Aurel Krause wrote of the Chilkat Tlingit, “Tonight Chlunat, the second chief of the Grizzly Bear clan, invites us to his new house for a feast for the members of his clan. The meal consists of tea and baked goods” (Krause and Krause 1993, 145). Another hot beverage, equally if not more popular than the English tea in many households in the past century or more, is made from the leaves (including twigs and occasionally flowers) of Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum) or, in the interior, sometimes of the related trapper’s tea (R. neoglandulosum). The use of these species for a beverage tea was evidently learned by the First Peoples west of the Rocky Mountains from Hudson’s Bay Company employees, who themselves apparently borrowed this use from the First Peoples of central and eastern Canada, especially the Cree voyageurs. This route of acquisition is reflected in the commonly used names for these species: “Labrador tea” and “Hudson’s Bay tea,” “trapper’s tea,” and various hybrid names that mix English or French with Indigenous languages. The hybrid terms include Skidegate Haida xàaydaa tiiga (“Haida-tea”), Nuu-chah-nulth tiimapt (“tea plant”), Squamish máqwam ti (“swamp tea”), Quinault nuwaqwánti (“prairie tea”), Selish (Flathead) schtxwe lití (“mountain tea”), borrowed from French, and Ktunaxa makay ʔaqułaqpiʔk (“McKay tea/leaves”), from the name of a Ktunaxa man from Columbia Lake named McCoy. In some of the Dakelh (Carrier) dialects, such as Saik’uz, one name for this tea is a compound from both French and Cree: ludi musjek (ludi from French le thé, “tea,” and musjek from Eastern Cree maschek, “muskeg, swamp”) (Poser 2008a, 2008b). Change, Loss, and Adaptation  |  217

Yet it seems that Labrador tea and trapper’s tea were used medicinally by a number of peoples in northwestern North America before they were adopted as beverages. An alternate Massett Haida name for R. groenlandicum, for example, is xil qagann, which apparently translates as “cold medicine,” and a Skidegate Haida name is k’usinga xilga (“tuberculosis-leaves/medicine”) (Turner 2004a). The Secwepemc names for R. neoglandulosum (e.g., sexwsqéqxeʔten [western dialect] and səxwsqéqxeʔtən [eastern dialect], “dogs wash nose”) refer to the apparently ancient practice of washing the noses of hunting dogs with a solution of the leaves to sharpen their sense of smell. Alcoholic Beverages

Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America fermented certain foods, like salmon eggs, to help cure and preserve them, but as far as can be ascertained, they did not originally prepare or consume alcoholic beverages. In 1792 Spanish chronicler José Mariano Moziño (1970, 20–1) noted, “they [the Nuuchah-nulh] do not have any fermented beverage, and until they began to deal with Europeans they satisfied their thirst with nothing more than water. Since that time they have acquired quite an affection for wine, brandy, and beer, all of which they use excessively whenever there is someone who furnishes them liberally, but up until now the thought of procuring these liquors by means of commerce does not seem to have occurred to them.” Farther north, people were said to have learned how to make a fermented beverage, called hutschino or hootch, from the Russians. In 1882 Krause and Krause (1993, 170), for example, observed, “Near the Village [Angoon] many potato plants can be seen. The Natives here have learned to use them in the preparation of hutschino.” Many people started to make home-brew from dried peaches and other fruit of various types, including the indigenous red elderberries and soapberries, and this became a common practice until the mid-1900s and even later in some cases (Margaret Siwallace, pers. comm., 1985). Mary Thomas (2001, 4) considered alcoholism, for the Secwepemc and other Indigenous peoples, to be one of the entire line of new diseases that were brought in by the newcomers: “There’re many diseases that our people were subjected to that were unheard of in our society. The last one is alcohol. That was never heard of in our society.” Alcoholism remains a serious threat to individual and community health for some First Peoples (Health Canada 2006). Salt

Salt, mostly in the form of rock salt, was introduced as a food preservative early in the development of the fishing industry, and coastal peoples taking part in the cannery or in fish exporting, especially, learned to use salt in large quantities, packed with fish in barrels. They also started to preserve their own fish in salt or 218 | part one – history

brine solution, thus increasing salt intake significantly, which has caused some health problems (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2003). People also occasionally used salt to preserve vegetables and started to make pickles. In Alaska people say that the Russians were the ones who introduced salt as a way of preserving foods, including some greens and sauerkrauts (Mudie et al. 2005). Language and Botanical Terminology

The adaption and development of the area’s Indigenous languages to accommodate new products and new terminology certainly must have accelerated during this early era of European contact. In the far north, words of Russian were adopted into Tlingit, Dena’ina (Tanaina), and other Alaskan languages. For example, Dena’ina names derived from Russian include gupgi (outer dialect) for tree fungus (Ganoderma applanatum); kashi or tashi for dock (Rumex spp.); bidrushga for lovage (Ligusticum scoticum); buchgi (outer dialect) for cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum); aramashga, k’elbasga, and related variants for pineappleweed (Matricaria spp.); and vinik or binik for mountain-ash (Sorbus sp.) (Russell 1991b; Russell Kari 1987). Norwegian and other terms also entered the language; some Haida still call cloudberries (Rubus chamaemorus) “maltberries,” from Norwegian “multebeere,” whereas the Dena’ina call them by their Russian name, moroshka. New plant names were developed through “expansion of reference,” with the names for known native species of strawberries, raspberries, currants, crabapples, and onions being applied to their corresponding domesticated types. New species were also incorporated by extending the names of indigenous species of similar type, such as applying the names for wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) to domesticated potato or applying the names for hazelnut (Corylus cornuta) to other types of nuts, such as walnuts (Juglans cinerea) and almonds (Prunus amygdalus). For the Nlaka’pamux, names for about forty introduced plants and plant products had been developed by the late 1800s, most based on similarities to existing species or on notable features of the items such as shape, colouring, or texture (Teit 1900, 295). Chinook Jargon, the trade language centred at the mouth of the Columbia River whose origins some linguists believe predate the arrival of Euro-Americans, became more elaborate during the fur trade era, incorporating both French and English terms, including various plant names such as those for Labrador tea, mentioned previously. Until the mid-1900s many Indigenous people were bilingual or even multilingual, conversing among themselves in one or more Indigenous languages, with traders and church and colonial officials in Chinook Jargon, and with others in English (Gibson 1992). As children were taken away to residential schools and even day schools, English predominated, and over the last half of the twentieth century, most people grew up speaking English as a first language, with many never learning their ancestral languages. Change, Loss, and Adaptation  |  219

The eclipse of ancestral languages has had profound implications for peoples’ ability to retain their cultural practices and stories since there are so many specialized terms, including place names and plant names, that embody cultural knowledge. “Languages contain generations of wisdom, going back into antiquity. Our languages contain a significant part of the world’s knowledge and wisdom. When a language is lost, much of the knowledge that language represents is also gone” (Reyhner 1997, 4). Sadly, the trend toward loss of languages continues, on both a regional and a global scale; of about 6,000 languages spoken in the world, around half are not being spoken by children, which means they will soon disappear. Fortunately, in northwestern North America, there are a number of different initiatives for language revitalization, so at least some of these languages will continue to be spoken into the future (e.g., Rubin 1999; and J.C. Thompson 2012). Colonial and Settler Period By around the 1840s settlers and missionaries began to enter northwestern North America in large numbers. The situation prior to this time, during the fur trade era, when First Nations themselves generally retained control over labour and production, changed during this next phase of European contact. Increasingly, settlers and colonial officials started to impose – sometimes through force – their own system of rules and regulations drawn from societies and governance bodies far away. In this new legal regime, some customary harvesting techniques were criminalized and constraints placed on trade relations, social institutions, and customary laws and land rights (Deur and Turner 2005; Deur et al. 2013; D.C. Harris 2001; R.C. Harris 1997; Menzies 2006b). The resulting disruption and displacement for the Indigenous communities was in many ways more damaging to Indigenous lifeways than the earlier fur trade, especially as it was accompanied by continued and devastating disease epidemics (Fisher 1992). Although there are many accounts of positive and respectful interactions between the settlers and Aboriginal peoples, the increasing intrusions and appropriations of land and resources by the newcomers were bound to cause distress and a sense of injustice. In such cases, relationships between the First Peoples and newcomers became strained at best and sometimes resulted in outright hostility. Thus in 1863 when the colonial authorities sanctioned the settlement of the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island and in 1864 when workers were in the process of building a road from the head of Bute Inlet to Alexandria on the Fraser River, through Tsilhqot’in territory, violence broke out and people – both settlers and Native people – were killed (Arnett 1999; Lutz 2008). In the Fraser Canyon there were also battles during the goldrush era, fought over access to gold-panning areas and conflicts over land for settlement (Laforet and York 1998).

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In these incidents, although some colonists and Indigenous people lost their lives, the latter were the ultimate losers, as they were never able to stop the influx of outsiders moving into their territories and destroying their resources and ways of life. In fact, the settlement of these lands is still under dispute, and land claim negotiations continue to this day (Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group 2009; Supreme Court of British Columbia 2007). Plant resources – as well as peoples’ rights to access and use specific habitats, like forests, prairies, and wetlands – are a significant part of these disputes. The famous Nez Perce War of 1877, fought over conflicts resulting from appropriation of lands and resources by the settlers in the Wallowa Valley and other areas of eastern Oregon, is said to have been triggered at least in part by the destruction of the Nez Perce’s staple root vegetable, camas (Camassia quamash), by the settlers’ cattle. On southern Vancouver Island, although outright warfare was avoided, the “large numbers of free-roaming cattle” in the area around Fort Victoria caused major conflict, especially when the Indigenous people started hunting the colonists’ cattle in the same manner as deer, with predictable backlash by the colonial authorities (Fisher 1992, 62). For their part, like the Nez Perce, the Straits Salish of southern Vancouver Island suffered tremendous losses of their camas resources to the settlers’ livestock. One of the more sympathetic of the colonial voices, J.W. Mackay, observed, “You will remember that the Districts for which the Indians received payments in blankets were the main producers of the Kamass root for the whole surrounding country. The destruction of this plant by cattle and sheep caused a great loss to the Songhees, Saanich and Sooke Indians as it was the most important article of trade which they had to offer in dealing with the neighbouring tribes” (letter written to John Helmcken regarding the Fort Victoria Treaties, 1888, cited in Beckwith 2004, 44). Fisher (1992) suggests that disagreements over land use, including the grazing of cattle and other livestock on traditional food production lands, were one of the greatest single causes of conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples. In general, however, although the First Peoples did not appreciate the encroachments – and protested them in a variety of ways, including through formal petitions to the queen and her government representatives – they were forced to accept the newcomers and their lifestyles. As noted previously, they were sometimes hired as workers in the very ventures that were transforming their landscapes and livelihoods (R.C. Harris 1997; Fisher 1992). Many actually developed cordial relations with the newcomers who hired them, and they accepted the changes with dignity and respect (Laforet and York 1998; Lutz 2008). Mary Thomas (2001, 48) described the circumstances faced by her own Secwepemc parents and grandparents at Salmon Arm in the 1800s and early 1900s: I can remember when I was with my granny, and my father and them were all struggling to learn the new way of life, because we were forced

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onto the reservations. And they accepted it ... There were a lot of newcomers coming in ... and [they] took up areas to farm ... My parents used to go and camp right on the spot where these people took a homestead, and work from early in the morning to late in the evening, clearing land for those newcomers. And there was no money exchanged. What they paid my father was, maybe a horse. He’d work for acres and acres of clearing land for a horse. Because they were changing their lifestyle, they needed these new things. Another farmer would maybe offer some kind of tools, a harness or a plow ... they worked together and respected one another. And there was a real nice harmony with the newcomers as well as our people ... They helped one another ... And I used to hear my mother, “Oh, so and so, they were good people, they were always kind to us!” And I guess [there was] a lot of respect among that age group at the turning ... [of the century], the newcomers coming in. On another occasion, however, Mary Thomas recalled that her entire family was summarily banished from land along the shore of Shuswap Lake where they had been going to camp, fish, and pick berries for many years. The owner of the local hardware store had bought the land, and when Mary’s family approached the place in their rowboat, this man yelled at them to get away and never to return. Mary’s mother16 was exceedingly angry, but her father turned the boat around and rowed them away. She said it was the only time she ever saw him cry (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2000). This experience was not unlike that of the Tsawataineuk women of Kingcome Inlet, referred to in the introductory quotation, who were ordered away from their root-digging grounds by the settler McKay (Turner and Turner 2008; Deur et al. 2013). Such events happened routinely and in some sense are still happening today, as Indigenous people are excluded not only from their traditional harvesting and camping sites, both on privatized land and for industrial purposes, but also from some parks and protected areas within their traditional territories. Fortunately, co-management agreements, such as between the Canadian federal government and the Haida Nation for managing the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site are resulting in a return of access to and control over some of these areas to their original inhabitants and caretakers (Turner and Bitonti 2011). There are many aspects of the impacts and relationships of the colonial and settlement period in northwestern North America that relate to plant use and ethnobotanical knowledge. These include effects of the early treaties and the reserve system on plant use; land and resource transformations, such as changes to foodways of Indigenous peoples, changes in technologies, and changes in medicine and healthcare; impacts of government regulations on Traditional Land and Resource Management systems; colonial effects on social and cultural

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aspects related to plant use, such as residential school impacts; and effects of new economic systems. Some of these aspects are alluded to in the ethnographic literature of the day – in the writings of Franz Boas,17 John R. Swanton, James Teit, and other ethnographers associated with the Jesup North Pacific Expedition.18 This expedition was intended to document rapidly disappearing cultures and languages; its very formulation was a recognition of what was happening to the cultural knowledge systems of First Peoples due to the influences of the newcomers and the urgency to record as much as possible before these systems were lost. Other indications of the changes, both intentionally imposed and incidental, are inferred or reflected in the journals and papers of the colonial government and religious officials of the day (see British Columbia 1875; Fort Victoria Journal 1846–50; Maclachlan 1998; and other documents in the HBC Archives). Beyond these documents, many more recent academic books and papers have focused on aspects of the social, cultural, and economic changes experienced by First Peoples.19 Of course, among the strongest and most authentic records of this time of cultural, social, linguistic, and economic transition are the words and oral histories of the First Peoples themselves; ironically, these voices have not received the same degree of acceptance in courts of law or government as the academic voice, as evidenced in the rejection of oral history testimonies by the trial judge in the Gitksan-Witsuwit’en (Delgamuxw) court case on Aboriginal title to land and resources (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia 1997).20 Early Treaties and Reserve Systems

For the Indigenous peoples of British Columbia, the colonial era could be said to have started with the development of treaties of land and resource relinquishment on Vancouver Island in 1850. James Douglas, chief factor of Fort Victoria, and later Sir James Douglas, governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island, was the main instigator of these treaties. In overseeing the treaties, he played a major role in the transformation of the landscapes of Vancouver Island and British Columbia from their original form – lightly but effectively managed and groomed by Indigenous peoples through periodic landscape burning, clearing, pruning, and selective harvesting – to a dramatically different configuration through farming of crops, grazing of cattle, logging, and in short, supporting a different pattern of settlement and land use. Although Douglas was undeniably paternalistic in his attitude toward the Indigenous peoples, occasionally referring to them in his letters as “wandering denizens of the forest” or “children of the forest” (Fisher 1992, 62; British Columbia 1875; see also chapter 12), he did recognize to some extent their ownership and occupancy of the lands on which the Europeans wanted to establish their forts, farms, mines, and settlements. He therefore took the initiative of establishing (under the British Colonial Office) a

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series of fourteen treaties – widely known as the “Douglas treaties” – by which the Indigenous peoples in the vicinity of intended European settlements around Fort Victoria, and later Saanich, Nanaimo, and Fort Rupert on northern Vancouver Island, would legally relinquish large tracts of their lands. Some of these areas were already being farmed to help supply Fort Victoria. Nanaimo and Fort Rupert were the locations of coal deposits, the mining of which Douglas saw as necessary for colonial development. The wording of the Douglas treaties (which were written only in English, not in the languages of the participating First Nations) was essentially the same for all, varying only with the areas designated and the chiefs and communities who were named as signatories. Even Douglas, like his colonial contemporaries, did not fully appreciate the complexities of the First Nations’ complete occupancy of the land, especially along the coast. His assumption was that any lands where there were not actually villages or fishing sites of the First Peoples were available for colonizing. The secretary of the Hudson’s Bay Company advised him as such: “In your negotiations with [the chiefs of the tribes] ... you are to consider the natives as the rightful possessors of such lands only as they are occupied by cultivation, or had houses built on, at the time when the Island came under the undivided sovereignty of Great Britain in 1846. All other land is to be regarded as waste, and applicable to the purposes of colonization” (Archibald Barclay to James Douglas, 16 May 1850, cited by Arnett 1999, 32, emphasis added). Douglas nevertheless saw it as his duty to formally divest the people of the lands he intended to take over. He felt this would simplify the colonial occupation of the land and eliminate any possible later impediments to European settlement. The wording of the Douglas treaties in many ways paralleled the English text of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi negotiated by the British government with the Maori of New Zealand, where similar philosophies and misunderstandings had been imposed (Arnett 1999, 31). Fisher (1992, 104), Arnett (1999, 32), and others have since pointed out that the British perspective was influenced by social theory of the day, particularly that propounded by Emerich de Vattel, an eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher and jurist, who argued that people who do not actually cultivate the land cannot have a true and legal possession of it; cultivation alone gave the right to hold title to land. Hunting or food gathering de Vattel considered indolent forms of existence, arguing that “Those who yet hold to the idle mode of life usurp more land than they would require with honest labour, and cannot complain if other nations, more laborious and too much pent-up, come and occupy any portion of it” (cited in Arnett 1999, 32). Europeans generally thought that those they perceived to be mere hunters and gatherers did not make use of the land in a “civilized” way, and it was even asserted that the Indians placed no value on their land because they never cultivated it (Banfield 1860; see also Deur and Turner 2005).

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The settlers were either unwilling or unable to understand Indigenous land and resource management practices and concepts of land proprietorship. Conveniently, they made the easier assumption that the land was lying “waste” and, as a consequence, was there for the taking (Fisher 1992). Following this perspective, each of the treaty documents created by Douglas incorporated this excerpt: “The condition of, or understanding of the sale is this, that our village sites and Enclosed Fields are to be left for our own use, for the use of our Children, and for those who may follow after us ... it is understood however that the land itself with these small exceptions becomes the Entire property of the White people for ever; it is also understood that we are at liberty to hunt over the unoccupied lands, and to carry on our fisheries as formerly” (British Columbia 1875, 5–11). The first nine treaty purchases, for lands around Fort Victoria, were made in the spring of 1850. Douglas called the chiefs together for a formal signing ceremony, in which they were to indicate their approval of the transaction on a blank piece of paper, relinquishing “entirely and forever” their rights to the lands specified in print. The chiefs in turn would receive a designated payment, most of which was provided in Hudson’s Bay Company blankets (the value of which was evidently inflated by several times their cost to the company). Ultimately, through the fourteen treaties, the “purchase” of 927 square kilometres (around 3%) of Vancouver Island was formalized through such signing ceremonies. Evidently, from the perspective of James Douglas, the formal ceremonies and treaties were straightforward and were intended to provide fair compensation for lands that were seen to be little used by the First Peoples. However, the participating Salish and Kwakwaka’wakw leaders had a different interpretation altogether, according to some of the oral accounts recorded later. Saanich elder David Elliott Sr, for example, recorded the Saanich people’s perception of the land transaction. He told about how, before the treaty ceremony, the Europeans had been cutting down hundreds of tall, straight trees for ships’ masts and other purposes from the forests around Cadboro Bay in Victoria and how the Saanich warriors, arriving in four canoes, confronted the loggers and told them to return to the fort. He referred to another incident, in which a Saanich boy, crossing James Douglas’s farm in the vicinity of Mount Douglas, had been shot and killed. Elliott and Poth (1990, 45–50) describe the signing of the treaty from the Saanich people’s perspective: They saw these bundles of blankets and goods and they were asked to put X’s on this paper ... Our people didn’t know what the X’s were for ... So they talked back and forth from one to the other and wondered why they were being asked to put these crosses on these papers ... One man spoke up after they discussed it, and said, “I think James Douglas wants to keep the peace,” because they were after all almost in a state of war, a boy had

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been shot. We stopped them from cutting timber and sent them back to Victoria and told them to cut no more timber. “I think these are peace offerings. I think Douglas means to keep the peace. I think these are the sign of the cross” ... It wasn’t until much later they found out actually they were signing their land away by putting those crosses out there. They didn’t know what it said on that paper. Dave Elliott himself looked at the original document and noted, as others have, that the X’s are all alike, “probably written by the same hand” (Elliott and Poth 1990, 69). The chiefs’ names recorded by Douglas’s officials were not accurately written, and many were not recognized by subsequent Saanich people. As he noted, “Our people were hardly able to talk English at that time and who could understand our language?” (ibid., 69). It seems unlikely that they would have willingly accepted wording that divested them of most of their lands, with “small exceptions,” to become “the entire property of the white people for ever” (British Columbia 1875, 5–11). Despite the profound misunderstandings that occurred over these treaties, they have been used in courts of law (e.g., R. v. White and Bob 1964, R. v. Bartleman 1984, and Claxton v. Saanichton Marina Ltd 1989, all cited in N. Claxton 2003) to uphold the limited rights, especially fishing rights, of the descendants of the original signators. On the American side of the border, within just a few years of the signing of the Douglas treaties, from late 1854 through to July 1855, mostly through the office of Isaac I. Stevens, governor and superintendent of Indian affairs of the Territory of Washington, and sometimes through a local Indian agent, over a dozen similar treaties were prepared and signed with marks made by the chiefs, headmen, and delegates of each nation, band, or series of villages of each tribe. These included tribes from the Olympic Peninsula and Puget Sound east to the Yakima, Nez Perce, and Selish (Flathead) territories (First People 2009a). Each of these treaties consisted of a number of articles confirming relinquishment of most of the First Peoples’ lands while “Guaranteeing however the right to all citizens of the United States to enter upon and occupy as settlers any lands not actually occupied and cultivated by said Indians at this time, and not included in the reservation above named” (First People 2009b). Each specified the assignment of a given territory in consideration of a payment from the United States of a sum of money (e.g., $30,000 for the treaty with the Makah) (First People 2009c), with a small amount more to help the Native Americans to move and settle on the reservation and “to clear, fence, and break up a sufficient quantity of land for cultivation.” For each there was the stipulation, similarly worded, that the people were permitted to continue to fish “at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations” and to “erect temporary houses for the purpose of curing [fish], together with the privilege of hunting and gathering roots and berries on open and unclaimed lands.” For the coastal peoples, a stipulation

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was added: “Provided, however, that they shall not take shell-fish from any beds staked or cultivated by citizens” (referring to the settlers) (First People 2009c). For those peoples who owned horses and cattle, an additional clause allowed them “pasturing [of] their horses on all open and unclaimed lands ... provided, also, that they shall alter all stallions not intended for breeding, and keep up and confine the stallions themselves” (First People 2009d). In each of these treaties, too, the United States agreed to establish agricultural and industrial schools, free to children of the said tribe, as well as “a smithy and carpenter’s shop, and ... the necessary tools and employ a blacksmith, carpenter and farmer for the like term to instruct the Indians in their respective occupations” (First People 2009c). Others were given funds for “erection of buildings on the reservation, fencing and opening farms, for the purchase of teams, farming implements, clothing, and provisions, for medicines and tools,” and some were promised sawmills and flour mills (First People 2009e).21 The tribes had to agree to free all slaves and not to purchase other slaves. The treaties also specified that, “in order to prevent the evils of intemperance among said Indians,” no liquor would be brought onto the reservation, with payments to be withheld if this order was broken (e.g., First People 2009e). The Makah, in particular, further had to agree “not to trade at Vancouver’s Island or elsewhere out of the dominions of the United States” and not to allow “foreign Indians” to reside on the reservation without consent of the superintendent or agent (First People 2009c). The treaties specified that the president of the United States had the right to settle members of other tribes or bands on the reservation as he saw fit. The border between British and American territory was established officially in the west with the signing of the Oregon Treaty in 1846. For those Indigenous peoples living along the boundary line, free interchange across the two territories was discouraged, even among those of the same nation and speaking the same language. Access to traditional hunting and fishing territories, supposedly guaranteed by the wording of the treaties, was severely curtailed. Even today, over 160 years later, the difficulty of people crossing the Canada-US border for harvesting or visiting relatives still exists. Each of these treaties, from the Treaty of Waitangi to the Douglas treaties and those developed for the US side of northwestern North America, reflected the imperative established by the colonists that the Indigenous peoples be controlled and contained and that they be persuaded to follow the “more civilized” and industrious lifestyles of the English and American settlers and governments. The wording of the treaties and the correspondence to and from the Indian agents, the colonial offices, the missionaries, and law enforcement officials (see British Columbia 1875) left no doubt of this. Although allowances were made for fishing, curing fish, and “hunting and gathering roots and berries,” the overwhelming push was for people to take up ranching and farming and

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for children to be schooled in these enterprises and to abandon the “primitive” lifeways of their ancestors. In the years following the signing of the Douglas treaties in what was to become British Columbia, further efforts were made to confine the First Peoples to designated areas of land in order to open the majority of the country for settlement. The original reserves, although imposed with little consultation, were based on a more generous allowance of land and access to their traditional resources than was the case later on, most notably after British Columbia became a colony in 1858. At this time, overtly bigoted and racist individuals like Joseph Trutch, who was appointed commissioner of lands and works in the 1860s, adopted a policy of pre-empting Indigenous lands and permitting settlers to obtain land for little cost by taking residence on it and “improving” it through cultivation, even before land surveys had been completed. During this period land-hungry settlers assumed ownership of some of the most productive and desirable lands in British Columbia, and Trutch refused to accept even the most obvious evidence of First Peoples’ prior claims, governance systems, and use of their lands and resources. During his tenure as commissioner, some of the original areas designated as reserves for First Peoples by his predecessor, James Douglas, were drastically reduced. Trutch’s malicious obstinacy thus caused even greater strife and hardship for Indigenous peoples of the day, even after British Columbia’s entry into Confederation in 1871 (British Columbia 1875). The reserve system continued to be imposed, confining First Peoples who wished to stay in their ancestral territories more and more to small areas of land for their permanent villages, with even smaller outposts at some camping and harvesting sites. In 1875 the federal and provincial governments agreed to initiate a Canadian Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Northwest Coast Indians, in which the Indigenous peoples’ needs for land were reassessed by colonial officials in view of settlers’ needs. The conclusions were not generally favourable to the Aboriginal peoples; the areas designated through this reassessment were generally very small and often did not even include parcels and resource sites that were specifically requested. As a result, even those First Nations that were trying hard to cooperate with the missionaries and the colonial governments became increasingly disenchanted and disillusioned with the entire process, particularly with the failure of both levels of government to protect their reserve lands from encroachment by settlers or to provide compensation for their losses. For the Haisla of Kitamaat, an important site of “Crab Apple Gardens” owned by certain families in a small inlet near Kildala was omitted from commissioner Peter O’Reilly’s reserve assessment, and as a result, in a letter dated 10 November 1897, the Haisla petitioned the chief commissioner to add the crabapple (Malus fusca) grounds to their other reserves (Kitamaat Indians 1897; see also chapter 11). Later, in 1912, a joint royal commission of federal and provincial

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representatives – with commissioners J.A.J. McKenna and British Columbia premier Richard McBride – was convened to try to resolve the ongoing issues around reserve requirements of the province’s Aboriginal population. McKenna and McBride met with the representatives of each band to negotiate its reserve land requirements. Through this commission more reserves were added, but again, many key areas that had been identified by the First Peoples as historically and economically important were still omitted, leaving a legacy of dissatisfaction that has continued, with modern treaty negotiations and specialpurpose claims related to legal title and rights to lands and resources ongoing in many areas. The Agricultural Imperative

At the same time as Indigenous peoples were encouraged to adopt the ways of the European newcomers, some of the best lands available for agriculture were surveyed and designated for white settlement or were outright appropriated, sometimes leaving only marginal reserve lands from which the First Peoples were expected to make a living. At least along the coast, the rationale for such small reserves was that people were fishers and needed land only for their villages and a few fishing camps (D.C. Harris 2001). Without recognition of peoples’ use of and need for wide and diverse areas of terrestrial territory, some of the best camas prairies, estuarine root gardens, montane parkland, and fertile bottomlands around the entire region were usurped by the settlers. A good example of how traditional food-harvesting lands were taken over for the European enterprise occurred, as already alluded to, in the vicinity of Victoria. Arriving at the future site of Fort Victoria from Fort Vancouver in 1842, James Douglas was already thinking about farming and food production for the fort and anticipated colony. He described two kinds of soil in the area where he landed, noting that both “produce Abundance of Grass, and several varieties of Red Clover grow on the rich moist Bottoms,” referring to the native springbank clover (Trifolium wormsioldii) (figure 4-6). He reported, “In Two Places particularly, we saw several Acres of Clover growing with a Luxuriance and Compactness more resembling the close Sward of a well-managed Lea than the Produce of an uncultivated Waste.” He didn’t recognize the food use of the rhizomes of this clover by the local peoples, nor did he appreciate that the “Lea” was, indeed, probably managed by the local Songhees (James Douglas’s report, Fort Vancouver, 12 July 1842, cited in Scholefield 1914, vol. 1, 463). On 27 June 1846 Captain Henry Kellett of the HMS Herald anchored off Victoria, and his naturalist, Berhold Seemann, described “a natural park; noble oaks and ferns are seen in the greatest luxuriance; thickets of the hazel and the willow, shrubberies of the poplar and the alder, are dotted about” but also “signs of cultivation in every direction – enclosed pasture-land, fields of wheat,

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4-6  |  Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii), a native perennial clover, noted by James Douglas in July 1842 when he arrived at what was to become the city of Victoria. Flowers and leaves (foreground).

potatoes and turnips.” Then, revealing his European bias, Seemann added, “Civilization had encroached upon the beautiful domain, and the savage could no longer exist in the filth and indolence of mere animal life” (cited in Scholefield 1914, vol. 1, 483). By 1848 the transformation of the landscape was even more dramatic: there were 300 acres (about 121 hectares) under tillage near Fort Victoria, there were two large dairies, each with seventy cows, together with numerous other cattle and twenty-four brood mares, and there was a sawmill under construction.22 The land was indeed very rich and yielded as much as forty bushels of wheat to the acre. The Hudson’s Bay Company was already producing stock for passing ships, as reported by Captain George William Courtenay in his letter to British consul William Miller: “for example the [HMS ] Constance paid them 400 pounds for what cost them absolutely nothing namely, Cattle that feed on the Prairies & flour that is manufactured at no cost whatever ... The winters are mild; never so severe as to interrupt agricultural pursuits, & they have never failed to gather in their crops at Fort Victoria in the month of August while the extensive Prairies afford pasture for innumerable herds of Cattle” (cited in Scholefield 1914, vol. 1, 380). Butter, along with other produce from Fort Victoria as well as Fort Langley, was sold to the Russians at Sitka. Within the next few decades, and throughout the region, the Europeans were exploring, carefully noting areas with potential for agriculture and settlement, and planning how these lands could be “developed.” For example, Major William Downie of the Royal Navy was the first European to describe the Kitsumkalum Valley in the Skeena region. He led a survey expedition there in 1859 and reported, “a large stream, called the Kitchumsala, comes in from the north; the land on it is good, and well adapted to farming,” adding that “the Indians grow plenty of potatoes” (cited in Mayne 1862, 451). Indigenous people, increasingly cut off from their lands, were persuaded or sometimes coerced into accepting the new lifestyles, and as already described, both on the coast and in the interior, many took up European-style gardening, farming, and ranching, thus participating in the transformation of their own lands (Lutz 2008). Draining and dyking wetlands, especially along rivers, was a common method of “reclaiming” land for farming in different parts of the area. The Kingcome River estuary was dyked by the settlers, including the Halliday brothers, one of whom, William, became the Indian agent for the region (Deur et al. 2013), and part of the Fraser River Valley’s alluvial floodplains and wetlands were also dyked and converted to farmland. In the Kootenays, too, dyking and farming were virtually imposed on the local Ktunaxa by the officials of the Indian Department, as evidenced by this passage from the Nelson newspaper The Miner on 20 July 1895 concerning a group of Ktunaxa who were dissatisfied with the extent of land on their reserve:

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Mr. Vowell [superintendent of the Indian Department] pointed out to them that the whole of the east side of the river is practically open to them and that if it is ever dyked, as it must be if the people to whom it belongs want to use it for settlement, the Reserve must be included in the dyke. The Indians would then have 1800 acres [about 728 hectares] of as fine land as there is in the valley. The chief promised that if they were allowed to remain where they were for the season and to cut their winter’s stock of hay on the land where they have been accustomed to do so, that next year he and his tribe would move over to the other side of the river and look out for suitable spots for themselves over there. Mr. Alexander on the part of the Reclamation Company agreed to this arrangement, and the so-called difficulty is at an end. Later, Whitford and Craig (1918, 259) reported, “Practically all the land in the Columbia and Kootenay valleys, up to an altitude of 3,500 feet [over 1,000 metres], and in some cases, to 4,000 feet [over 1,200 metres], has been alienated for agricultural purposes.” Describing British Columbia in general, Whitford and Craig (ibid., 104) expressed a dominant perspective on the desirability of exploiting both timber and agricultural lands: “Though the general policy has been to reserve all the agricultural land for homesteaders, some 115,000 acres [about 46,539 hectares] have been sold, chiefly under special conditions requiring reclamation by dyking or irrigation ... Nearly all the land in the lower Fraser valley is valuable for agricultural purposes, especially for fruit, vegetables and dairying, and greater efforts should be made to have it cleared and put under cultivation as soon as possible after logging.” Regarding Vancouver Island, Whitford and Craig (ibid., 363) wrote, The climate is propitious also for agriculture, especially for fruit, vegetables, poultry and live stock. In this district, including the adjoining islands, there is estimated to be 425 square miles [over 1,100 square kilometres] upon which agriculture could be conducted. Owing to the density of the forests and the high cost of clearing the land, estimated not to exceed 100 square miles [259 square kilometres], has been actually devoted to agriculture. However, with the removal of timber, large areas are being made available for settlement, and several agricultural centres are established. The most important of these are in the vicinity of Comox, Alberni, Nanaimo, Duncan and Saanich. Indeed, the southeastern coast of Vancouver Island, from Comox to the Saanich Peninsula, has now been almost entirely cleared of its old growth forests, with their massive Douglas-firs, western redcedars, and other timber species. The ownership of much of this land has never been legally settled, and the

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Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group is developing a comprehensive claim for lands that were taken from the Hul’qumi’num by the colonial authorities, particularly those included in the E&N Land Grant of 1884 (Thom 2005; Thom and Fediuk 2009; Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group 2009). The introduction of invasive weedy species like burdock (Arctium minus) and mullein (Verbascum thapsus) has also been a consequence of ranching (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; L.R. Smith 2008b; Swan 1972; Turner and Brown 2004). In the Interior Plateau, aggressive rhizomatous grasses such as couchgrass (Agropyron repens) were more successful at withstanding the grazing and trampling of cattle and other livestock than was the native bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata; syn. Agropyron spicatum). By the early 1900s, Whitford and Craig (1918, 64) reported, “The most characteristic plant of the natural grass lands in the southern part of the Interior system is the bunch grass (Agropyron spicatum). Over some areas it has been practically exterminated by over-grazing.” Many large patches of Indian-hemp and other culturally important species of moist prairies, like silverweed and bitterroot, were also destroyed by overgrazing and agriculture in the Interior Plateau (see J.A. Ross 2011). On southern Vancouver Island and in the Puget Sound region, European orchardgrass (Dactylus glomeratus), velvetgrass (Holcus lanatus), introduced brome grasses (Bromus tectorum, B. mollis), and other exotic grasses started to take over the native grasslands of the Garry oak savannahs and the coastal floodplains, and European reed canarygrass (Phalaris arundinacea) started to dominate wetlands. Today, as a result, many grasslands at both low and high elevations throughout the region are comprised predominately of introduced species, to the detriment of native species, both plant and animal. As noted by Tsilhqot’in elder Patrick Lulua, “The deer are scarce because the cows are eating all the food and trampling what is left ... The cows push the soil down and they love eating the flowers and leaves of mountain potato [Claytonia lanceolata]” (pers. comm., 2005; see also Mellott 2010). Whether raised by the newcomers or Indigenous peoples,23 horses and cattle, especially the latter, had an undeniable impact on habitats and landscapes, and along with other types of land transformation, they were responsible for irrevocable changes to indigenous species and the territories of Indigenous peoples. The herds of cattle released to graze in the valley bottoms and subalpine parkland ecosystems of many parts of the study area disrupted and polluted wetlands and compacted and eroded the soils of prairies, meadows, and sagebrush steppe, which were traditional root-harvesting grounds (Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). As explained by Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001), “At the surface of the soil where we used to gather our food, there’s about four to six inches of thick, thick sod. And the cattle walk on it, and it’s packing it to the point where there’s very little air goes into the ground, very little rain.” As a consequence, the ground was becoming harder and more difficult to dig:

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We have a place called the Neskonlith Flats where our grandparents went to dig the root edibles, the avalanche lily [yellow glacier lily, Erythronium grandiflorum], spring beauty, chocolate lily [Fritillaria affinis], different other kinds of plants. You couldn’t dig in there the way my grandmother used to dig ... All you needed was a little crossbar digging stick, to turn the sod. Today, when I want to get a little feed of avalanche lily, I have to get some of the boys with strong legs and a shovel, really sharpened shovel. And they kick into it, and even then, we have a hard time to reach down ’cause those roots are going deeper and deeper and they’re getting smaller and smaller. There’s a lot of harm done by doing what we’re doing today by introducing different species of grass; it’s choking out all our plants. (Ibid. 2001) Most Indigenous people, while taking up some of the occupations of the newcomers, continued to fish, hunt, and harvest berries and other plant products from their territories. Rather than stopping these activities, they cut back on them, while integrating agricultural work and/or work in the fishing industry, canneries, or logging into their seasonal rounds (see Laforet and York 1998). Many of the elders of the late 1900s in British Columbia recalled travelling as children and young adults with their families to pick hops (Humulus lupulus), strawberries, loganberries, and other produce in the Fraser Valley and Tacoma areas, and some travelled from the coast to Yakima or the Okanagan Valley to pick apples and other fruit. For example, Alice Paul of Hesquiat travelled to Tacoma with her family in 1919, when she was five years old, to help her mother pick hops. They picked the hops into huge funnel-shaped boxes and were paid seventy-five cents or one dollar per box. Working from six o’clock in the morning until dark, a good picker could earn six or seven dollars a day. Later in her life, Alice Paul picked hops at Sardis and Chilliwack in the Fraser Valley (Turner and Efrat 1982). Alec and Nellie Peters and Margaret Lester (pers. comm., 1987) from Mount Currie also used to travel to the Fraser Valley to pick hops in the 1930s, earning about $1.25 per box (1.5 by 1.2 by 1.2 metres). With people from many different First Nations and ethnic backgrounds coming together at these agricultural and other industrial and urban centres, there was an active exchange of products and cultural information, including new plant foods, both native and introduced, and new materials and tools. For example, the Saanich learned from interior peoples that soapberries – commonly whipped into a frothy confection – could also be made into a refreshing lemonade-like beverage (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1991; Turner and Burton 2010). Haida women learned about false embroidery techniques for basketry decoration from their Tlingit neighbours (Blackman 1982, 85–6). New weaving materials like raphia (stem fibre from the Raphia palm) and corn husks were experimented with, and sewn and knitted clothing from cotton and wool yard and

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fabric became more common (Schlick 1994; Laforet 1990, 1992). C.F. Newcombe (1897–1916) reported that by 1902 women were frequently using brightly coloured aniline dyes for their beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax), basket sedge (Carex obnupta), and other weaving materials because of “the demands of the average collector for gaudy shades.” They used these coloured materials to produce striking patterns in their weaving, generally replacing the softer natural colours derived from alder (Alnus spp.) and western hemlock bark, Oregon-grape root, and other native plants (Turner 1998). Missionary Influence, Residential Schools, and the Potlatch Ban

Missionaries of various denominations, especially Roman Catholic and Anglican, had begun to establish missions in various Indigenous communities by the second half of the nineteenth century. Many changes resulted to Aboriginal communities, most notably the creation, with the support of the colonial government, of mission schools to educate Native children using the “civilized” model of the Europeans, a primary goal of both colonial and church officials. The impacts of these efforts to eliminate the “pagan” religious traditions of First Peoples through conversion to Christianity and to convert their lifestyles, economic systems, and governance to those in keeping with the industrialized European mode were immense, eroding Indigenous peoples’ sense of identity, languages, food systems, and entire systems of governance, land use, and management of lands and resources, including their myriad plant resources (Turner, Gregory, et al. 2008). Once they had attended school, where they learned to speak English and were taught the newcomers’ ways, many Indigenous people found employment as labourers and wage earners and, in some cases, as spouses of the settlers. For example, in Chilkat territory in December 1881, Krause and Krause (1993, 119) recorded, “The trader’s wife is a Tsimshian [Ts’msyen] Indian. She was educated in a mission school about 20 kilometers south of Fort Simpson, where, in addition to religious instruction, the Indians learned several crafts as well as strict cleanliness.” These mission schools were established in many different centres throughout the area, and sometimes they drew families from outlying areas to resettle near the schools so as to be near their children. Missionaries like Willie Duncan, an Anglican who emigrated from England in 1856 to Fort Simpson (Lax Kw’alaams) in British Columbia, influenced the settlement patterns of entire groups of people.24 Children at the residential schools everywhere were put to work in the kitchens and in the gardens and orchards, where they grew and harvested their own food, as well as in domestic work like sewing and knitting. In some cases, traditional arts like basket weaving were encouraged (e.g., at the mission school in Yale) (Laforet and York 1998), but the products were to be sold to raise funds

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to support the students. Children were expected to pay for their clothing and often had to work hard outside of school time. Margaret Lester of Mount Currie (pers. comm., 1984), for example, used the money she earned picking hops with her family to pay for her clothes and shoes when she went to a mission school. On other occasions, people would go to live and work at the canneries along the coast at places like Sunnyside, Duckers, Namu, Rivers Inlet, and Steveston on the British Columbia coast. Men, women, and children all worked hard, alongside Chinese and other labourers. Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief Earl Maquinna George (2003), when he was a boy, went from Ahousaht with his father to work at the cannery at Rivers Inlet. Working for an entire season, he earned thirteen dollars, which his aunt immediately took to buy his school clothes. At the age of nine, Margaret Siwallace (pers. comm., 1984) of Bella Coola accompanied her aunt to the cannery there. Margaret’s job was to salvage the heads and tails of the salmon. She would then take them home, gather driftwood from the river, skewer the salmon pieces on sticks, and smoke them for her family’s winter food supply. Many of the elders had painful recollections of their time in residential schools. For example, Nuu-chah-nulth elder Roy Haiyupis (pers. comm., 1994) remembered being put to work at the school at Ahousaht to dig a long, deep ditch to drain the large salmon-spawning lake beside the village so that it could be converted to production of domesticated cranberries as a means of supporting the school. The children, some as young as six years old, had to remove from this ditch and carry away heavy buckets of soil. Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (2001, 4) recalled, And then, out of the blue we were taken away from our homes, off to the Kamloops residential school. There we were not allowed to speak. We were never allowed to talk unless we were spoken to. And we were never allowed to ask questions ... It was perfect silence. From the minute you got out of bed ... You went to the chapel and we were interrogated there about the way our people was the work of the devil and we were to forget our language. And if we spoke one word in our language, we got strapped five hard strokes on each hand. They made sure they hit us back here [on the wrists] where it’s tender, it would draw blood, and we were always bruised on our arms. I grew up like that ... And that made me want to speak English so I could avoid getting whipped, strapped ... You were only given two hours of reading and writing. The rest of the day was domestic work. You went to the sewing room. We had to mend socks, we had to patch pants, and any clothing that needed mending. Either that, or we were put in the kitchen. And I’m telling you, the stew they made in there wasn’t fit for consumption. Everything was thrown in a great big vat and boiled until

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you didn’t know which was potato or turnip, boiled right mushy. And yet, we were so hungry we used to eat it. The psychological impacts of the residential schools were as bad as or worse than the physical abuse. Mary Thomas (2001, 25) recalls, “It was really, really torture. And when you put the person’s spirit down that bad ... I walked out of that school with very low self-esteem.” The residential schools worked at several levels to reduce and, in some cases, eliminate the desire for children to learn the knowledge and lifeways of their parents and grandparents – including the knowledge about plants and environments. The entire policy of the government and churches, enacted over several generations through the residential schools and missionization, was to assimilate First Nations children into a European lifestyle. “There [at residential school] we ... were told that ... the teaching of my grandmother was the work of the devil and that we were to throw it away. We were not allowed to even hum an Indian song ... We were totally cut off from studies that we learned from our grandparents” (ibid.). This policy of the schools – to ban the use of Indigenous languages, to serve the children a completely different diet, to indoctrinate them with different belief systems, and to emphasize instruction in European-based occupations like farming, sewing, knitting, and so forth – created an immense barrier across the generations, such that children no longer appreciated their original languages, foods, and culture, ultimately contributing to an overwhelming loss of ethnobotanical and environmental knowledge that has continued to the present time (Turner, Gregory, et al. 2008; Turner and Turner 2008). One positive outcome of the residential school system was bringing together children from different regions and First Nations. Strong and lasting friendships developed from these often alienating situations, and these friendships have allowed important exchanges of knowledge that have continued up to the present. For example, Haida, Heiltsuk, and Nuu-chah-nulth Nation students all attended the Port Alberni Residential School, and many Ditidaht, Haida, and Nuxalk students attended Coqualeetza School in Chilliwack. In the United States, children were sent even farther away, with some Alaskan Haida being sent to schools in California or Oklahoma, together with children from Cherokee, Sioux, or other Native American communities. Later, there were visits among these friends and in some cases intermarriages. Some also suggest that some of the strong political Indigenous institutions that formed in the latter part of the twentieth century had their beginnings in residential school friendships and alliances. In 1884, following pressure from missionaries in British Columbia, the Canadian government banned potlatching. The potlatch, and its affiliated institutions known by different names, is a complex and critically important system that embodies several different cultural, economic, and ceremonial practices

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(Trosper 2002). Guests are invited, both from the community and from neighbouring and sometimes quite distant communities, to witness ceremonies of name giving for children, observances for young people coming into adulthood, marriages, and transfers of titles from deceased persons to their heirs. The guests are feasted and given gifts, often of very high value, in appreciation of their presence and their services as witnesses and memory keepers. The potlatch also embraces a system of investment in which guests are given gifts of food and other goods, including high-value items such as “coppers” (i.e., shields of beaten copper), with the assumption that they will gain in value and that, at some point in the future, this value will be returned “with interest” to the original giver. Finally, the potlatch serves as a venue for the performance of sacred ceremonies, songs, and dances that portray peoples’ spiritual attachment to the environment and key events in the history of a family, clan, or lineage. Chiefs, elders, and expert historians speak and inform the guests of interrelationships, commemorating the history of the people and keeping it alive through oral tradition. Plants as feast goods and gifts, ownership of resource-harvesting sites, ceremonies recognizing the spiritual powers of plants, and oral histories that relate to plants and environments are all important elements of the potlatch system. The European newcomers had little understanding of these important roles and functions of a potlatch. They simply regarded it as frivolous, lavish, and wasteful gift giving and could not understand how a person could divest himself of all his wealth. The new law imposed heavy punishment for those hosting and participating in a potlatch, subjecting offenders to imprisonment and to having their goods and regalia confiscated and their property – and in some cases, even their children – seized. Despite these prohibitions, people continued to hold potlatches, but they had to be done in secret and in modified form, disguised as weddings and Christmas celebrations, and held in remote places where the police were unable to come in the wintertime. The potlatch thus continued, but many of its intricacies were lost, including countless songs and dances, since they were no longer performed. On 6 April 1919 a group of Kwakwaka’wakw chiefs at Alert Bay wrote a letter to the deputy superintendent general of Indian affairs asking for the potlatch law to be reconsidered. They explained, as part of a much longer letter, We all know that things are changing. In the old days the only things that counted were such things as food: dried fish, roots, berries and things of that nature. A chief in those days would get possession of all these things and would pass them on to those who had not got any and in many instances would call another tribe and help them out too. We wish to continue this custom. In the old days when feasts were given, those who remained at home were remembered and those who attended would carry

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stuff home for their wives and children. This is all about our feasts, and we want to have the same thing today. (Chiefs of the ’Namgis (Nimpkish) Nation 1919; see also Bracken 1997, 221) The role of the potlatch chiefs in redistribution of food was explicitly stated here, as well as the other key functions of the potlatch. Despite this request, however, the potlatch law was not repealed until 1951, and although there have been immense efforts to revive potlatching, some of the key ceremonies and performances were lost or obscured through this oppressive act. Another deliberate attempt to integrate and assimilate Indigenous people is reflected in the wording of the Canadian Indian Act of 1876, which automatically enfranchised any Indian women who married non-Native men, as well as children of such marriages, effectively removing their Indian status and their access to reserve lands and resources (Laforet and York 1998). Given the important role of women in transmitting knowledge about plants, medicines, and food processing, this move had a profound impact on opportunities for knowledge dissemination related to these topics, akin to setting up a wall between these women and their traditional territories. Some people embraced the changes more readily than others. For example, Teit (1909, 469–70) noted, The Shuswap [Secwepemc] seem to be less conservative than the Thompson [Nlaka’pamux] Indians, and have been quicker to accept the teachings of the missionaries, and to discard their old ways of life. This is evidenced in many ways. Shamans still practise among the Thompson Indians; and dancing, feasting, and potlatching of different kinds are not infrequent. Basket, bag, and mat making are still important industries. Parts of the old style of dress, and a few men with long and braided hair, may still be seen; and stone pipes are still commonly used. Among the Shuswap all these have disappeared entirely, or almost entirely. The potlatch ban, the policy forbidding children to speak their Native languages and the enforcement of new dietary regimes in the residential schools, the missionaries’ efforts to eliminate totem poles and traditional ceremonies, and the government’s Indian Act all impacted peoples’ abilities to practise their cultures and transmit their knowledge across generations. The residential schools, however, did provide opportunities for young people to learn new knowledge and skills in preparation for the different lifestyles they would be leading. Residential schools became, in fact, new centres of learning for gardening and farming, knitting, sewing, and homecare. Many people adapted by integrating the new religions and practices into their traditional lives and cultures. For example, instead of giving thanks and words of appreciation to animals being hunted at

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the time they were killed, people started to use the Christian practice of blessing the food before meals (Dr Earl Claxton Sr, pers. comm., 2003). Some Tlingit people adopted the practice of repeating the Lord’s Prayer before going hunting or before gambling (de Laguna 1972). Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York, who was a devout Christian and a staunch believer in Indigenous spiritual practices, explained, “You pray to God and the creek” (Laforet and York 1998, 19). People travelled to different missions and exchanged ethnobotanical knowledge even during religious events. For example, in the late 1800s, Sliammon women travelling to Kamloops for Catholic prayer meetings learned the art of coiled cedar-root basketry from Interior Salish basket makers (Kennedy and Bouchard 1983). For some decades at the Gitga’at seaweed camp, people observed Sundays as days of rest and did not go out to harvest seaweed or fish on that day; however, the need to get food and to take advantage of tides and good weather sometimes overrode this constraint (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2003). Formal and Informal Economies

As settlers moved onto the lands occupied by Indigenous peoples, and as the Indigenous peoples themselves converged on centres of employment at the forts and, later, on urban centres, canneries, and major areas of crop production, including the Fraser Valley, the Okanagan Valley, Yakima, and Puget Sound, not all interactions were hostile or conflicting. Friendships, alliances, intermarriages, and cordial relationships of employment sprang up across cultural and linguistic divides throughout the area. In these situations, not only goods but also knowledge and technologies, as well as services, were readily exchanged (see Ommer and Turner 2004). Krause and Krause (1993, 115; see also 170), for example, observed on their trip to Alaska in the early 1880s, The Indians here do not withdraw from white people; they rather actively seek contact with them ... Traders and miners speak the language of the Natives more or less. It is easier for them to learn Indian because many of them live with Indian women whom they purchase according to the local custom. Fifty dollars is the usual price. Miners also employ Indians as earth diggers or wood cutters, whereby the Indians earn $1 to $2 per day. Such a good possibility of earning a living led about 200 Indians from all parts of their territory to build their huts in Juneau City near the miners. Just slightly earlier, en route to Alaska, the Krause brothers passed by Cape Flattery on the Olympic Peninsula and reported a similar situation for the Makah: Near this cape there is an Indian reservation. A young merchant aboard our ship runs the only government-approved trading post there. He tells

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us that these tribes, as perhaps many others living farther north ... live in wooden houses and wear the same clothes as white people. From spring till the end of June, the men find rewarding employment catching fur seals ... the Indians and their wooden canoes carved out of one trunk are taken out by small schooners to suitable fishing sites. Summer is the time to catch halibut and other sea fish, mostly for their own use. During harvest time, they work on farms where their services as diligent and strong workers are well paid for in money, no longer in goods. They are active and eager to learn. (Ibid., 107) Thus formed, in many places, what Lutz (2008) has termed a “moditional” economy, blending traditional and modern lifeways. In terms of ethnobotanical knowledge and practice, the last half of the nineteenth century became a time of active and diverse interchange among First Peoples and between them and the settlers and other newcomers they encountered. This exchange has, of course, continued up to the present day, but in terms of direct relationships and interchange at an individual level, the interval from the mid-1800s to the mid1900s is particularly notable. The trade of traditional plant resources and products intensified with increased travel opportunities. For example, the Ditidaht from Clo-oose and other communities on the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island travelled regularly to Victoria, stopping to camp at Whiffen Spit on Sooke Harbour. Among other products, they traded dried fish with the Straits Salish for camas bulbs in the early 1900s, as recalled by Ida Jones (cited in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). In some cases, people paid for these products with cash. Saanich elder Elsie Claxton of Tsawout (pers. comm., 1996) recalled that “a long time ago” the Ditidaht and other people of Vancouver Island’s west coast (Nuuchah-nulth) used to pay five or ten dollars for a 50-pound potato sack (over 22 kilograms) of cooked camas bulbs. The hop-growing fields in the Fraser Valley around Chilliwack and Agassiz, as noted earlier, became destinations for diverse Indigenous families from both the coast and the interior. The hop pickers lived in long shacks, and women used to walk through the camps selling traditional foods such as soapberries and bitterroot from the interior. Hesquiaht elder Alice Paul remembered three or four old Native women walking around from door to door and calling out, “Supʔulalii, supʔulalii!” They had large baskets of fresh soapberries, which they would sell to other people for whipping with water into “Indian ice cream” (Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990).25 Basketry materials, too, were sold at such times. The Hesquiaht and other Vancouver Island Nuu-chah-nulth basket weavers used to purchase the tough, glossy leaves of beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax), sometimes already dyed and ready for use, from the Makah and Quileute of Washington, paying about a dollar per bundle (of about 2.5 centimetres thick). They called this “American grass,” in contrast with the more common and readily available tall basket sedge, or

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slough sedge (Carex obnupta), and they also purchased bundles of “three-square” sedge (Schoenoplectus americanus; syn. Scirpus olneyi), which is more restricted in its range (Turner and Efrat 1982). As well as enhanced exchange and purchase of plant products, the new modes of travel facilitated arrangements for sharing access to resources. As mentioned previously, the Ditidaht also made arrangements with their Salishan friends to harvest camas bulbs in their territory. As another example, Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1996) talked about her uncle, who was married to a Ktunaxa woman. Every summer, they and other Ktunaxa kin would travel to Salmon Arm by train from the Kinbasket area in the Kootenays, staying at Salmon Arm for about a month and harvesting “everything that the Secwepemc people used,” including berries, root vegetables, and salmon. In return, they brought dried elk meat, which their Secwepemc friends were not able to acquire locally. Foodstuffs and food production methods were also commonly exchanged between Indigenous peoples and their immigrant neighbours. The First Peoples were learning about farming and ranching and were starting to grow not only potatoes but other crops as well, and they continued to transform their diets and lifestyles to accommodate these new foods. Furthermore, the newcomers were at times completely dependent on knowledge of using the local native foods. For example, botanist David Douglas (1914, 63, 171) reported during his travels in present-day Washington in 1826 that a man named Jacques Finlay and his family were subsisting on “a sort of cake made of Lichen jubatum [Bryoria fremontii, wila] and a few roots of Scilla esculenta [Camassia quamash, camas] and of Lewisia rediviva [bitterroot].” Settlers were also eating wild caraway roots (Perideridia gairdneri) and a wide variety of berries (Gorman [1905–15]; see also Turner and von Aderkas 2012). The white settlers soon availed themselves of a variety of Indigenous baskets for storing their food, clothing, and other items, as well as for their collections of art and curios. Susan Allison, a young Englishwoman who with her husband settled in the Similkameen Valley of the southern British Columbia interior near Princeton in the mid-1870s, recalled from the 1870s, “The Indians [at Hope] made baskets, blankets, and rugs ... The Baskets were very costly and were useful as well as pretty. They were watertight and took a long time to make, some of them months even of hard work; they were used for many purposes ... for cooking ... [they] filled them with water into which they threw red hot stones till the water boiled, when they covered [them] tightly and kept it boiling till the food was cooked” (cited in Ormsby 1976, 39). In the late 1800s, Haida weaver Isabella Edenshaw of Massett sold her spruce-root basketry to a store in Port Essington on the mainland of British Columbia, receiving about five dollars in cash for a finely woven, painted spruce-root hat. She used the money to buy clothing for the family (Blackman 1982; Turner 2004a). Stl’atl’imx elder Margaret Lester

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of Mount Currie remembered that her grandmother used to take her beautiful coiled cedar-root baskets to farms in the nearby Pemberton Valley and exchange them with the settler women for used clothing, potatoes, fat, beef, or “anything we could get” (Turner and Loewen 1998; Turner 1998). Charles Hill-Tout ([1910], 30) described the production of baskets for sale at Sechelt: “Some of the women were very skillful in making the cedar-root basketry of this region. Even now, they make large numbers of them for sale to tourists, receiving from five to fifteen dollars a basket, according to size and quality. They had received an order just before my last visit to them, and many of the women and girls were busy in carrying it out.” In the 1920s and 1930s, Native basketry was featured in the Canadian Pacific Railway’s advertising for the west coast of Vancouver Island. One brochure (Canadian Pacific Railway 1936) noted, “The Indians of this district [Nuu-chah-nulth] are still noted for their skill in basket weaving and offer their wares for sale to tourists at various wharfs along the way.” The Indigenous basket weavers soon learned to adapt their art to the tastes of the traders and settler women, creating coiled basketry tea trays and even teacups, suitcases, trunks, and coffee tables. “Modern” touches were added to these and even to more traditional baskets, with fancy looping or scalloping around the rims and Christian symbols and European textile patterns in the designs. Increasingly, basketry was created more for show and decorative purposes than for functional applications. The diversity of basketry decreased as the specialized traditional styles of basketry and woven bags used for transport and storage gave way to burlap sacks, metal buckets, porcelain crocks, wooden casks, and cans (Turner 1996). Stl’atl’imx elder Edith O’Donaghey, for example, recalled, “They had special buckets for soapberries and other kinds of berries, ones that won’t leak ... woven of cedar roots. Nobody makes those baskets any more. They use ice cream buckets now” (cited in Turner 1992b, 417). Today, among Indigenous families, most people keep their baskets, especially those inherited from mothers, aunts, or grandmothers, as treasures and family heirlooms, but a few continue to make and use them for harvesting (Neawana Michell [‘Lémyaʔ], pers. comm., 2009). Woodcarvings and model totem poles became ready collectors’ items for settler families and ethnographers searching for museum pieces. The newcomers also emulated Indigenous fishing methods, with the construction of fish traps and weirs, as well as the use of Indigenous-designed fishhooks and gaffs, for example. The early colonial officials and settlers also travelled frequently by dugout canoe or, in winter, by wooden snowshoes, and some used fur clothing of Native design and manufacture. Some First Peoples, such as the Nlaka’pamux and Stl’atl’imx, learned to cook the leaves of the introduced common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) as greens, to make wine from dandelion flowers, and to use the cooked taproots

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medicinally for jaundice and liver problems and the latex to eliminate warts (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). They learned from the Japanese and Russians how to salt and pickle kelp stipes (Nereocystis luetkeana) and glasswort (Salicornia perennis) (Compton 1993b; Mudie et al. 2005). Some people also started using knotweeds (Fallopia spp., Persicaria wallichii), watercress (Cardamine nasturium-aquaticum), burdock roots (Arctium minus), lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), and hedge mustard (Sisymbrium altissimum), whose use as greens was learned from European, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991). In turn, the First Peoples started to sell some of their indigenous food, including red laver seaweed (Pyropia spp., Porphyra spp.) and wapato, to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who were used to eating related foods in their own homelands (Gorman [1905–15]; Darby 1996; Turner 1995, 1997a, 2003a; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983; M.D. Williams 1979). English settler Susan Allison, quoted previously, recalled the reciprocal and interdependent relationship between the settlers and their Indigenous neighours: “The Indian women used to gather and dry saskatoons, so I did the same and when they brought me trout which they caught by the hundreds in the baskets they set in the One Mile Creek, I paid for them with butter and then dried and smoked the trout, making delicious kipper for winter” (cited in Ormsby 1976, 39). Gorman ([1905–15], n.p.) also reported that First Peoples of Washington and Oregon “gather and sell saskatoon berry, or serviceberry, in large quantities to the white settlers who relish it for pies and jams” (see also Turner and von Aderkas 2012). Some Indigenous peoples became renowned for their garden produce, which they sold widely to other First Nations communities. The early marketing of potatoes has already been mentioned (Suttles 1951a). The Nuxalk of Bella Coola routinely brought potatoes, carrots, turnips, and other garden vegetables, together with their dried salmon, to Kitlope and Kemano to exchange for dried oulachens and oulachen grease, as well as to the Gitga’at community of Hartley Bay to exchange for dried seaweed and halibut (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2003; Compton 1993b). The Cowichan Hul’qumi’num used to bring potatoes they had grown over a trail from Lake Cowichan to Ditidaht territory at Nitinat Lake to trade for halibut and whale oil (William Eddie Banfield from the 1850s, cited in R.S. Mackie 1984, 102). The Haida continued to grow potatoes for their own use as well as for trade. On 2 August 1878 at Skidegate, George Dawson (1880, 54) reported seeing “New potatoes. Well grown, mealy & nearly ripe.” He also noted, “The potatoes planted by the Indians are of late varieties or they might be ready even before this. They are also planted in little irregular patches, the stalks crowded much too thickly together” (ibid.). Not only potatoes but also various other types of plants, both introduced and indigenous, were moved from place to place, a practice that, although documented from within the period of European contact, probably also occurred much earlier, possibly over hundreds, if not thousands, of years (see chapter 11).

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Elders like Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (Kwakwaka’wakw), Mary Thomas (Secwepemc), Annie York (Nlaka’pamux), and Ida Jones (Ditidaht) all reported having transplanted plants from outlying areas to their gardens in order to make them more readily available. Adam Dick transplanted highbush cranberries to his backyard at Kingcome Inlet, Mary Thomas transplanted bitterroot, spring beauty, and chocolate lily (Fritillaria affinis) to her gardens at Enderby and Salmon Arm, Annie York transplanted, among many different plants, an interior variety of saskatoon berry to her garden at Spuzzum, and Ida Jones transplanted “three-square” bulrush (Schoenoplectus americanus) from the Nitinat Lake area to a place near her house in Port Renfrew. Tree seedlings were also used as gifts to be transported from one place to another; for example, cedar trees were brought by the lower Nlaka’pamux and given to the upper Nlaka’pamux (Jim Stafford, pers. comm., 2008), and cottonwoods from Nuxalk territory were given as potlatch gifts to the Heiltsuk chiefs (Cyril and Jennifer Carpenter, pers. comm., 1999). Gitga’at elders of the early twentieth century transplanted Himalayan knotweed (Persicaria wallichii) and yellow iris (Iris pseudacorus) to Hartley Bay from Kitamaat and Prince Rupert respectively (Belle Eaton, pers. comm., 2004). People were continually exchanging different strains of blackberries, raspberries, and other fruits with each other, and even today, one can see patches of spearmint (Mentha spicata) and other herbs at old village sites like Whyac at the mouth of Nitinaht Lake that were introduced many years ago from Victoria and other centres. In terms of technological development, the Europeans, with their metal tools, large boats, guns, wooden barrels, and other containers and fabrics of canvas, cotton, and burlap, immediately created a range of new possibilities for the First Peoples, augmenting their abilities to work with wood in the construction and manufacture of implements, boxes, and sculptures; improving transportation; and increasing their effectiveness in hunting and fishing, in making clothing, and in transporting, processing, and storing food. For example, to make sheets used for spreading and drying their seaweed, the Gitga’at and other Northwest Coast peoples adopted cotton flour sacks with a 50-pound capacity (over 22 kilograms), which were opened up and sewn together; six flour sacks were used to make one drying sheet. Gitga’at elder Colleen Robinson (pers. comm., 2003) recalled that her family used to have forty-eight of these large cotton sheets. Cotton rice sacks and burlap potato sacks also became important in food harvesting. Saanich women at the hop-picking centres learned that, after the hops were harvested, they could take the long cotton strings used for training hop vines and reuse them for stitching their tule and cattail mats (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1992; Turner and Hebda 2012). For storing their food, including crabapples, highbush cranberries, bog cranberries, lingonberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea), and cloudberries, the latter of which were traditionally parboiled and placed under water in baskets or cedar-wood bent boxes, some people

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started to use wooden barrels and casks. Berries like blueberries and roots like spring beauty, or mountain potato, were sometimes picked into 5-pound coffee cans (about 2.25 kilograms), lard cans, or cleaned-out kerosene tins lined with bags (Kake 1989; Turner and Thompson 2006). As noted previously, the flat-sided kerosene cans were particularly useful for packing on horses (Minnie Charleyboy and Maryann Solomon, pers. comm., 2003; Turner 2004b). In some cases, metal screens replaced wooden berry-drying racks and frames, although these screens might be covered with layers of “timbergrass” (Calamagrostis rubescens) or large leaves for drying the berries, just like their wooden counterparts. By the early 1900s most fruits, including crabapples, blueberries, soapberries, and other berries, were generally being mixed with sugar and made into jam that was stored in jars or cans, as well as being dried in cakes and stored in baskets or boxes. By the 1880s most people had stopped building the traditional multifamily “big houses” as residences on the coast or the log-covered pithouses in the interior. Emulating the European newcomers, and with urging from the missionaries, people started to build log cabins and log outbuildings or to use milled lumber and wood-frame construction for their permanent houses, which had wooden floors and shingled roofs (Laforet and York 1998; Teit 1900, 237). However, the traditions of caring for and cleaning out the house at the end of the winter season continued. Mary Thomas recalled living in a log house as a child. She remembered her mother boiling up a huge vat of “mint grass” (Mentha arvensis) and lye in a big oil drum. Her mother cleaned out all of the mud chinking from their cabin, and then Mary and her brother and sister would dip small shamrock lard buckets into the mint-lye solution and splash it all over the logs and between them. Her mother used her broom to wash the entire cabin, inside and out, with this solution, following the age-old custom of purifying their winter kikuli (“pit”) houses. Everyone moved out of their log houses in the summertime, just as they had moved out of their pithouses in previous generations (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994). Rough temporary shelters and lean-tos continued to be used at fish camps, on traplines, and at mountain hunting and berry-picking camps, but many people also started to use canvas tents, small log cabins, or small frame houses at these places. Fires became much easier to start and keep going, with the new flints and later matches, with axes and cross-cut saws to cut fuel wood, and with the possibility of using fuels like kerosene, coal, and coal oil. Stone fireplaces and metal woodstoves replaced the central hearth fires people traditionally used for cooking and warmth. Candles and kerosene lamps provided improved lighting at night, for example, and glass windows installed in houses made dwelling places more comfortable. Dugout canoes and bark canoes gave way to wooden rowboats and then, in the early 1900s, to small gas boats. For example, on 23 February 1913 a man

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named Marshall Bond, who was interested in going to a mine site about 40 kilometres up the Douglas Channel from Hartley Bay, came to Hartley Bay and hired one of the community’s main leaders, Heber Clifton, for ten dollars to row him to Clamstown with a rowboat so that Bond could borrow a gas boat from there. And on 5 April 1916, during the McKenna-McBride Commission hearings, when spokesman George Robinson was asked by the commissioners about the need for western redcedar trees in the Gitga’at territory on the northern coast, Robinson responded that everyone was using boats, not canoes, by that time (McKenna-McBride Commission 1913–16). Surprisingly, however, some dugouts continued to be used right into the twenty-first century, and some were constructed so that they could be fitted with motors at the stern (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983; pers. obs., Kingcome Inlet, 2008). On the west coast of Vancouver Island at Bamfield, the remains of several large fishing boats with cabins can be seen with hulls of immense dugout cedar logs. People often mixed their different craft, with dugout canoes being taken onboard larger boats when people went fishing, allowing greater flexibility in accessing shallow water and going ashore. Sometimes people were dropped off with their canoes and then later towed home by relatives with larger motorized craft (Dr Earl Claxton Sr, pers. comm., 2001). People also started travelling routinely on the coastal steamships and paddlewheelers of the interior lakes and rivers, and some people earned a living cutting wood for firing the boilers of these craft or as pilots and crew members on the boats. When the railways were constructed starting in the 1880s, First Peoples took advantage of this new mode of transport, riding the trains as passengers, for example, from Lillooet to Mount Currie, and also selling berries, game, and other products for use in the railway dining cars and on the steamboats. Sec­ wepemc women from Kamloops and Simpcw (Chuchua) would be dropped off at their blueberry-picking grounds along the Canadian National Line and would then sell some of the berries they picked to the railway dining cars (R.E. Ignace and Ignace forthcoming). Children were sometimes sent to residential school by steamboat or railway, and entire families used to travel together by these transportation means. As a girl, Elsie Claxton (pers. comm., 1993) travelled with her family from the Saanich Peninsula to Yakima in central Washington to work in the orchards there and trade their produce with the Sahaptin and other peoples of that area. Some people also worked on the construction and maintenance of the railways. The coastal villages became regular stopping places for the steamships, and mail and other goods were often transferred from the larger boats by rowboat or dugout canoe. Likewise, Indigenous communities along the railways and paddlewheel steamer routes of the interior were also serviced with mail and goods by these modes of transportation. New medicines were also exchanged and acquired from the expanded circle of social contacts that resulted from development of agricultural centres and

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canneries and contact with immigrants and other First Nations. Saanich elder Elsie Claxton (pers. comm., 1992) recalled that the Saanich people learned about the use of oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor) fruits to treat dysentery and diarrhoea from the Yakima people.26 European-style patent medicines were introduced and sometimes replaced traditional medicines. New uses were developed for traditional medicines and applied to new illnesses, and many medicinal species and products were exchanged between European newcomers and Indigenous peoples. Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus), for instance, which was widely used originally by Indigenous peoples to treat arthritic pain and as a purgative, began to be used to treat diabetes, an application that is today quite widespread among First Nations. This use was apparently adopted by white settlers, such as those at Bella Coola (Thommasen 1995; MacDermot 1949). There was also exchange of knowledge and products with Asian and Mexican immigrants. Nlaka’pamux plant specialist Annie York recalled how the local Chinese people used wild ginger leaves (Asarum caudatum) as a poultice for cuts and sprains, and one of the names she used for this plant was “Chinaman’s medicine” (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 165; see also Kennedy 1984). Later, in the early 1900s, a significant number of Indigenous people also earned money from harvesting cascara bark (Frangula purshiana; syn. Rhamnus purshiana) to sell to pharmaceutical companies, at about twenty cents per pound (less than half a kilogram) in the 1930s (Davidson 1942; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Hul’qumi’num elder Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim) (pers. comm., 2011) as a very young child paid for his hunting ammunition by harvesting and selling cascara bark. People also collected and sold wild ginger (Asarum caudatum), devil’s-club, and sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) according to Davidson (1922). Secwepemc (Shuswap) harvesters used to sell “balsam pitch” (spruce gum and fir gum) to local pharmacists for use in their pharmaceutical preparations (G. Palmer 1975b 50). The ways that medicines were prepared and administered also changed and adapted. Decoctions and infusions were prepared in metal pots and coal oil tins rather than bark containers, and vaseline and cold cream often replaced bear grease and other animal fats for mixing with medicinal salves and ointments. Although the use and application of herbal medicine continued, traditional medicine in general declined, with shamanic healing practices strongly discouraged by the churches (Jilek 1982) and with Western medicine gradually replacing the herbal healing traditions. In the past few decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in traditional healing. In some cases, this has involved the introduction of healing practices from outside of the area, including peyote healing ceremonies (with Lophophora williamsii) that originated in the Southwest and are now practised through the Native American Church, as well as pipe ceremonies and smudging ceremonies from the Sisika (Blackfoot) and other Plains peoples that use sage (Artemisia ludoviciana), juniper (Juniperus scopulorum), and sweetgrass braids.27 248 | part one – history

Along with all of these exchanges came the acquisition of new terms and other cultural information. The story is told in the names for the new products themselves; when one product functionally replaces another, it is often given the same name, as occurred for the potato and other new foods in a number of languages in northwestern North America (see chapter 13). The functional correspondence of many of these new developments was reflected in the names applied to them: the term for “firedrill” was transferred to “match,” “arrow” to “bullet,” “cedar-wood box” to “cask,” “canoe” to “boat,” and “digging stick” to “garden fork” or “clam fork” (see Rath 1981). As in any society, new and exotic items rendered some status to those who possessed them, and some of these new tools and items of European or Euro-American origin, from sewing machines to rowboats, became items of high prestige, to be distributed as part of a chief ’s wealth at potlatches (even when potlatches were officially banned) and as gifts in other contexts such as at weddings. Altered Resource Management Regimes The participation of Indigenous peoples in the new wage economy, particularly in agricultural pursuits and intensive employment in the fishing and cannery industries by the latter part of the nineteenth century, resulted in significant changes to seasonal movements and to traditional resource use and management practices (Lutz 2000). Increasingly, logging and land clearing for agriculture and settlement, draining and dyking wetlands, and the introduction of livestock and exotic plants resulted in a dramatic reduction of traditional plant resources, and privatization of lands restricted people’s access to their harvesting sites (Deur and Turner 2005; Lepofsky 2004; McDonald 2003; see also M.K. Anderson 2005). Although the introduction of horses, and later of roads, wagons, automobiles, and motorboats, facilitated travel and transport and improved access to remote places in peoples’ territories (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Lepofsky 2004; Thoms 1989; Turner 1992b), these conveniences also opened the country to others and, in effect, increased competition from settlers and others intending to exploit these areas and their resources. As already noted, the convenient misunderstanding and lack of recognition by colonial officials of Indigenous peoples’ sophisticated systems of caring for and managing their lands and resources allowed the ready takeover of Indigenous lands by European settlers, with the justification that they were not “in any civilized way” occupying their lands (Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, 1868, cited in Lillard 1987, xvi; Deur and Turner 2005). As explained by McDonald (2003, 60) and others regarding the Ts’msyen’s laxyuup (lands and resources): [B]y describing their activities simply as “gathering,” the Commissioner trivialized and dismissed their plant management strategies. He obviously had not bothered to learn about the Tsimshian or he could not have Change, Loss, and Adaptation  |  249

described their use of their laxyuup as he did ... individuals could not go wherever they wished ... “there were no unclaimed land or sea food resources of a kind important to the Indian’s economy” (Garfield 1966: 14). Other Tsimshian laws recognized lineage ownership of patches of edible roots, cedar stands, certain generalized territories, kelp beds (Darling 1956: 10–12), berry patches (Garfield 1966: 23) and stands of crabapple. There also was widespread ownership of “fruit-gathering preserves” and of timber lands (British Columbia, Sessional Papers 1885: 289; 1887: 260ff). For the Secwepemc and other peoples of the Interior Plateau, similar difficulties occurred with newcomers’ encroachment on their resources and with laws and restrictions imposed by government officials, as described by the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council (1989, 35): “The severe restrictions put on us lately by the government re hunting and fishing; the depletion of salmon by overfishing of the whites ... In many places we are debarred from ... gathering roots and obtaining wood and water as heretofore. Our people are fined and imprisoned for breaking the game and fish laws and using the same game and fish which we were told would always be ours for food.” Secwepemc elders have described being fined for hunting in their traditional territory, as well as observing declines in caribou and mountain sheep because of logging and overgrazing of cattle and sheep. In their traditional hunting grounds, native animals once known for their abundance can no longer be found (Marianne Ignace, pers. comm., from interviews with Chris and Lizette Donald, 1985). Mount Currie Lil’wat elders Alec Peters and Margaret Lester (pers. comm., 1987) commented, “It’s real hard to get berries now. We have to sneak them. They won’t [even] let us in to where they’re logging.” Furthermore, they said, “now the whites are so strict, they don’t allow us to do that [burn] anymore.” John Ross (2011, 269) notes, “even during the 1920s and 1930s, on both the Colville and Spokane Indian Reservations, the Bureau of Indian Affairs jailed individuals, including several women, who attempted to maintain those few traditional on-reservation berry-picking patches and roots fields by prescribed burning.” The colonial governments’ prohibition against using fire to maintain prairie and meadow habitats in order to enhance edible root and berry production – starting in the mid-1800s in some areas and becoming increasingly stringent by the early 1900s – meant that many species became less productive and abundant than formerly, even in places where they continued to grow. As described in chapter 11, fire was an extremely important land management tool, which tended to diversify ecosystems and species by creating landscape mosaics of different successional stages, and seasonal landscape burning was practised widely throughout northwestern North America (Boyd 1999b; Trusler and Johnson

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2008; J.A. Ross 2011; Weiser and Lepofsky 2009; White 1980, 1999). The banning of burning over areas had real consequences for the productivity of peoples’ resources. Without fire to open up clearings in the forests and renew the growth of berry bushes, for example, berries became less productive. As Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York said, “Now, it turns into bush. That’s why we don’t get many berries any more. We’re not allowed to burn. [We get] some, but not the same as it used to be. They [berries] do [grow] after logging, but it’s not the right kind” (cited in Turner 1999, 192). Many other elders have concurred, citing a decline in numerous species, especially black huckleberry and blueberries (Vaccinium membranaceum and other Vaccinium spp.), since burning was banned.28 Many of the root vegetables, too, like yellow glacier lily, spring beauty, or mountain potato, and wild nodding onions, are said to have declined in numbers and productivity because of the banning of fire. For example, Mount Currie Lil’wat elder Baptiste Ritchie recalled, “When they used to burn that grass above timber line they used to say the Indian potatoes [Claytonia] were as big as your fist. Now they are only that big [like marbles], ’cause they are not cultivated. They would burn every five or six years ... Now it’s only timber grows” (interview with Dorothy Kennedy, May 1977, cited in Turner 1999, 185). Ironically, without regular fire in the undergrowth, the built-up fuel load results in hotter, more destructive fires when these do ensue from lightning or other accidental causes. Many major stand-destroying fires have occurred in past decades that may well have been prevented if the routine traditional burning practices of Indigenous peoples had been allowed (Pyne 2001). Another consequence of fire suppression is an increase in insects, including the mountain pine beetle that has devastated huge tracts of forestlands in the British Columbia interior over the past couple of decades (British Columbia Ministry of Forests Lands and Natural Resource Operations 2012). Elderly Spokan men commented to John Ross (2011, 268) that the reduction of selective burning in their area had resulted in an apparent increase in deer ticks, spruce budworm, wild carrot moth, and a moth that attacks aspens and cottonwoods. Urbanization is another cause of loss and deterioration of resources. Musqueam and Squamish elders of the Vancouver area and Songhees plant specialists from Victoria have noted significant depletion in many plant species, including blueberries on the lower mainland and camas and wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca, F. virginiana) in the Victoria area. One account from around 1860 noted, “The forest [near Fort Victoria] is as full of wild strawberries as possible, and it abounds with other fruit bearing shrubs: last summer the officers of the ‘Grappler’ made enough preserves from the wild berries to last them all through the winter” (cited in Pritchard 1990, 32–3). Today, other than introduced Himalayan blackberries (Rubus armeniacus), it would be very difficult to find enough wild berries around Victoria to fill a cup, let alone to gather a winter’s supply. In the “natural” areas of the region, Douglas-fir forests are gradually replacing

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Garry oak savannahs and open prairies, and many of the species associated with the latter, including culturally important species like wild caraway, or yampah (Perideridia gairdneri), are therefore declining (Gedalof, Pellatt, and Smith 2006). Perhaps the most compelling account of the consequences of the ban on landscape burning is a story told by elder Baptiste Ritchie, originally in the Stl’atl’imx language (cited in Swoboda 1971, 182–91; see also Turner 1999), that pertains to Lil’wat (Lower Lillooet) territory: But now, because the white man really watches us, we don’t burn anything. We realize already, it seems the things that were eaten by our forefathers have disappeared from the places where they burned. It seems that already almost everything has disappeared. Maybe it is because it’s weedy. All kinds of things grow and they don’t burn. If you go to burn then you get into trouble because the white men want to grow trees. Because they changed our ways they do good for us and we eat the food that the white men use. Then we forget the good food of our earliest forefathers ... We named other grounds of ours around here; called them “The Picking Places” because that is where we went to pick berries. Now you will not find one single berry there. Environmental Degradation and Industrial Land Use Indigenous peoples’ territories and resources have undergone tremendous change since the arrival of Europeans. Many of the causes have already been mentioned. They include urbanization; loss and fragmentation of forest ecosystems from large-scale industrial logging, clearing for urban development and agriculture, and powerline and transportation rights-of-way; dried-up streams and watercourses due to more extreme temperatures and the disruption of hydrology from logging and road building; dyking of rivers, especially river estuaries and floodplains; draining of lakes and other wetlands for agricultural production; construction of hydroelectric dams that have inundated forests, hunting grounds, archaeological sites, and in some cases, entire villages; mining – both open pit and underground mining – and the effects of pollution from mining and smelting; soil erosion; herbicide and pesticide use associated with forestry, agriculture, powerline and railway rights-of-way, and fish farms; overexploitation of fish and marine life and loss of wildlife through overhunting and habitat modification; development of ski resorts, golf courses, and similar recreational uses that eliminate native species and exclude Indigenous peoples from their lands and resources; and introduction of exotic plants and animals. Pulp mills and other industrial sites, including fish farms along the British Columbia coast and domestic sewage outfalls along rivers and on the coast, have raised concerns about contamination of foods such as seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae)

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(Deveau 2010; Sutherland et al. 2011) and eelgrass (Zostera marina), as well as shellfish and other marine life (Cullis-Suzuki 2007; L. Chan 2009; H.M. Chan et al. 1996; P.S. Ross 2000). The sinking of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez in 1989 in Tlingit territory, in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in which 49.5 million litres of crude oil were released into the ocean, was a disaster for the marine ecosystems of the entire area, which have not entirely recovered after over twenty years. In March 2006 the sinking of the British Columbia ferry Queen of the North in the territory of the Gitga’at First Nation of Hartley Bay reinforced the dangers of marine contamination in relation to peoples’ traditional foods. Various other accidental spills of oil and other contaminants have caused further deterioration in marine and aquatic resources. Now plans to build a “Northern Gateway” pipeline system from Alberta to the British Columbia coast at Kitimat, in order to ship oil to world destinations through the territories of the Gitga’at, Haida, and other First Nations, are being regarded with deep concern because of fears of further contamination of key coastal habitats, as well as other impacts from large oil tankers such as excessive waves along the shoreline (Findlay 2009; Satterfield et al. 2012). Introduced species – like the deer introduced to Haida Gwaii and the cattle, whose impacts have already been mentioned – have dramatically changed the structure and composition of indigenous ecosystems and, according to Indigenous plant specialists, have reduced the productivity of plant resources in many areas (see M. Thomas, Turner, and Garibaldi forthcoming; and Turner 2004a). The encroachment of various introduced plant species alone has been highly detrimental (Crosby 1986; Turner and Brown 2004). Weedy invasive species such as thistles (Cirsium vulgare, C. arvense), burdock (Arctium minus), knapweed (Centaurea diffusa, C. maculosa), mustards (Brassica spp., Sisymbrium spp., and related spp.), purple loosetrife (Lythrum salicaria), tansy ragwort (Senecio jacobea), and foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) are widespread on logged, burned, grazed, or otherwise disturbed lands in many places. These species, and the livestock they often accompany on rangelands and prairies, pose an increasing threat to the productivity of traditional resource species. For example, as already noted, in the early colonial era the trampling and overgrazing of pigs and sheep on southern Vancouver Island and the small islands of Haro and Rosario Straits – combined with the accompanying weedy grasses and other species – spoiled the once productive camas beds of the Straits Salish people in many places (see Suttles 1951a, 1951b). In the interior, Botanie Valley, by historical account one of the most productive traditional root-digging grounds of the entire province, has been changed irrevocably by grazing livestock and the weedy plants accompanying them (see Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011; and Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Many other areas have been similarly impacted (see Hebda 1998; R.E. Ignace 2008; Mather 2000; Ommer et al. 2007; L.R. Smith 2008b; Thom and Fediuk 2009; and Turner and Brown 2004).

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Now, in the twenty-first century, the onset of global climate change poses yet another threat to peoples’ plant and animal resources (IPCC 2007; Salick and Ross 2009). Already, since the late 1990s, people have noticed changes in weather patterns and moisture regimes that are impacting their safety and ability to harvest seaweed and other marine foods along the coast (Turner and Clifton 2009). In the interior, vast tracts of forestland are succumbing to deadly insect infestations, such as that of the mountain pine beetle, whose epidemic growth is evidently related to warmer winter temperatures (British Columbia Ministry of Environment 2007; Dilbone 2011). Wetlands, coastlines, high mountain areas, and northern environments are considered to be at greatest risk from climate change, and deforestation can increase the loss of soil moisture and accelerate drying processes. Already, Indigenous elders and environmental experts have noted changes in the levels of winter snowfall, increased rates of melting of mountain snow patches, and a general drying and lowering of water levels in lakes and rivers. As Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) described for the area around Salmon Arm and Shuswap Lake, “The water’s getting less and less, the lakes are getting drier and drier. Our rivers, our creeks, are almost totally gone and it’s not feeding the lakes. So the water level is going down. The areas where the bulrush [Typha latifolia] grew are disappearing. They’re just no more life there left. Just a big mudflat; in places they have canarygrass [Phalaris arundinacea], a tough grass that nothing will eat, is taking its place.” The cumulative and indirect effects of all of these different impacts – combined with those of the residential schools and with the overall loss of access to lands and resources from colonization – are potentially as serious or even more so than the direct consequences (Turner, Gregory, et al. 2008). As Fisher (1992, 106) notes, “Settlers failed to realize that the Indians had developed an economy that was finely tuned to the environment. Europeans, by contrast, tended to dominate their environment and extracted the minerals and fertility from the soil. That is what the European meant when he talked about ‘improving’ the land. Gradually, the ecological balance that the Indian way of life was based on was being eroded ... When the Indians lost their land, it was not only their means of subsistence that was removed. They were also deprived of a major part of their social and spiritual identity.” A key, and often unrecognized, problem is the associated loss of critically important Traditional Ecological Knowledge that results when people are prevented from using or accessing their lands and resources. In such cases, for example, children and young adults are no longer able to learn the skills of harvesting and processing plant foods, materials, or medicines that are part of their cultural heritage. Elders worry that if their children and grandchildren lose these skills, and the spiritual aspects of plant use and management in which they are embedded, they will lose their cultural identity and their resilience. Their

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health and well-being, and their very ability to survive as Indigenous people, are threatened by such a loss (Thom and Fediuk 2009; Turner 2005). Furthermore, destructive land use and threats to the marine environment, along with privatization of land and resources, can also preclude Indigenous peoples’ abilities and options for developing sustainable local economic development, such as ecotourism. Another effect of industrial development, raised in chapter 2, which has never been thoroughly assessed, is the destruction of archaeological sites. Ancient sites of inhabitation and resource-harvesting activities tend to align with modern towns and cities, to occur along rivers and lakeshores that become flooded by dams, or to be located in forested areas that are damaged by clearcutting. Countless such sites have already been destroyed, many without any kind of proper assessment or excavation (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Lepofsky 2004). The degraded state of peoples’ lands and territories is described by many Indigenous elders.29 The following account by Dakelh (Carrier) elder Mary John of Stoney Creek in north-central British Columbia is just one of many testamonies: “When I was a small girl, the land, the rivers and creeks and lakes, were full of life – birds and animals of all kinds were as much a part of the landscape as trees and clouds and sun. Now I can travel five hundred miles in any direction from our village and not see so much as a field mouse. I think with sadness of those trips to the hunting grounds when I was a child and I remember our land as it used to be” (cited in Moran 1988, 30). Linda Smith (2008b, 17) describes a similar state for the Tsilhqot’in lands: The Tsìnlhqút’ín and their ancestors derived benefit from their diverse landscape of mountains, plateaus, valleys, and semi-arid areas. Within our territory, there is ongoing natural subsistence harvesting, ranching, tourism, forestry, and mining. The pristine wilderness where Tsìnlhqút’ín imprinted their history no longer exists as such; much of the subsistence area is clearcut and overgrazed. The ancient resource sites and campgrounds are for the most part riddled with roads, tree stumps, and cattle – unrecognizable according to Tsìnlhqút’ín who once lived there. Hence it will certainly not be easy for youth to visualize the stories within this present topography and environment without knowing what existed previously. Dr Earl Claxton Sr (pers. comm., 2001) described the environmental situation on southern Vancouver Island from his family’s perspective: When we used to look down the beach, and look in the ocean, you’d see fish jumping. There was clams, there was lots of halibut, there was lots of oysters. There was lots of berries on the bushes. There was lots

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of everything! And the way I saw it, I thought that it would never end. I thought that it was going to be like that forever. And, as the days went by and I got older, I realized that it wasn’t going to stay the same. The clams are polluted now. You can’t dig them anymore. And I remember Mother saying, “We’ll be okay. We could always go down the beach and dig some clams for our food.” And that was one of the first things that went out. Restructuring the Food System Among the most serious impacts of environmental deterioration and cultural change in terms of the health and well-being of Indigenous peoples, both in the study area and throughout the world, is the dramatic and ongoing shift in diet. Changes in Indigenous food systems, starting with the introduction of potatoes, sugar, and other new foods in the times of early contact with Europeans, have been occurring for over two centuries. At first, these new foods were simply integrated into the original food system, with gardening, as people learned it from the newcomers, being folded into the seasonal round of activities. It was a simple matter of substituting potatoes for wapato or red currants for wild currants or huckleberries at people’s convenience. Gardening in the European style was actually very similar to the cultivating and tending practices already in place for wild root vegetables and berries (Deur and Turner 2005; see also chapter 11). For example, Tlingit elder Bessie Thomas of Kake, Alaska, recalled, “Point White, we had a garden there. We used to go there in May to plant our garden – rutabagas, potatoes, carrots. My mother used to save the small ones after they dig it up, and save it for the next time. They used to get kelp and lay it in the ground, and put small potatoes on top. We used to drag it up, we used to have fun bringing it up ... cockles, roast on stick, eat with grease” (cited in Kake 1989, 37). For the Tsilhqot’in, the parallels between gardening and traditional root harvesting were reflected in the taboos and restrictions associated with both. For example, menstruating women, widows, and those who had handled dead bodies were not allowed to walk on or near a garden, or they would cause the vegetable growth to be stunted (L.R. Smith 2008b, 138). Dehydration as a major food-processing method gave way over time to canning and jamming. Cache pits were replaced with root cellars and refrigerators, food storage boxes with crocks and glass jugs. Pit-cooking largely gave way to stovetop cooking with enamel, aluminum, and stainless steel pots and to pressure cookers for canning. Eventually, nylon onion sacks, plastic ice cream buckets, and freezer bags with zippered tops supplanted other types of containers, and freezers became the most efficient way of storing berries and other types of food (Turner 1992b). All of these changes, adaptations, and adoptions of new technologies and materials can be considered obvious and logical progressions and a part of cultural processes and responses to innovation that have been

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going on for millennia. However, food consumption is also a biological process, and our bodies adapt over generations to certain diets. Abrupt changes to dietary regimes can lead to problems. Within the past half-century in particular, many Indigenous communities have experienced a relatively dramatic and fundamental shift in the foods people were eating on a daily basis due to an escalating decrease in the relative quantities of local indigenous foods they consumed, along with fresh garden vegetables and fruits, and a coinciding increase in marketed food, much of it high in unhealthy fats and refined carbohydrates, from the global economy (Kuhnlein 1989a, 1992). The convenience of the “modern” foods is undeniable. However, this relatively abrupt change, known as the “nutrition transition,” has resulted in significantly higher levels of obesity, heart disease, tooth decay, and diabetes among many Indigenous populations than their ancestors experienced (Health Canada 2009; Heffernan 1995; Hopkinson, Stephenson, and Turner 1995; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Spigelski, et al. 2013). In some Aboriginal communities, the rate of diabetes, for example, is five times as high as in the general population. Levels of alcohol consumption and alcoholism are also significantly higher. These health problems often go hand in hand with increased risk of deficiency in nutrients such as folates and vitamins A and C and their derivatives – nutrients that are widely available in many Indigenous foods (Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Creed-Kanashiro, et al. 2006; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Spigelski, et al. 2013; Parrish, Turner, and Solberg 2007). Even as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, Teit (1909, 517) noted that most of the traditional plant foods of the Secwepemc and other Interior Salish peoples, although still used at that time, were “only supplementary to potatoes, flour, rice, beans, etc., which now compose the staple articles of diet. Salmon, however, is still of some importance along Fraser River. Many families of the Lake division still subsist largely on trout, and some of the Upper North Thompson people still live mostly on game.” Game and especially fish and seafood continued to be the most enduring components of Indigenous peoples’ food systems. Whereas a number of wild berries – such as saskatoon berries, chokecherries, soapberries, huckleberries, lingonberries, naigoonberries (Rubus arcticus), wild raspberries (Rubus idaeus), and blackcaps (Rubus leucodermis) – as well as edible seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae) and herring spawn on kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) are still sought by many people in the twenty-first century, traditional root vegetables, wild greens, and the inner bark of trees have been among the Indigenous foods that have declined the most in use. For example, camas bulbs (Camassia spp.) – which used to be the “number 1 vegetable” and “the Queen root of the clime” on southern Vancouver Island – were, within a few generations, almost forgotten by most of the First Peoples who had relied on them (Beckwith 2004; Turner and Turner 2008). When the

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root vegetables were harvested within the past century or so, they were generally used only as a special treat. Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) described her family’s use of wapato when she was young, around the 1920s: “that was kind of like more of a treat ... I can remember my granny would go with her basket and dig and dig and get some of the roots and fill up the basket. It was just like a treat – a special event or a Sunday [when] there was going to be relatives coming. She’d go and get some and wash it and clean it and have it ready.” Eventually, people stopped using them altogether. A key problem for many Indigenous communities is poverty and lack of food security. In British Columbia, for example, whereas the median annual income for non-Aboriginal people is $25,000, for Aboriginal people it is only $13,000. Sixty-four per cent of Hul’qum’num people live below the poverty line (as of 2009), with inadequate access to food or shelter (Thom and Fediuk 2009). Obviously, the marketed food that these people are able to afford is of generally low quality. Yet their access to their healthy traditional food has been severely curtailed due to the environmental losses mentioned previously, to restrictive government regulations, and in part, to a loss of Traditional Ecological Knowledge related to identifying, harvesting, and processing this food (Thom and Fediuk 2009).30 The costs of travelling to traditional spring and fall fishing camps or to berry-picking and root-digging grounds have also escalated, such that many people cannot afford these trips. As well, many people are spending time in low-paying wage jobs that do not allow them to be away for the time required for harvesting and processing their food as their parents, grandparents, and ancestors did (Turner and Thompson 2006). The problems resulting from less healthy diets are exacerbated by the fact that people are leading less active lifestyles partly because – for reasons already mentioned – they are no longer out on the lands and waters to the same extent, harvesting and managing their own food, or even cultivating gardens. In many ways, this is a societal problem throughout North America. Balancing the health and cultural benefits of Indigenous food and local access to sufficient quantities with the convenience, high palatability, and wider availability of marketed food is the key issue in addressing the effects of the nutrition transition. In general, the pendulum has swung away from traditional Indigenous diets (see Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Creed-Kanashiro, et al. 2006; and Kuhnlein and Turner 1991), but recent recognition of the health impacts of refined market food and an overall resurgence of interest in the cultural values of Indigenous food have resulted in a number of initiatives, both large- and small-scale, aimed at revitalizing and celebrating the use and potential of local Indigenous foods (Devereaux and Kitteridge 2008; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Spigelski, et al. 2013; Nuxalk Food and Nutrition Program 1984; Turner and Turner 2008). Camas harvesting and pit-cooking have occurred recently in a number of communities on southern Vancouver Island, and other

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root vegetables, including northern riceroot, springbank clover, and Pacific silverweed, have also been dug and pit-cooked recently at special traditional feasting events. These events represent wider efforts for cultural renewal, as discussed in chapter 14. Conclusions This chapter has chronicled immense changes that Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America have experienced since the arrival of Europeans in their territories, particularly in relation to various aspects of their knowledge and use of plants. Although there is no question that some of these changes have been beneficial, many have ultimately been destructive to First Peoples’ lifeways, resulting in takeovers of their lands, loss of their resources, substitution of their traditional food systems with less healthy food from distant places, suppression of their languages, outlawing of their ceremonies, and attempts to deprive them of their own cultural expression and identity. An inevitable result has been a general erosion of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge in many aspects of people’s lives. Nevertheless, a rich legacy of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge has persisted, thanks to the determination of many elders and others to keep it alive. Now, in the twenty-first century, assisted by different means – from books and other publications to films, websites, and the establishment of gardens, “science camps,” courses, and cultural programs in many different venues – much of this knowledge is being strengthened and revitalized (Turner, Marshall, et al. 2008). Even such venues as the All Native Basketball Tournament held in Prince Rupert each year for the past fifty years (as of 2009) have provided opportunities to share seaweed, herring spawn on kelp, and other Indigenous foods, as well as cedar-bark basketry, woodcarving, and other tangible forms of ethnobotanical production and knowledge. There is an abiding interest among many non-Indigenous people to support and learn from First Peoples, and many venues and opportunities have been developed for this to happen. Cultural tourism, if carefully managed and controlled by Indigenous communities themselves, can support local economic development that is sustainable both environmentally and culturally (Turner, Marshall, et al. 2008; K.L. Turner 2010). Selective forestry, allowing for traditional harvesting and the reinstatement of traditional management protocols, may provide another venue for sustainable economic development. One of the challenges in these diverse efforts to maintain the legacy of Indigenous knowledge and identity will be to recognize and support each of the distinct Indigenous groups and languages within this vast area – in order to ensure that they do not come to be regarded as just one single group of Native Americans or Aboriginal Canadians. Although, as demonstrated in this book,

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these peoples share many practices and cultural traditions, including similarities in knowledge and use of hundreds of plant species, the differences in their uses, practices, and names for these species are as important as the similarities. Their historical interactions and interconnections are reflected in their common usage of certain terms – whether cognate or borrowed – the common themes in many of their stories, common modes of harvesting and processing their foods, common styles of basketry and art, and even common medicinal applications. Nevertheless, each group, by virtue of its rights to its own distinctive territory, with its own unique combination of resources and history of occupation, is a separate and discrete player in a diverse, complex cultural mosaic and deserves to be recognized as such, even after the massive changes that have occurred in people’s lives.

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Part two

Development

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5 Plants as Food: Development, Diversity, Dissemination

Next month [October] is the month for gathering silverweed roots [Argentina egedii] by the women. They will dig as many roots as they could gather ... When I was a child I would go out with the root digger. As soon as she filled the pack basket she would go home and wash the roots and dry them on a mat ... She gathers like this for many days, until she has as much as she needs for winter. Then she quits. They invited each other, I guess so they won’t be lonely or sad, because they are happy, passing on the news, when they gather the roots. (Ida Jones, cited in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983, 18)

Introduction Ida Jones of the Pacheedaht community of Ditidaht lived along the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island through most of the twentieth century. Residing for most of her life in the small communities of Clo-oose and Pacheedaht, as a young woman she was at the centre of traditional foodways, especially plant harvesting and processing. In the introductory quotation she describes an activity once common all along the coast and throughout the interior: a small group of women of different ages heading off to the root-digging grounds, with their digging sticks and baskets, to harvest the tasty carbohydrate-rich underground parts that contributed many important nutrients in a healthy, diverse diet. The mother and grandmother of Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), together with their friends and relatives, tended and harvested these same roots at the estuary of the Kingcome River in the Tsawataineuk territory of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Deur and Turner 2005). Root digging and berry picking were, for thousands of years, central to the way of life for women throughout this region. Only the

species harvested varied from place to place; the techniques used were remarkably similar. Women’s efforts to obtain these important food products, the distances they travelled, and the energy they expended year after year are often almost invisible in ethnographic discussions of the economies of the Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau. Plant foods, if mentioned at all, are often glossed over in a sentence or two (e.g., Huelsbeck 1988, 166: people simply “did not rely heavily on plant foods”), with far more emphasis placed on fishing and hunting as the mainstays of peoples’ food systems. Similarly, Matson, Coupland, and Mackie (2003, 3) suggest that, “Except for berries, vegetable foods do not contribute significant calories [on the Northwest Coast] beyond the South Coast, where acorns are abundant.” Yet Deur (1998, 2005) has critiqued stable isotope studies that were calibrated based on faulty assumptions, “arguably resulting in erroneous estimates of salmon consumption in excess of 90% of the pre-contact Northwest Coast diet” (Deur 2005, 290). Deur’s evidence suggests – notwithstanding that Northwest Coast peoples’ consumption of large amounts of marine protein is indisputable – that plant foods made up a much higher proportion of the total diet than is generally recognized. For the Makah of the Olympic Peninsula, Gill (2005a, 2005b) concludes that plant foods constituted formerly about 50 per cent of the diet, with somewhat less of a percentage in the historic period. The relative number of named species in different regions (see chapter 3 and appendix 2) generally concurs with Ames and Maschner’s (1999, 120) statement that “Plant foods [on the Northwest Coast] were more important in the south than in the north” if the central Northwest Coast is taken as the “south” (since the smaller number of species of the southernmost coast is probably due to sparcity of information rather than to fewer actual plants being used as food).1 In the central and southern Interior Plateau, plant-based food energy contributions, particularly for root vegetables, were evidently even higher. Hunn (1981) estimated for the Columbia Plateau peoples that plants – including camas (Camassia quamash), bitterroot and biscuitroot (Lomatium spp.), and various berries – contributed as much as 70 per cent of total dietary calories (see also Keely 1980; Keely et al. 1982; and Kuhnlein and Turner 1991). In the northern Interior Plateau region, including Nlaka’pamux, Stl’atl’imx, Secwepemc, and Tsilhqot’in territories, root vegetable use was also relatively high, but the species sought were mostly different – mainly yellow glacier lily, spring beauty, balsamroot, and nodding onions. Ames and Marshall (1980) suggested that the wide availability and diversity of root foods was an important factor in the early attempts at sedentism in the Interior Plateau, between about 5,300 and 4,500 years ago. Even in the northern sub-boreal region, where the energy contribution from plants was decidedly lower (see Emmons 1911; Goddard 1917; and Teit 1906b,2 1956), the significant dietary role of plant food – especially in times of famine and food scarcity – should not be overlooked.

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Another reason for the lack of attention or credibility attributed to plant food harvesting may be that it is primarily “women’s work,” and the majority of ethnographic information from the Indigenous cultures of the region was recorded by men of European background and culture: explorers, trading company officials, colonial government officers and settlers, and anthropologists and archaeologists (Deur and Turner 2005; Lepofsky 2004). With several notable exceptions (see Blackman 1982; Boas 1921; Norton 1985; and Steedman 1930), these chroniclers also interacted mainly with the Indigenous men, so it is not surprising that women and their work have been underrepresented. Even less recognized in many descriptions and analyses of Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau First Peoples’ economies is that people systematically manipulated many different plant resources and habitats to enhance the productivity, reliability, and sustainability of the plants they used for food, materials, and medicines – that they, in fact, cultivated their environments and plant resources. This cultivation, contradictory to the notion that “the plants just grew by themselves” (Drucker 1951, 81), has, however, become increasingly acknowledged (M.K. Anderson 2005; Deur and Turner 2005; McDonald 2003; Minnis and Elisens 2000). Although use of edible plants in northwestern North America is often portrayed as peripheral or unimportant in comparison to salmon, seafood, and game of various types, this is hardly the case. Harvesting and processing various plant resources typically would have been a major occupation, especially of women and children, going back to time immemorial. Elders throughout the area have recalled, often with nostalgia, just how important the various plant foods were to their family’s foodways, and many have expressed concern over the decline in their use in more recent times (Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009; M. Thomas, Turner, and Garibaldi forthcoming; Turner and Turner 2008). The stereotypical “hunter-gatherer” paradigm is being increasingly challenged as more becomes known of Indigenous peoples’ often subtle but sometimes quite obvious ecological manipulations of species and their environments and as the rigid dualism reflected in “hunter-gatherer” versus “agriculturalist” starts to be deconstructed (B.D. Smith 2005, 2009). This chapter focuses mainly on food plant species themselves, on the different kinds of root vegetables, greens, berries, and other foods derived from plants, and on the patterns of use they show across the study area. The role of plant foods in Indigenous cultures is part of a complex “food system” in which plant foods are situated both in the context of food in general and in all of the various cultural, linguistic, and ecological aspects of food production. Plant foods feature in technologies and healthcare (chapters 6 and 7) and, as discussed in volume 2, are an integral part of peoples’ seasonal and annual movements around their territories (chapter 8), their social relationships (chapter 9), their trade and exchange networks (chapter 10), their narratives (chapter 12), and their belief systems (chapter 13). The management of plant food resources,

Plants as Food  |  265

and the practices and approaches developed to enhance their productivity, both quantitatively and qualitatively, are described in chapter 11.3 Plant Food Categories First Peoples in the study area – from the Northwest Coast to the Rocky Mountains, north into Alaska and the Yukon, and south to the Columbia River region – have traditionally used over 150 different plant, fungi, and algal species as food, and some of these continue to be in use to the present. In the context of this book, the term “food plants” comprises several major categories: root vegetables (including not only true roots, such as those of Pacific silverweed, but also rhizomes, like springbank clover, as well as bulbs and tubers) (figure 5-1), featured in Ida Jones’s introductory quotation; berries and other fleshy fruits; nuts and seeds; green vegetables (leaves and shoots); inner bark of trees; a few mushrooms; one type of lichen and a few species of marine algae; and various plants, mainly aromatic species, used for beverage teas and flavourings. A number of species are used as food in more than one of these categories. For example, salmonberry and thimbleberry each provide both berries and edible green shoots, and in the Interior Plateau, people sought out balsamroot for its tender young shoots and edible budstalks, its edible taproots (middle-sized ones, which have to be pit-cooked for a long time), and its tiny sunflower-like seeds (achenes), which were dried and pounded into a meal to mix in soups and other dishes (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Turner 1995, 1997a). In addition to the plant resources actually consumed, there are other plants that were, and are, closely involved in food collection and processing – for example, the lacey boughs of western hemlock used for collecting herring spawn. These boughs, as well as those of western redcedar and some other coniferous species, are anchored in the quiet bays where herring spawn in the early spring, to be covered with masses of herring eggs (figure 5-2). The boughs, with their acidic, resinous needles, are then harvested and used fresh or dried (or nowadays frozen). The needles are cooked together with the herring eggs but not actually consumed with them. Hemlock boughs were also used in the past to line acorn-leaching pits (Croes et al. 2007) and berry-cooking pits (Lepofsky 2004).4 Skunk-cabbage, as well as serving as a peppery root vegetable for some peoples in times of food scarcity, was valued for its large, smooth, oval, waxy leaves (figure 5-3), which people used in various ways in food preparation: as a surface for drying berries, for lining cooking pits, and for covering food stored in cedar-wood boxes. Various other types of vegetation were, and still are, used to protect and flavour food in pit-cooking. Ida Jones (cited in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983), for example, used layers of leafy salal branches and sword fern fronds in the earth ovens where she cooked her root vegetables. Helena Myers and Mabel Solomon, Tsilhqot’in elders and food specialists from the northern

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5-1  |  Coastal root vegetables from Kingcome Inlet, BC . 5-2  |  Herring spawn on hemlock boughs. Raw (above) and cooked (below).

5-3 | Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus). The large, waxy leaves are inedible but were often used in food preparation, for wrapping food, or as a surface for drying berries.

Interior Plateau region, used fireweed greens, wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana) leaves, and alder (Alnus incana) branches around the food they pit-cooked, and they covered the pit as the food was cooking with bark of whitebark pine or white spruce (Linda Myers, Helena Myers, and Mabel Solomon, pers. comm.,

268 | part two – development

2003; L.R. Smith 2008b). Further east, the Spokan used beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax), bracken fern fronds, skunk-cabbage leaves, sticky geranium plants (Geranium viscossissimum), giant wild rye grass, sweetgrass, pinegrass, or “timber grass,” and other grasses to line and cover their roasting pits (J.A. Ross 2011). Coastal peoples sometimes used seaweeds, such as bull kelp fronds or sea wrack (Fucus spp.), to line their cooking pits. These materials helped to provide moisture for steaming the food, to protect the food from burning on the red-hot rocks at the bottom of the pit, and to flavour the food. The critically important and diverse role of plants as famine, survival, and emergency food is discussed as a special topic later in this chapter. A summary, providing examples of the various types of food plants used over the region under various food categories, is provided in table 5-1. Plant foods as a group contain certain nutrients – such as dietary fibre, carotenes, vitamin C, folates, and energy-rich carbohydrates – that do not occur in many food products of animal origin. Some foods, such as red laver seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae and related spp.), are particularly nutritious; in fact, phycologist Louis Druehl considers this genus the most nutritious food in the world (cited in Turner 2003a). Plant foods also provide obviously appreciated diversity in flavour and texture to human diets. Their nutrient contributions in Indigenous food systems of the overall region over time have varied, not only with geographical and cultural locale but also with storability and seasonal and annual availability of the different food products, as well as with individual and family food preferences. Kuhnlein and Turner (1991) provide, in appendices, overall nutrient profiles of most native plant foods from the study area, drawn from innumerable reference sources and from first-hand nutrient analyses in many cases (see also Keely 1980; Kuhnlein 1989b, 1990; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009, Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Spigelski, et al. 2013; Kuhnlein and Turner 1987; Kuhnlein, Turner, and Kluckner 1982; Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992; and Turner and Kuhnlein 1982, 1983). The following sections focus on the different categories of plant foods, including general descriptions, archaeological contexts for use, nutrient contributions, and specific harvesting and processing methods. Root Vegetables “Root vegetables” include (as noted previously) not only true roots but also bulbs, tubers, rhizomes, and corms. These are the main storage organs of many herbaceous perennials and contain, among other essential nutrients, substantial amounts of carbohydrates, which are usually at their maximum in the dormant season for the plant.5 Thus most root vegetables tend to be harvested from the fall through the spring, although some are dug during the growing season because the plants are more visible and easily identified at that time. The taste and texture of various root vegetables can vary significantly, depending on

Plants as Food  |  269

Table 5-1  |  Examples of traditional plant foods of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America Plant species

Family

Notes

Roots, including true roots, bulbs, tubers, corms, and rhizomes (out of about 40 spp.)

Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa)

Polypodiaceae (Fern family)

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum)

Dennstaedtiaceae (Hay-scented fern family)

Nodding onion (Allium cernuum)

Liliaceae (Lily family)

Silverweed (Argentina anserina, A. egedii)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata)

Asteraceae (Aster family)

Edible blue camas (Camassia quamash, C. leichtlinii)

Liliaceae (Lily family)

Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata)

Portulaceae (Purslane family)

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Rootstocks widely eaten; harvested fall through spring; usually cooked in earth ovens; known as winter famine food; named in more than 35 languages (Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992) Rhizomes roasted in coals, cooked in earth ovens; recovered from archaeological contexts in roasting pits (Norton 1979b)

Bulbs eaten, especially in Interior Plateau; harvested in spring before flowering; usually braided and pitcooked; inulin is main carbohydrate, breaks down to fructose with cooking; recovered from archaeological contexts in hearths and earth ovens

Fleshy roots eaten (A. egedii on Northwest Coast, A. anserina in Interior Plateau); harvested from fall to spring; usually cooked in earth ovens or steamed; often served at feasts; tended in estuarine gardens (Turner and Kuhnlein 1982) Medium-sized taproots eaten (not the very largest); Interior Plateau; harvested in spring; cooked in earth ovens; said to be sweet-tasting; inulin is main carbohydrate, breaks down to fructose with cooking (Peacock 1998)

Bulbs eaten; Vancouver Island, Puget Sound, southern Interior Plateau; harvested in summer; pitcooked; sweettasting; inulin is main carbohydrate, breaks down to fructose with cooking; dried for winter, trade; served at feasts (Beckwith 2004; J.A. Ross 2011; Turner and Kuhnlein 1983); recovered from archaeological contexts in hearths and earth ovens (Lepofsky 2004; Thoms 1989)

Corms eaten; Interior Plateau; harvested in summer; steamed or cooked in earth ovens; dried for winter, trade (Mellott 2010)

Table 5-1 | continued Plant species

Family

Notes

Yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum)

Liliaceae (Lily family)

Northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatchensis)

Liliaceae (Lily family)

Bulbs eaten in quantity; northern Interior Plateau; steamed in baskets; cooked in earth ovens (Loewen 1998)

Licorice root, “Eskimo potato,” or “Indian carrot” (Hedysarum alpinum)

Fabaceae (Pea or Bean family)

Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva)

Portulaceae (Purslane family)

Tiger lily, or Columbia lily (Lilium columbianum)

Liliaceae (Lily family)

Biscuitroots, kous roots (Lomatium cous, L. canbyi, and other spp.)

Apiaceae (Celery family)

Desert parsley (Lomatium macrocarpum)

Apiaceae (Celery family)

Roots cooked in earth ovens and eaten; Interior Plateau

Nootka lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis)

Fabaceae (Pea or Bean family)

Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus)

Araceae (Arum family)

Roots eaten, raw or sometimes cooked, by some Northwest Coast peoples (warning: potentially toxic if too many eaten)

Bistort (Polygonum bistortum; syn. Bistorta vivipara)

Polygonaceae (Buckwheat family)

Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia)

Alismataceae (Water-plantain family)

Bulbs and rice-like bulblets eaten by Northwest Coast peoples; usually steamed in containers or underground pits (Turner and Kuhnlein 1983)

Roots eaten, raw or cooked, by northern peoples (warning: similar species are toxic) Starchy taproots eaten; cooked by steaming or baking; an important Interior Plateau food (Bandringa 1999)

Bulbs eaten; both Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau; cooked in earth ovens or steamed

Tuberous roots of several species eaten in Interior Plateau; Lomatium sp. roots recovered from archaeological contexts in hearths and earth ovens (Hunn and French 1981; J.A. Ross 2011)

Named in 41 languages, but only a few groups (e.g., Stl’atl’imx, Chinookan, Spokan) ate rhizomes in recent times; mostly emergency food; cooked (warning: toxic if eaten raw)

Tuberous rhizomes eaten, raw or cooked, by northern peoples Tubers widely eaten; especially Fraser and Columbia Valleys; cooked in earth ovens; found in archaeological contexts (Darby 1996, 2005; Garibaldi 2003; Spurgeon 2001)

Plants as Food  |  271

Table 5-1 | continued Plant species

Family

Notes

Water-parsnip (Sium suave)

Apiaceae (Celery family)

Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii)

Fabaceae (Pea or Bean family)

Roots eaten, raw or cooked, in Interior Plateau (warning: similar species are toxic)

False onion (Triteleia spp.)

Liliaceae (Lily Family)

Cattail (Typha latifolia)

Typhaceae (Cattail family)

Edible valerian (Valeriana edulis)

Valerianaceae (Valerian family)

Eelgrass (Zostera marina)

Zosteraceae (Eelgrass family)

Rhizomes eaten on Northwest Coast; harvested from fall to spring; usually cooked in earth ovens or steamed; often served at feasts; tended in estuarine gardens (Turner and Kuhnlein 1982)

Recovered from archaeological contexts in hearths and earth ovens, dating back 4,300 to 4,000 BP (Chance and Chance 1982; Lepofsky 2004)

Named in 41 languages; rhizomes roasted and eaten by some groups (e.g., Stl’atl’imx, Secwepemc, Spokan), including as a famine food; best known as mat material for many (along with tule) Strong-smelling rhizomes eaten in southern Interior Plateau; cooked in earth ovens (J.A. Ross 2011)

Rhizomes eaten fresh in spring by Kwakwaka’wakw and other Northwest Coast peoples (Cullis-Suzuki 2007)

Berries and other fleshy fruits (out of about 60 spp.)

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Kinnikinnick, or bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)

Ericaceae (Heather family)

Black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Crowberry, or “blackberry” (Empetrum nigrum)

Empetraceae (Crowberry family)

272 | part two – development

Most important fruit of Interior Plateau; widespread use; named in more than 40 languages; up to 6 or 7 different varieties recognized; sweet and palatable; preserved by drying in cakes or like raisins; recovered from archaeological contexts with birch bark, mats, and in hearth sites Berries important as winter food, snack; somewhat dry; named in more than 40 languages; common and widespread; usually cooked by frying in oil; recovered from archaeological contexts Dry and seedy; often considered secondary fruit; kneaded and made into cakes for winter

Berries eaten by northern peoples, fresh or frozen for winter

Table 5-1 | continued Plant species

Family

Notes

Wild strawberries (Fragaria chiloensis, F. vesca, F. virginiana)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Salal (Gaultheria shallon)

Ericaceae (Heather family)

Named in 49 languages; berries widely eaten, usually fresh and in season; used as sweetener for soapberry whip and other bitter foods

Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Chokecherries (Prunus virginiana)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Gray currant, or stink currant (Ribes bracteosum), and other currant spp.

Grossulariaceae (Gooseberry family)

Coastal black gooseberry (Ribes divaricatum) and other gooseberry spp.

Grossulariaceae (Gooseberry family)

Wild roses (Rosa acicularis, R. nutkana, and other Rosa spp.)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Nagoonberry (Rubus arcticus) and other dwarf raspberries (Rubus spp.)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Wild raspberry (Rubus idaeus)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Cloudberry, or bakeapple (Rubus chamaemorus)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Named in 30 languages; berries widely eaten by Northwest Coast peoples; seeds and whole berries recovered from archaeological contexts

Highly important fruit for Northwest Coast peoples; picked in late summer and fall; cooked slightly and stored under water in boxes or other containers; eaten with grease Fruits important in Interior Plateau and northern interior; two varieties often recognized (red-fruited, black-fruited); seeds recovered from archaeological contexts

Several different currant species found in different parts of study area; R. bracteosum berries eaten widely on Northwest Coast; sometimes mixed with salal for drying in cakes Named in 39 languages (with close relatives); several different gooseberry species found in different parts of study area; fruits widely eaten but seldom stored

Named in 53 languages (complex of large flowered spp.); outer rind of hips eaten, especially in winter at times of food scarcity; hips and seeds recovered from archaeological contexts

A favourite fruit of northern regions; mainly eaten fresh but also stored frozen or under water A favourite fruit of northern regions; mainly eaten fresh but also stored frozen or under water Named in 39 languages; fruits widely eaten, especially in Interior Plateau and northern interior; dried in cakes

Plants as Food  |  273

Table 5-1 | continued Plant species

Family

Notes

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Named in 47 languages; berries widely eaten, especially on Northwest Coast; sometimes dried in cakes; Rubus spp. seeds recovered from archaeological contexts

Trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa)

Caprifoliaceae (Honeysuckle family)

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis)

Elaeagnaceae (Oleaster family)

Black mountain huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum)

Ericaceae (Heather family)

Oval-leaf blueberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium)

Ericaceae (Heather family)

Bog cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos)

Ericaceae (Heather family)

Red huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium)

Ericaceae (Heather family)

274 | part two – development

Named in 39 languages; berries widely eaten on Northwest Coast, usually fresh; Rubus spp. seeds recovered from archaeological contexts

Berries widely eaten on Northwest Coast, fresh or dried in cakes; Rubus spp. seeds recovered from archaeological contexts Named in 42 languages; berries eaten along Northwest Coast, especially in the north; always cooked, sometimes in earth ovens; sometimes dried in cakes or stored in pits; seeds recovered from archaeological contexts (coastal)

Named in over 45 languages; tart, somewhat bitter berries picked by flailing the branches; whipped with water into frothy confection; served as drink; next in importance only to Amelanchier alnifolia for Secwepemc (Teit 1909, 514); widely traded across Interior Plateau and Northwest Coast (Turner and Burton 2010)

One of the most popular berries; sweet, juicy; harvested and processed in quantity; dried in cakes; Vaccinium spp. seeds recovered from archaeological contexts

Named in 43 languages; several other blueberry species used in various places; fruits widely eaten, especially on Northwest Coast; used fresh or dried in cakes; Vaccinium spp. seeds recovered from archaeological contexts Fruits widely eaten, both Northwest Coast and interior regions; picked in fall and stored under water Fruits widely eaten, especially on Northwest Coast; used fresh or dried in cakes; Vaccinium spp. seeds recovered from archaeological contexts

Table 5-1 | continued Plant species

Family

Notes

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule)

Caprifoliaceae (Honeysuckle family)

Fruits widely eaten, especially at feasts on Northwest Coast; picked in later summer and fall and stored under water in boxes or other containers; eaten with grease and inner bark of trees

Seeds and nuts (out of about 8 spp.)

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis)

Pinaceae (Pine family)

Balsamroot, or spring sunflower (Balsamorhiza sagittata)

Asteraceae (Aster family)

Hazelnut (Corylus cornuta)

Betulaceae (Birch family)

Seeds harvested from whole cones picked in the fall by knocking or climbing the trees (or from horseback); roasted until soft and kernels eaten like peanuts; seeds and shells recovered from archaeological contexts; montane southern Interior Plateau Achenes, like small sunflower seeds, harvested from seed heads in summer in Interior Plateau; pounded into meal and cooked in soups and stews Nuts harvested in late summer or retrieved from squirrel caches; used especially in Interior Plateau, Skeena River, and southern coast; widely traded; nuts and shells recovered from archaeological contexts

Green vegetables (out of about 25–30 spp. of the Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau)

Rockweed, or sea wrack (Fucus gardneri)

Fucaceae, Phaeophyta (Brown algae)

Young plants used for harvesting herring eggs; occasionally eaten with the eggs on Northwest Coast

Giant horsetail (Equisetum telmateia)

Equisetaceae (Horsetail family)

Wild chives (Allium schoenoprasum)

Liliaceae (Lily family)

Young spore-bearing and vegetative shoots eaten raw in spring by Northwest Coast peoples

Red laver seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae and related spp.; syn. Porphyra)

Balsamroot, or spring sunflower (Balsamorhiza sagittata)

Bangiaceae, Rhodophyta (Red algae)

Asteraceae (Aster family)

Widely eaten along Northwest Coast and traded, dry, to interior peoples; harvested in spring; dried and sometimes compressed in cakes (Turner 2003a); eaten in soups and other dishes, as a condiment and nutritious food

Leaves, flowers, bulbs eaten as greens by northern peoples Shoots, budstalks eaten in early spring, raw or cooked, by Interior Plateau peoples

Plants as Food  |  275

Table 5-1 | continued Plant species

Family

Notes

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium)

Onagraceae (Evening Primrose family)

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum)

Apiaceae (Celery family)

Named in more than 40 languages; young shoots harvested in early spring; inner part scraped off and eaten or used to sweeten soapberry whip; a spring tonic

Sea lovage (Ligusticum scoticum)

Apiaceae (Celery family)

Named in 45 languages; very important green vegetable, both Northwest Coast and interior; young budstalks, leafstalks eaten, usually raw; always peeled (contains phototoxic compounds) Young leaves, stems eaten by northern peoples along the coast

“Wild celery,” or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule)

Apiaceae (Celery family)

Prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.)

Cactaceae (Cactus family)

Mountain sorrel (Oxyria digyna)

Polygonaceae (Buckwheat family)

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus) and salmonberry (R. spectabilis)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Young shoots eaten fresh or cooked in earth ovens by Northwest Coast peoples

Polygonaceae (Buckwheat family)

Young leaves and leafstalks eaten, cooked with grease by some Northwest Coast peoples

Seaside plantain, or “goose tongue” (Plantago maritima)

Western dock, or “wild rhubarb” (Rumex aquaticus var. fenestratus)

Plantaginaceae (Plantain family)

Young leaves and stalks eaten raw or cooked by some Interior Plateau peoples; aromatic seeds widely used as incense and flavouring, both southern Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau Fleshy inner stems roasted in coals, cooked in earth ovens, Interior Plateau; eaten particularly at times of food scarcity Leaves eaten fresh or cooked by some northern peoples

Young leaves eaten fresh or preserved by some northern coastal peoples

Cambium and inner bark (out of about 10 spp.)

Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta)

Pinaceae (Pine family)

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)

Pinaceae (Pine family)

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Cambium and inner bark tissues eaten in late spring by Interior Plateau and northern peoples; fresh or cooked; sometimes dried (Dilbone, Turner, and von Aderkas 2013)

Cambium and inner bark tissues eaten in late spring by northern Northwest Coast peoples; usually cooked; sometimes dried for winter; served with grease and berries

Table 5-1 | continued Plant species

Family

Notes

Balsam poplar, or cottonwood (Populus balsamifera)

Salicaceae (Willow family)

Cambium and inner bark tissues eaten fresh in late spring by Stl’atl’imx, Nuxalk, and some other peoples

Mushrooms and lichen (out of about 8 spp.)

Black tree lichen, or wíla (Bryoria fremontii)

Bryoriaceae (Bryoria family)

Dog ears fungus (Exobasidium vaccinii)

Exobasidiaceae (Exobasidium family)

Cottonwood mushroom (Tricholoma populinum)

Tricholomataceae (Tricholoma family)

Harvested with twisting poles; pounded and leached in water; cooked in earth ovens with camas, onions or other food, mostly by Interior Plateau peoples (S. Crawford 2007)

Fruiting bodies on the backs of false azalea (Menziesia) leaves eaten fresh as a snack by some northern Northwest Coast peoples (Compton 1993b) Mushrooms harvested in fall and eaten cooked by some Interior Plateau peoples; sometimes dried for winter

Other plant foods, such as beverages, flavourings, casual foods, and famine foods (out of about 35 spp.)

Licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhiza)

Polypodiaceae (Fern family)

White and black spruce (Picea glauca, P. mariana)

Pinaceae (Pine family)

Sweet-tasting rhizomes used as appetizer and mouth freshener, as well as medicinally for colds, coughs, and sore throats Hard old sap/pitch chewed like gum; boughs used to make a beverage tea by some northern peoples

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Pinaceae (Pine family)

Special trisaccharide sugar produced by some Interior Plateau trees; harvested and used whenever available

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)

Ericaceae (Heather family)

Scrub birch (Betula nana), bog birch (B. pumila)

Betulaceae (Birch family)

Leaves used as a beverage tea by some northern peoples

Salal (Gaultheria shallon)

Ericaceae (Heather family)

Beach lovage (Ligusticum scoticum)

Apiaceae (Celery family)

Leaves used to flavour smoked fish and to remove fishy taste when cooking halibut heads; leafy branches also used in pit-cooking

Leaves and stems used as a beverage tea by some Interior Plateau peoples; also used for smoking, alone or mixed with tobacco (see Densmore 1939)

Leaves used as flavouring in fish soups and with boiled fish by some northern peoples

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Table 5-1 | continued Plant species

Family

Notes

“Wild celery,” or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule)

Apiaceae (Celery family)

Field mint (Mentha arvense)

Lamiaceae (Mint family)

Seeds and leaves used as flavouring for soup, stew; seeds chewed as mouth freshener; also used medicinally and as incense

Prickly rose (Rosa acicularis)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum)

Dwarf wild rose (Rosa gymnocarpa)

Ericaceae (Heather family)

Rosaceae (Rose family)

Aromatic leaves used as a beverage tea by Interior Plateau peoples Leaves used as a beverage tea; named in 38 languages but many from English or French terms

Flower petals eaten by children in some areas

Hips eaten in times of scarcity (Teit 1909)

Note: Examples are selected from a total of about 150 species, including those applied in more than one category. Sources: Specific references are cited in the table. For key references, see Boas (1921), Griffin (2001), Hebda, Turner, et al. (1996), Hunn, Selam, and family (1990), Hunn, Turner, and French (1998), A. Jones (1983), Kuhnlein and Turner (1991), Lepofsky (2004, citing many archaeological sources), Marles et al. (2000), Parlee and Berkes (2006), Parlee, Berkes, and Teetl’it Gwich’in Renewable Resources Council (2005), Porsild (1953), Reagan (1934), J.A. Ross (2011), Russell (1991a, 1991b), Russell Kari (1987), Teit (1909), Thornton (1999), Turner (1995, 1997a, 2004a), Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy (1980); Turner and Efrat (1982); Turner and Hebda (2012); Turner, Thomas, et al. (1983); Turner, Thompson, et al. (1990), and Wennekens (1985). See also Turner and von Aderkas (2009).

seasonally modulated levels of sugars, tannins, and other compounds, which also fluctuate with the age and size of the storage organs, as well as with the habitat and genetic makeup of the plants (see Beckwith 2004; Lloyd 2011; Loewen 1998; and Turner and Kuhnlein 1982, 1983). Root Vegetables in Archaeology

Occasionally in archaeological contexts, actual remains of root vegetables are revealed, such as the whole wapato tubers and associated digging sticks from Pitt Polder, described in chapter 2. Charred camas bulbs (Camassia quamash), remains of onions (Allium cernuum), and a few other root remains have been recovered from hearths, middens, cache pits, and other features from the Willamette and Callispel Valleys to the northern Interior Plateau (N.D. Stenholm, cited in Lepofsky 2004, 394–400; Thoms 1989; Wollstonecroft and Baptiste forthcoming). These findings, and archaeological work from other regions of

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the world, suggest that more concentrated efforts may reveal considerably more direct evidence of ancient root use (see Wollstonecroft et al. 2008).6 Aside from actual remains, evidence for root use in archaeological contexts may be indicated by the presence of digging sticks and digging stick handles (as mentioned previously in the wapato example from chapter 2), by the remains of cache pits and earth ovens (roasting pit depressions, with fire-cracked rock and charcoal), and by the use of stone pounders and grinders. In numerous southern assemblages, for example, along the southern Oregon coast and Columbia River, dating to between 11,000 and 8,000 years ago, grinding slabs, manos, and edgeground cobbles have been found, starting to be replaced after about 8,000 years ago with mortar bases and pestles. Stone grinders have also been recovered from sites in Washington and southwestern British Columbia (Thoms 1989; Lepofsky 2004). These stone implements may well serve as proxies for the use of certain root vegetables that were processed by grinding, such as pit-cooked camas bulbs and roasted bracken fern rhizomes (Norton 1979b; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Lepofsky 2004), as well as for the processing and consumption of seeds, nuts, and large-seeded fleshy fruits. It appears that root-cooking techniques employing hot rocks and earth ovens were in use markedly earlier in the southern and eastern part of the study area. Evidently, the oldest documented use of cooking pits for roasting camas in the vicinity of the study region is from the Willamette Valley, just south of the Columbia River.7 One earth oven alone in the Willamette area produced several hundred charred camas bulbs, some dating to the Early Holocene, possibly as early as 8,000 or more years ago (Cheatham 1988; Kramer 2000; Thoms 1989, 2008a, 2008b; see also chapter 2). In the Calispell Valley of northeastern Washington, the earliest camas-roasting sites date to the Mid Holocene, around 6,800 years ago, although roasting pits were evidently not used extensively until after about 4,500 to 3,500 years ago (Thoms 1989). Some Calispell Valley sites have produced an abundance of charcoal, along with the remains of camas in the form of bulbs, seeds, and processed cake fragments (Lepofsky 2004; N.D. Stenholm, cited in Lepofsky 2004, 394–400). Peaks in earth oven use in the Calispell Valley occurred between 3,500 and 2,500 years ago and again after about 1,500 years ago (Lepofsky 2004). Thoms (1989) and others have concluded that the pattern of camas digging and camas pit-cooking there has changed little over thousands of years, noting that more recently constructed earth ovens closely resemble the ancient ones. Given the early dates for large-scale processing and use of the “camas-acornhazelnut triad” from the Willamette Valley and Long Tom River (see Lepofsky 2004), it is possible that subsequent adoption of these food plants and development of pit-cooking and grinding technologies derived from this region, spreading eastward and northward, possibly with the plants themselves and human populations as well, after the Pleistocene deglaciation.

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Upland sites in the Interior Plateau have yielded particularly strong evidence for the importance of root resources in these areas (Lepofsky 2004; Peacock 1998). Earth oven features are scattered throughout the Interior Plateau, especially in upland valleys and slopes, from central Washington (Thoms 1989) to the Kamloops area (Peacock 1998; Nicholas, Bonneau, and Westfall forthcoming), Botanie Valley near Lytton (Nicholas, Wollstonecroft, and Baptiste 1997), Keatley Creek (Hayden 1992, 1997; Lepofsky 2004; Lepofsky and Lyons 2013), the Hat Creek Valley (Pokotylo and Froese 1983), and the Potato Mountains in the Chilcotin region (Matson and Alexander 1990; Matson and Magne 2007). The earliest recorded upland earth ovens in the northern part of the Interior Plateau, sometimes called the Canadian Plateau, date to just over 3,000 years ago (Rousseau et al. 1991). Pit-cooking features have also been identified on the Northwest Coast, including Vancouver Island (Bell 2008) and northwestern Washington, mostly from the Late Holocene, although few have actually been dated (Capes 1964; Lepofsky 2004; Reagan 1917; Thoms 1989, 296–9). These cooking pits were probably used mainly for camas and other roots but may also have been used, as they have been more recently, for processing other foods, including clams.8 Root vegetable use apparently intensified from the latter part of the Mid Holocene to the Late Holocene – with many different root resources being harvested and processed between about 4,500 and 2,000 years ago. People were travelling more widely at this time, and – significantly – they were learning to use fire for maintaining prairie habitats where an assortment of root species thrived (see chapter 11). The archaeological record reflects the dynamics of earth oven use but also presents puzzles yet to be unravelled. Some of the earlier pit-cooking depressions are extremely large, measuring up to 3 metres across. Between about 1,500 and 850 years ago, however, the earth ovens in the upland regions of the Canadian Plateau appeared to reflect a different harvesting and processing strategy. The large roasting pits of the upland harvest sites seem to have been reduced in number in this period, but at the same time, large ovens show up in lowland pithouse village sites. Starting about 850 years ago, the size of upland ovens decreased dramatically, but there was a concurrent increase in smaller-sized roasting features. In studies of roasting pits from the Hat Creek Valley, British Columbia, Peacock and Lepofsky (2009) have concluded that the larger, older earth ovens may simply represent multiple reuse, with their crater-like pits growing in size with each use episode because of the additional debris added (Pokotylo and Froese 1983; Peacock 1998). Roots, like balsamroot, wild nodding onions, bitterroot, spring beauty, or mountain potato, and biscuitroot (Lomatium spp.), as well as other vegetal foods, such as black tree lichen and possibly some berries, were evidently cooked in these pits in the past, as they have been more recently.9 Although it was originally assumed that the reduction in numbers of large pits was related to a deintensification of root use, possibly due

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to overharvesting (Hayden 1997), it seems likely now that overall root use remained the same, but people stopped reusing their roasting pits as much, instead opting for smaller, single-use roasting pits (Peacock and Lepofsky 2009). Nutritional Contributions and Regional Variation in Root Vegetables

A few root vegetables were eaten raw, at least in small amounts (see Boas 1921), but most were cooked in some manner, through baking over coals, boiling or steaming in baskets or wooden vessels, or cooking in underground pits, or earth ovens (Turner 1995, 1997a; Turner and Kuhnlein 1982, 1983).10 Root vegetables are potentially good sources of mineral nutrients, especially since they are usually cooked and served with their skins still intact. Root foods in general provide only small amounts of vitamins (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991), but many (e.g., silverweed, yellow glacier lily, and wapato) are important sources of starch (Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Spigelski, et al. 2013; Kuhnlein, Turner, and Kluckner 1982; Loewen 1998).11 A number of root vegetables contain the carbohydrate inulin – a complex sugar comprised of units of fructose and fructans – which is largely indigestible by humans, nor is it particularly sweet. It is found in significant proportions in camas bulbs, onions, and some edible plants of the Aster family (Asteraceae), such as balsamroot and thistles (Cirsium spp). The people who developed these roots as sources of food energy devised various ways – through storage and long-term cooking – to hydrolyze the inulin into fructose, which is both sweet-tasting and, more significantly, easier to digest than inulin (see Konlande and Robson 1972; Kuhnlein, Turner, and Kluckner 1982; and Turner and Kuhnlein 1983). With pit-cooking, inulin-containing root vegetables can become major sources of food energy and were especially important for the peoples of the Interior Plateau and the southern coastal region from Vancouver Island south to California. Annora Brown (1970, 44–5) provides one testament to the sweetness produced through pit-cooking camas, describing the opening of an earth oven in which camas had been baked: “When the pit was opened, a thick, sweet syrup would have gathered on the twigs and strands of grass with which the pot [sic] was lined – a temptation to the children and probably to many an adult as well to lick the pot. The cooked bulbs were spread out in the sun to dry and then stored for future use.” Within the study area, in keeping with the overall trend noted previously for plant food use, the number of named and used root vegetables on a gradient from south to north appears to decline in both variety and quantity (table 5-2). The highest diversity of named edible “root” species – and the maximum productivity and intensity of use – is in the central and southern Interior Plateau region, where around forty different named species were harvested.12 The sparsest area in terms of available root vegetable species is the northern

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Table 5-2  |  Regional variation in numbers of major food plant species and closely related taxa that are named in northwestern North American Indigenous languages Subregions

Major languagesa

Named edible berry/fruit species used

Named edible seed/nut species used

Named root vegetable species used

Named edible greens species usedb

Named edible inner bark species used

Named edible mushroom/fungus species used

Northern coast (88 spp.)

4 Ts’msyenic languages, Haida, Tlingit, Haisla

53

1

15

14

4

1

49

–

8

3

2

–

67

2

24

13

5

2

59

4

28

9

6

7

35

3

8

7

3

–

48

5

40

6

1

3

Northern interior (62 spp.) Central coast (113 spp.) Central interior (northern Plateau) (113 spp.) Southern coast (56 spp.)

Southern interior (southern Plateau) (103 spp.) a

b

Athabaskan languages, excluding Ulkatcho and Tsilhqot’in Heiltsuk, Oowekyala, Kwak’wala, Nuu-chahnulth, Nuxalk, Central Coast Salish languages

Ulkatcho, Tsilhqot’in, Stl’atl’imx, Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc Southern Coast Salish, Puget Sound languages, including Quileute Okanagan, Columbian, Selish (Flathead), Sahaptin

Indicates presence of a name in at least one of the grouped languages Includes seaweeds and lichen

Note: Excluded are those foods that are used very casually or marginally or that are used only as famine food. Also excluded are Inuit and Yupik names.

Sources: See the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

interior boreal forest region, with only about eight species of roots documented in people’s diets. Teit’s (1909, 514) observations agree with this trend for the Nlaka’pamux and Secwepemc Interior Salish: “Most of the roots found in the Thompson [Nlaka’pamux] country also grew abundantly in the southern parts of the Shuswap [Secwepemc] country, but in the more northern parts many kinds common in the south did not grow. Thus in the grounds of some bands not over five or six kinds of edible roots were found, while in those of others as many as fifteen kinds might be obtained.” Teit did note that the largest bulbs of tiger lily were obtained in the Horsefly district, which is in the northern part of Secwepemc country. Bitterroot, camas, and a number of other roots were available to the Secwepemc only through trade with the Okanagan or other peoples to the south. Not all root species that were potentially available to people were eaten. Teit (1909, 514) for example, stated, “It is said that fern-roots [presumably bracken fern] were not eaten, although abundant in some parts of the country.” Similarly, wild caraway, or yampah, although it grows in Secwepemc territory at Neskonlith Meadows and elsewhere, was apparently not used by the Secwepemc (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1998), although it was well appreciated by the Okanagan, where it was known as “wild carrot” (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Actual quantities of root vegetables used in different areas have not been well documented. Biscuitroot, camas, and bitterroot in the southern Interior Plateau and yellow glacier lily and spring beauty in the northern Interior Plateau are among the most heavily harvested. Several journals from the 1840s and 1850s report women in the southern Interior Plateau digging a bushel of roots – about 60 pounds, or 27 kilograms – a day, and Eugene Hunn has clocked women digging as many as 300 biscuitroots (Lomatium spp.) per person per hour (cited in Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 66). Secwepemc families were said to harvest 100 kilograms or more of yellow glacier lily bulbs (figure 5-4) annually (G. Palmer 1975b). For the Nlaka’pamux, Annie York (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) suggested that each year people formerly stored many baskets full of dried roots and dried berries, along with dried meat and fish, on the scaffolding of their pithouses. She recalled that a family or household might have sixteen or more large storage baskets (each around 20 litres) full of dried berries and perhaps as many again full of dried roots, as well as additional baskets for harvesting and cooking (figure 5-5). In Tsilhqot’in territory, spring beauty, or mountain potato (súnt’íny), is the most prominent of all of the root vegetables; an entire mountain is named after it in English: Potato Mountain (Tsinuzchéd in Tsilhqo’tin).13 The Northwest Coast region stands in between the northern and southern extremes of numbers of root vegetables named and used, ranging from about twelve species on the northern coast to twenty on the central coast.14 Quantities of these roots harvested may have been smaller than in the Interior Plateau, but especially in camas- and wapato-growing regions, people obviously consumed

Plants as Food  |  283

5-4  |  Dried bulbs of yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum). Largest bulbs about 6–7 cm long and 1–2 cm across. 5-5  |  Nlaka’pamux pack basket, which belonged to Annie York of Spuzzum, BC .

5-6  |  Wapato patch along the Columbia River near Portland, OR , at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge.

considerable amounts. On Vancouver Island, for example, Saanich families in the late 1800s were harvesting several burlap gunnysacks, each 50 pounds (over 22 kilograms), of camas bulbs every year. At an estimated 100 camas bulbs per litre,15 with a gunnysack holding about a bushel, this translates into over 10,000 camas bulbs per family per year (Deur and Turner 2005). Depending on the population and family size, this could amount to a harvest for southeastern Vancouver Island in excess of 1 million bulbs each year. Such a harvesting regime would be difficult to imagine without some form of enhancement or management, which did, indeed, take place in the form of landscape burning, clearing of competing vegetation, selective harvesting, and other practices (Beckwith 2004; Turner and Peacock 2005; see also chapter 11). In the lower Fraser and Columbia Valleys, extensive wapato patches were similarly exploited, with prolific yields. Darby (2005) notes that Sauvie Island alone, on the lower Columbia River, provided almost 7,500 acres (about 3,000 hectares) of ponds, lakes, sloughs, and slack-water bays ideal for wapato (figure 5-6), and these were exploited not only by people but also by muskrats and migrating ducks, geese, and swans, and possibly even by mammoths in the Late

Plants as Food  |  285

Pleistocene.16 Judging from the 3,500-year-old Pitt Polder wapato site in Katzie territory (described in chapter 2), wapato production was also enhanced through management. The full extent of the wapato meadow there – more properly, a “precontact, intensified food production site” – has still not been determined, but it must have been very large.17 Wapato tubers were usually harvested in the fall, with women wading in the water, sometimes up to their necks, and using their feet to dislodge the tubers, which would float to the surface. Darby (2005; see also Kirk and Daugherty 2007) estimates that an experienced person could loosen nearly thirty wapato tubers per square yard (0.84 square metres) and could harvest a total of about 350 tubers (about 6 pounds, or just under 3 kilograms) per hour. Wapato was harvested right into the twentieth century, and the Katzie were widely known as producers of this valuable vegetable, trading the tubers – and the rights to harvest them – with other First Peoples as well as selling them to Hudson’s Bay Company traders at Fort Langley (Suttles 1955, 1987b). Estuarine tidal marshes have been important production sites for a suite of root vegetables all along the Northwest Coast, as described by Deur and Turner (2005), Deur (2005), Turner, Thomas, et al. (1983), and many others. Not only springbank clover but also Pacific silverweed, northern riceroot, Nootka lupine, and Pacific hemlockparsley were all harvested from these areas and, in some cases, intensively managed as perennial “gardens,” owned and carefully guarded against intruders. Few data on quantities of these roots dug and processed are available. However, Turner and Kuhnlein (1982) suggest that, working quickly in a good digging site, one might be able to dig about 500 grams to 1 kilogram of silverweed roots in an hour. Edwards (1979, 5) reports a longer time: Nuxalk elder Margaret Siwallace had to dig for five hours to obtain enough clover rhizomes for three large servings. However, this would have been in an area that had not been dug over recently, whereas a routinely dug site would probably be much more easily and efficiently harvested. Drucker (1951, 62) reports for the Nuu-chah-nulth on the west coast of Vancouver Island, “Tales of famous feasts speak of young men having to go up on the roof of the house to pour in water to make steam, so high were the piles of clover roots” – a testament to immense quantities that must have been dug, at least on occasion. As early as 1792, Archibald Menzies, a botanist and naturalist travelling with Captain George Vancouver (1798), reported intensive activities in clover-root digging by a number of Nuu-chah-nulth women at the present-day site of Tahsis, Vancouver Island (see chapter 11). On the northern coast, the Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, Haida, and Tlingit also harvested significant quantities of root vegetables. For example, one Nisga’a elder recalled harvesting spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa) rootstocks “by the sack,” noting, “It’s used for dessert; mix it with new grease and sugar, that’s all. It’s sort of a delicacy” (Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a 1995, 83; see also Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992).

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Harvesting Root Vegetables

Root vegetables, although potentially available year round, are seasonal in terms of their optimal nutrient content, flavour, and texture. Elders have often observed that some localities produce better tasting roots (e.g., northern riceroot and Pacific silverweed) than others. Furthermore, varying with species, certain growth stages – often after the plants have flowered and when the leaves are dying back – are preferred for root harvesting (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2009; Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001; Annie York, co-author of Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990; Turner 2004a). The usual implement for harvesting is a stout digging stick, usually made of wood or antler. Digging sticks (described further in chapter 6) are of various sizes and styles depending on the region and the roots being harvested.18 Along the coast, people harvested clams and cockles using similar digging tools. Dawson’s (1892, 20) description of Secwepemc harvesting of wild nodding onions provides a context for digging stick use: “Early in July the wild onion, nearly ready to flower, is in condition to be gathered ... some families, camping in favourable places for the purpose, engage in this harvest. The women search the open woods and hillsides with crutch-like root-digging sticks in hand, and as each bunch of roots is extracted deftly toss it over the shoulder into a basket carried on the back.” Along with digging sticks, containers are essential equipment for root harvesting. Baskets, woven bags, or birch-bark vessels were formerly used variously to wash, transport, cook, and store the roots. Today, buckets, potato sacks, and other more modern containers have the same function. The close connection between roots and baskets is shown in the Nlaka’pamux narrative of “Old-One and the Creation of the Earth”: At last Old-One came to the woman, who was sitting looking at the ground, and asked her what she was gazing at ... He told her to shut her eyes, and, when she opened them again, a large plant had grown up before her. He asked her to go to the birch tree, and, after saying to it, “O friend! I require you,” to strip off its bark. This she did, brought the bark to him, and he rolled the plant in it. Now he told her to travel along the hillside, and throw away pieces of the plant. She did as directed, and, each time she put her hand in the roll, she pulled out a different kind of bulb or seed. Thus she sowed all the different kinds of plants used by the Indians for food or medicine; and from these sprang up many, and they spread over the whole country ... When the plants had all been distributed, OldOne made the roll of bark into a basket ... “Henceforth ... women will dig roots, and make baskets.” (Teit 1912, 326–7, emphasis added) As well, root harvesters used mats for kneeling or for sorting and spreading the roots to dry. Like digging sticks, the vessels and mats varied considerably

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in style, size, and materials used, ranging from sturdy openwork washing and pack baskets of split redcedar withes twined with spruce root for the Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth to large, coiled split cedar-root baskets for the Nlaka’pamux and Stl’atl’imx, birch-bark vessels and woven cattail-leaf baskets for the Secwepemc, and intricately woven bags of Indian-hemp, silverberry (Elaeagnus commutata) bark, cattail, or tule used in many places in the Interior Plateau. On the central and northern coast, bentwood cedar boxes of various sizes were used to transport, cook, and store roots as well as many other products. (These different containers are described further in chapter 6.) As well as containers and mats, twined strings were also used to tie the roots in bundles for cooking or to thread onions and other roots for drying. Wooden skewers were also used. Strings and skewers of roots were often of a standard length and had set values as trade goods. Cooking Root Vegetables

Almost all root vegetables were cooked before being eaten, either by roasting over hot coals (e.g., bracken fern rhizomes), by steaming in baskets or bentwood boxes (e.g., spring beauty corms and northern riceroot), or by baking in underground pits, or earth ovens, as noted previously (e.g., camas, nodding onions, and balsamroot). Bracken fern rhizomes were sometimes pounded into a starchy flour and then formed into loaves and baked into a kind of bread, which could be eaten fresh or dried for later use (Suttles 1974). Teit (1909, 516) described one common method of cooking, used for some roots that were dried and then reconstituted through steaming or boiling: Roots of the wild potato [Claytonia lanceolata] and the lavender lily [Calochortus macrocarpus] were [often] ... threaded on strings and hung up to dry, or were spread loosely on mats to dry. Afterwards they were put in sacks or baskets, and cooked in small quantities, as required, by boiling in the manner of potatoes. It was considered preferable, however, to steam them, as then they did not get so watery. Round birchbark baskets with flaring sides were used as kettles. The basket was filled nearly half full of boiling water. About halfway down the basket, a little above the surface of the water, a framework of twigs or small sticks, fastened together in the manner of spokes in a wheel, was placed, with the ends resting on the sides of the basket. On this was spread a thin layer of grass, upon which the roots were heaped and covered with a close-fitting lid or sheet of bark. The basket was then set near the fire. Small hot stones were dropped into the water if necessary. As these roots were small, they did not take long to cook. At the present day [as of the early 1900s] a lard-tin is used instead of

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a bark kettle, and placed on the stone; so that the water continues to boil and the volume of steam is kept up. More recently, Linda Smith (2008b) described how spring beauty, or mountain potato, corms (called súnt’íny) were harvested from mid May to early June, boiled for about thirty minutes, flattened and strung together, and then placed on tree branches to dry or spread out on a table or tarp. The dried corms were added to soup or later cooked in a pit (k’èlés).19 Smith remembers her maternal grandmother preparing these corms. As noted earlier, root vegetables were also sometimes steamed or boiled in bentwood cedar boxes or in coiled cedar-root baskets or birch-bark vessels, using fire-heated rocks. Cooking clover and silverweed roots in cedar boxes for a feast was described by Boas (1921, 527–31, 535–42). The men cooking the roots set a grid in the bottom of the box before adding water and red-hot stones. They then placed baskets of the roots to be cooked in the box, above the water level, and allowed them to steam for a short time. They covered the box with mats to keep the steam in place. Kwakwaka’wakw elder Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) demonstrated this cooking technique, which is highly effective and efficient, producing large quantities of cooked roots in a relatively short time.20 He fashioned wooden tongs to retrieve the red-hot rocks out of the fire, dipping them in water to clean off any ash, and then placed them into the box. As the rocks cooled down, he took them out and replaced them with newly heated rocks until the food was cooked. For cooking riceroot bulbs, only a little water is used and the roots are steamed; for potatoes and some other food, the box is filled with water. Another cooking method, used especially when people were out camping, was to wrap edible roots like those of springbank clover and Pacific silverweed in skunkcabbage leaves or thimbleberry leaves and bake them in hot ashes (Boas 1921, 533; Olson 1936, 54). Pit-cooking, as noted previously, has also been a common method for cooking root vegetables, one that has left an extensive signature in the archaeological record. There are words for pit-cooking in virtually all of the languages within the study area. Interestingly, the Nuxalk names for spiny wood fern, sqw’alm, sqw’almiixw, and sqw’alqw’almłp, apparently derive from the Proto-Salish term qw’al or qw’ay (“to scorch [burn to] ashes, black”; “roast [or ripen, as for berries]”) (Kuipers 2002) and are also related to the Nuxalk term qw’almuuł (“roast potatoes under the sand”).21 Many different recipes for pit-cooking have been developed, involving different timing, different rock-heating elements, different types of vegetation included around the food, and, of course, different types of edible roots and other food being cooked. Teit (1900, 236–7; see also Teit 1909, 516) described the Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) pit-cooking method for roots:

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Nearly all roots were tied in strings or threaded on strings before cooking in the earth ovens ... a circular hole is dug in the ground to the depth of two feet and a half and large enough in diameter to contain the roots to be cooked. Into this hole are put four or five flat stones – one in the centre and the others around the sides. Above these is piled a large heap of dry [Douglas-]fir-wood, on which is placed a quantity of small stones. The wood is then kindled, and allowed to burn until nothing but the embers remain, when the small stones drop down to the bottom of the hole. The unburnt wood is next taken out, leaving nothing but the ashes and stones. Enough damp earth is then shovelled in to cover thinly the top of the stones, and this is overspread to the depth of half a foot or more with the broken fir branches, over which is spread a layer of dry yellow-pine [P. ponderosa] needles, and still another layer of fir-branches. By this time the hole is nearly filled up. The roots are then placed on the top, and covered carefully with a thick layer of fir-branches. The whole is covered with earth, and a large fire of fir-wood is kindled on top. In this way immense quantities of roots are cooked at one time. They remain in the oven – according to the kind being cooked – from twelve to twenty-four hours. The root of the wild sunflower [balsamroot] is difficult to cook, and is therefore allowed to lie in the oven for two days. Over a century later, Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) described a similar method for cooking balsamroot but using wet bunchgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata) instead of Douglas-fir boughs. She noted that the women chose only the smaller carrot-sized roots of balsamroot for cooking, not the mature roots, which can be as large as a person’s arm and are far too woody and strong tasting to be edible: You dig a hole down in the ground and fire that pit. And if you take a stick and hit the sides of ... the hole in the ground, you could hear, [it sounds] almost like a ceramic pot ... In the meantime, you’re heating rocks as hot as you can get them. And you have everything all prepared ... In our area we use grass, wet grass, and twigs. We take the hot rocks and put it in the hole in the ground. We cover it a little bit with the dirt so it will not burn the grass or twigs. And then put the wet grass over it and line it. Put the twigs and then the [balsam]roots, put it over the twigs. And then keep lining the side with the grass. You have to work really fast. And in the middle of that we put a stick about maybe an inch in diameter, we put the stick down and leave it there and as you’re filling up that hole, you put some more twigs, lots of grass, wet grass and then you start burying it. When you figure you have it buried enough, you slowly remove that stick down in the middle and it leaves almost a hole right down, and you take

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maybe about a quart of water and pour it down really quickly and plug it. And you watch, if there is steam coming out, you bury it some more until there is no steam escaping. And then you build a little fire over it and leave it overnight. Dawson (1892, 9, 20) supplemented this information with a description of the location and signature of roasting pits: Such root-baking places are usually in the vicinity of root-gathering grounds, and after some years appear as low cones, from fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, with miniature craters in the middle. These might easily be mistaken by an imaginative antiquarian for old sacrificial sites, on account of the evident traces of fire which the stones and earth show ... The root of the Balsamorhiza is also eaten, being previously roasted or baked in the ground for a period of two or three days. Signs of the old roasting-places are common on hillsides where the plant abounds. Comparable descriptions for coastal cooking pits have also been documented. Ditidaht elder Ida Jones, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, described how, in her young adulthood, many women would pit-cook their roots communally, using a relatively large pit, as big as 2 metres wide, 4 metres long, and 1 metre deep. If only one family’s roots were being cooked, a much smaller pit would be prepared. The procedure is as follows. The bottom of the pit is lined with dense, rounded volcanic beach rocks 8 to 10 centimetres across. Then a hot fire is kindled and allowed to burn, usually for several hours, until the rocks are all glowing redhot. Any excess burned wood or ashes are removed, and a little soil or sand is sprinkled over the rocks. A post is placed in the centre and held in place while the pit is being filled. Then a thick layer of vegetation, usually salal branches, is placed over the rocks. A layer of fern fronds, usually sword fern, is added overtop, followed by the roots or other food to be cooked. Before being placed in the pit, the clover and silverweed roots are first tied in fist-sized bundles with pieces of the roots themselves, each woman using her own special knot so that she can recognize the roots. The bundles are to be laid side by side in layers, alternating in direction and interspersed with layers of fern fronds until the pit is full. A final thick layer of salal branches or other vegetation is placed over the top. Then, at the last minute, the post is lifted out, and enough water is poured in through the remaining channel to generate clouds of hot steam. At this point, as the water strikes the red-hot rocks at the bottom, there is much crackling and hissing. A mat – or more recently a piece of canvas or burlap – is laid overtop and weighted down at the edges before being covered with sand or soil. The pit is usually left overnight, sometimes for twelve hours or more, although recent

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pit-cooking for small potatoes and other smaller roots has been successful after only two to three hours. The scent of cooked salal leaves rising from the pit tends to suggest when the food itself is cooked. The pit is then carefully opened and the roots taken out.22 In Ida Jones’s time, each woman took her own roots home to serve to her family or to dry and store for winter. Sometimes camas bulbs, obtained from the Salishan people in the Victoria area, were cooked in the same pit. They were usually placed at the bottom, below the clover and silverweed, because they require more cooking (cited in Turner and Kuhnlein 1982, 1983; and in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Pit-cooked camas bulbs were sometimes pounded and formed into loaves or flattened and dried. If stored carefully, they would keep all winter and could be reconstituted and eaten with fish or seal oil, to be served at potlatches during the winter dance season. Kirk and Daugherty (2007) describe pit-cooking experiments by Alston Thoms and other archaeologists in which it was shown that a tremendous and lasting heat could be produced from cooking rocks; about 250 cobbles heated to redhot can generate a temperature at the bottom of the pit of 800 degrees Fahrenheit and in the upper pit of around 550 degrees Fahrenheit. Even twenty-four or more hours later, temperatures of 125 degrees Fahrenheit had been maintained. Other pit-cooking experiments by Sandra Peacock and Dawn Loewen (Peacock 1998) determined more modest temperature ranges of around the boiling point two or three hours after the pit was closed and then declining over the next few hours. However, lighting a fire on top of the cooking pit, which was frequently done, maintains consistent, higher temperatures as long as the fire is kept going. Pit-cooking may be, in fact, the original slow cooking. In Thoms’s (1989) replications of camas pit-cooking, he found that the time required to assemble the cooking rocks, fuel, and vegetation for cooking was at least half of the time required to harvest the camas bulbs themselves. Obviously, ideal sites for locating cooking pits would have ready access to rocks, firewood, vegetation for surrounding the food, water and shelter from wind, and the camas bulbs or other food being processed. Cooking pits on the coast were often situated near the beach. In the interior, they might be at edge of the treeline in subalpine parkland or at the lower edge of the trees and alongside a creek in dryland valleys. As noted previously, earth ovens vary significantly in size, depending on the quantities of food being cooked and other factors.23 Historically, they range from less than 1 to 3 metres or more across and from around 30 centimetres to over 1 metre in depth. Some of the cooking pits, once constructed and covered, were mounded up to 1.3 to 1.6 metres high (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Cooking rocks, too, have varied in size, number, and type. Vesicular basalt, of the type also often sought for sweat lodges, is commonly used in pit-cooking. Ida Jones and John Thomas (pers. comm., 1982) of the Ditidaht Nation said that their people used to

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go to a certain beach, at the mouth of Tugwell Creek in Sooke on southwestern Vancouver Island, to get their cooking rocks, which were fist-sized, dense, finegrained, and without evident cracks, checks, or veins, so they would not explode when heated. At Kingcome Inlet, people obtained their cooking rocks from a special site, at the bottom of a long rockslide on the south side of the inlet. The place was called Xaxwtemáʔ, referring to carrying the rocks in your arms. Clan Chief Adam Dick (pers. comm., 2008), who shared this information, recalled that as a child he had seen “a big pile of rocks in one corner of the house,” used for cooking – not only for pit-cooking but also for steaming food in bentwood cedar boxes. After being cooked, root foods like clover, silverweed, camas, spring beauty, glacier lily, bitterroot, and onion were generally strung or spread out on mats to dry and could then be stored indefinitely on the strings or in baskets set on the scaffolding in the upper part of a cedar big house or a pithouse. Sometimes, after cooking, bulbs like camas were pressed flat or chopped into pieces before being dried. Dawson (1892, 20) summarized the Secwepemc processing of nodding onions, whose harvesting was described previously: “Returning to camp, the collections of the day are roasted or steamed in the usual way. They are next dried, and finally made up very neatly into bundles or chaplets and stored for future use. Thus treated, the roots are nearly black, and are said to be sweet-tasting.”24 Again, over 100 years later, Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) recalled how her grandmother prepared these onions: “I can remember when we used to [get onions] with our grandmother. She used to dig them and lay them out in the sun to dry, or wilt the tops. And then take it and braid them and put them out to dry for winter use ... They look almost like your regular table onions and they have the same smell, the same taste.” Within the past century or so, many people have experimented with stovetop methods of cooking root vegetables – silverweed roots, clover rhizomes, wood fern rootstocks, and glacier lily bulbs – that were usually pit-cooked in the past. These methods imitate the original pit-cooking or steaming in vessels using hot rocks. Gitga’at elder Marjorie Hill recalled her grandmother Lucille Clifton cooking wood fern rootstocks (figure 5-7), called ʔaa, on the top of the stove: “She put salmonberry branches in the bottom of the pot, with water, and steam[ed] them like that ... Oh, yes. They ate a lot ... I loved that stuff” (cited in Turner and Thompson 2006, 24). Nisga’a elder Beatrice Bright had similar recollections for this fern rootstock: “cook it the whole day on the stove. The [root] whiskers are cleaned off; when it is cooked [they] are taken off. You peel it and mix it with grease and sugar” (cited in Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a 1995, 4, 82). Ida Jones described a stovetop method for cooking bundles of silverweed and clover leaves, interspersed with salal and sword fern fronds just as they would have been in a cooking pit (cited in Turner and Kuhnlein 1982).

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5-7  |  Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa), showing cut away rootstock and frond.

Berries and Other Fleshy Fruits Wild berries and other fleshy fruits25 are favourite foods for many people. In northwestern North America they are, as a group, the most salient and frequently cited and used type of plant food for contemporary Indigenous peoples. These fruits vary in quality and taste: soft, sweet, and juicy, such as wild strawberries, saskatoon berries, or serviceberries, huckleberries and blueberries (Vaccinium spp.), salal, and various blackberry and raspberry relatives in the genus Rubus; tart and relatively hard-fleshed, such as Pacific crabapple, highbush cranberries (Viburnum spp.), bog cranberry, and lowbush cranberry, or lingonberry; or dry, mealy, seedy, and/or somewhat insipid, such as kinnikinnick, currants (Ribes spp.), and black hawthorn. Some of these fruits can be eaten raw, straight from the plant, whereas others, like red elderberries (Sambucus racemosa), highbush cranberries, and chokecherries, were almost always cooked before serving, unless they were completely ripe, almost overripe. Many of the juicy and softskinned types were dried in cakes for storage. Black hawthorn fruits (Crataegus douglasii) and chokecherries, as well as saskatoon berries and some other kinds

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of fruits, were sometimes pounded before or after drying, which can help to pulverize the hard seeds. Nisga’a elder Constance Leeson recalled, “They also picked a berry called snax [black hawthorn]. They would smash these berries until all the teeth [seeds] are all smashed. The people wouldn’t throw any part of it away” (cited in Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a 1995, 79). Some kinds of berries were mixed together, either to extend the sweeter ones or to improve the flavour of the more tart or insipid types. Berries and Other Fleshy Fruits in the Archaeological Record

As with root vegetables, evidence for long-term use of berries and other fleshy fruits can be inferred from the presence of stone grinding slabs, manos, mortars, and pestles, especially if the remains of the fruits themselves are found in the context of these artifacts. A number of berry-drying sites – some quite old – have been identified throughout the study area. Seeds in particular tend to preserve better than many other types of botanical remains. One example of an early large-scale fruit-processing locale is the Fraser Canyon Milliken site, where large numbers of charred cherry seeds (assumed to be chokecherry but not identified by species) were discovered, dating from the Early Holocene (see Lepofsky 2004; and chapter 2). One pithouse site, the Chief Joseph Dam project in Washington, produced saskatoon berry seeds as well as hawthorn (Crataegus sp.) seeds, all of which were crushed, possibly as a result of pulverizing the fruit for drying (Lepofsky 2004; N.D. Stenholm, cited in Lepofsky 2004, 394–400; Turner 1997a; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Just south of the main study area for this book, at the Halverson site, a later prehistoric campsite east of Eugene, Oregon, seeds of saskatoon berry, Vaccinium species, Rubus species, wild rose (Rosa sp.), and cherry (Prunus sp.) were all identified, indicating that it was probably a place specifically used for fruit processing rather than for processing camas bulbs, acorns, or hazelnuts (as most of the other Willamette Valley sites were) (Lepofsky 2004). Salal seeds (as well as flattened mature berries) and seeds of huckleberries and blueberries, red elderberry, and raspberry relatives (Rubus spp.) have all been recovered in quantity from coastal village sites such as the Barnett site on the lower Fraser River and the Scowlitz site about 100 kilometres inland on the Fraser, both in hearths within houses and in middens outside of houses, as well as in short-term lowland camps. The contexts in which they are often found suggest processing en masse for winter consumption (Lepofsky 2004). At the Ozette site in Makah territory, nearly 90,000 seeds of red elderberry, in association of large numbers of salmonberry seeds, as well as salal, huckleberry, and other Rubus seeds, possibly thimbleberry, were found together inside the houses as well as in middens. Since the Ozette mudslide is thought to have occurred in the spring, and these fruits ripen in June and July, these findings indicate that the

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berries were being stored, apparently having been mixed together, boiled into a sauce, and then buried underground (Gill 1983; Whelchel 2005). Interestingly, one Lushootseed elder recalled that her grandmother used to wrap bunches of red elderberries in the large leaves of bigleaf maple and bury them in the sand by the river for future use (cited in Bates, Hess, and Hilbert 1994). Hundreds of thousands of huckleberry and/or blueberry seeds (and staining from the berry juice) were recovered from hearths and storage areas associated with families of high status at a proto-historic Ts’msyen village, Psacelay, on the Skeena River of northern British Columbia (Martindale 1999; Lepofsky 2004). Other fruits and berries whose seeds have been found in small quantities in coastal villages include bitter cherry, red-osier dogwood, kinnikinnick, Pacific crabapple, Oregongrape (Mahonia sp.), and strawberry (Fragaria sp.) (Lepofsky 2004). Perhaps the most extensive berry-processing sites from the archaeological record (and also well documented in the ethnographic record) are the over 200 huckleberry-drying locales at Indian Heaven, southwest of Mount Adams in Washington, as described in chapter 2 (Lepofsky 2004; Mack and McClure 2002; see also Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). Although the Indian Heaven drying trenches are evidently fairly recent, with charcoal samples dating back only about 600 years (Kirk and Daugherty 2007), variations of this system evidently extend over at least 3,000 years. In 1995 at a site located at an elevation of more than 1,300 metres on Mount Baker in Snoqualmie National Forest, archaeologists Chris Miss and Meg Nelson documented twenty shallow trenches, five of which were excavated and showed evidence of digging out and intentional burning, with large quantities of charcoal but no rocks. Dates between about 2,500 and 1,500 years ago were produced from two of the trenches.26 Nutritional Contributions and Regional Variation in Berries and Other Fleshy Fruits

Berries and other fleshy fruits are among the most favoured and flavourful of all plant foods in the area (and, as noted previously, are the traditional plant food most in use today). Most wild fruits are good sources of ascorbic acid (vitamin C); some, such as rose hips and cloudberries, are exceptionally high in this vitamin (see Karst and Turner 2011). These fruits can also contain relatively high amounts of other essential nutrients, such as calcium, vitamin A (as carotene), and folic acid (Kuhnlein 1989b). Recent attention has been paid to some of the dark-coloured berries in particular – blueberries and cranberries, for example – as important sources of flavonoids, which play a recognized, if somewhat indirect, role in cancer prevention (Blumenthal, Goldberg, and Brinckmann 2000, under Vaccinium). Although berries seem to have been universally available and widely harvested throughout the region, the numbers of species named and used vary

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5-8  |  Salal berries (Gaultheria shallon).

somewhat regionally (see table 5-2). The greatest diversity of named species is on the central coast (sixty-seven species), with the central interior a close second (fifty-nine species). Everywhere, however, there were, and are, many different types of berries available. Even in the northern interior region, nearly fifty different species of berries are named and used. In the southern Interior Plateau region, Kirk and Daugherty (2007) note that the Yakima people alone picked eighteen different kinds of berries, with huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum, V. deliciosum) by far the most important. In the scattered meadows of Indian Heaven, mentioned previously, the yield of these berries for the Sahaptin and Chinookans and their ancestors was in the order of 100 gallons per acre (about 940 litres per hectare), and a single family of seven or eight people could

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collect around 500 kilograms (“half a ton”) of fresh and dried berries in a season (Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 69). Equally important, especially in the valleys and on the sidehills of the Interior Plateau, were saskatoon berries, which were harvested in immense quantities and dried in various ways for year-round use. Each family in any Interior Plateau community would have dried and stored several large baskets full of these sweet fruits – probably totalling in the order of about 40 litres or more of dried berries – every summer. On the Northwest Coast, salal berries (figure 5-8) are one of the most important fruit species. These berries were also harvested in enormous numbers – adding up to 100,000 to 200,000 berries per family per year, and millions if one considers an entire community (Deur and Turner 2005). They were generally cooked, using hot rocks, and dried in cakes, some weighing as much as 10 to 15 pounds (4.5 to 7 kilograms) each (Gunther 1973), which were stored in large pack baskets of 20 litres or more capacity, with quantities equivalent to those of the saskatoon berries stored by Interior Plateau families. Harvesting Berries and Other Fleshy Fruits

Berries and fruits require little in the way of harvesting equipment other than containers for picking and transporting them. Typically, a women harvesting berries would use three sizes of basket: a large pack basket carried on the back with the use of a tumpline, a medium-sized basket carried on a strap over the shoulder (figure 5-9), and a small picking basket tied around the waist (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994; see also Boas 1909; and Turner 1996, 2003b). Using both hands to draw the branches toward her, she would pull off the berries so that they dropped directly into the small basket. As the basket filled up, she would keep emptying it into the other baskets until she had filled all three. For picking highbush cranberries, saskatoon berries, elderberries, or crabapples, harvesters might use a long, hooked stick to pull the branches down within reach. For small, densely berried bushes like red huckleberry or dwarf blueberry (Vaccinium caespitosum), a long-toothed wooden comb of mock-orange or some other hardwood was sometimes used to rake off the berries (Teit 1909). Soapberries are a special fruit, harvested in a particular way, even today. Placing a mat, bark tray, or large basket beneath the bush, the picker then uses a short stick to strike the branches, causing the ripe berries to drop en masse to the vessel or mat below, to be gathered up and transported home. Highbush cranberries were also sometimes collected in this manner, especially late in the fall, when the berries were very ripe and sweet and the leaves had fallen off of the bushes (Teit 1909). John Ross (2011) mentions an implement made of snowberry branches used by Spokan women to hit huckleberry bushes and cause the berries to fall off. Soapberries, huckleberries, and other kinds of berries were –

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5-9  |  Stl’atl’imx elder Edith O’Donaghey, 1988, with mediumsized coiled cedar-root berry-picking basket.

and still are – sometimes cleaned of leaves and twigs by rolling them down an inclined wetted board or mat, with a receiving vessel at the bottom; the leaves and twigs stick to the wet surface, and the berries roll free into the container. Processing and Cooking Berries and Other Fleshy Fruits

As well as being eaten fresh, berries and other fruits were processed and stored in various ways. In the past, the sweeter, juicier fruits with small seeds –

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salalberries, huckleberries and blueberries, saskatoon berries, strawberries and thimbleberries, wild raspberries, and blackcaps – were mashed, cooked slightly, and then spread out and dried, usually in dense cakes, for storage. To process their fruits, people sometimes used wooden berry mashers; Teit (1909, 501) mentioned bottle-shaped pestles or mashers for berries of birch wood used by the Secwepemc. Stone mauls were also used to mash the berries (and in some cases, to help pulverize or separate their seeds). Berries were formerly cooked in cedar-wood boxes on the coast or in specially made cooking vessels of birch bark, spruce bark, or other materials in the interior. Small rocks were heated red-hot in a fire, to be added progressively to the berries using wooden tongs until they started to boil; the berries were then allowed to cook to a jamlike consistency. Mats of tule stalks, cattail leaves, or other materials or layers of “timbergrass” (Calamagrostis rubescens), skunk-cabbage leaves, or leaves of thimbleberry or bigleaf maple were variously used as a surface on which to dry the berries once they were cooked.27 The cooked berries were poured out onto the surface to dry. Teit (ibid., 516) described this process for the Interior Salish (Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux): Mats of all kinds, but especially tent-mats, were used for drying berries on. About half the harvest of service-berries [saskatoon berries] and soapberries was boiled and made into cakes, and some of the raspberries and blackberries [blackcaps] were treated in like manner. Instead of large woven baskets, temporary baskets were often used for boiling. These were made of spruce-bark, and were cylindrical in shape. Bark trays were sometimes used in conjunction with them. The cakes of berries were spread on layers of leaves, dry pine-needles, or dry grass, supported on sticks; but more generally they were laid on mats woven of willow-twigs or of grass, made for the purpose. Frames woven of slats of wood were used by a few people. In dry, sunny situations, berries and berry cakes will readily air dry, whereas in cooler, moister climates such as on the coast or at upper elevations, drying might be assisted by placing the berries near a fire. Drying had to be thorough or else the berries would soon become mouldy. Women sometimes poured their berries onto the drying surface in successive, thin layers, allowing each to dry before more berries and juice were added, eventually producing heavy cakes about 2.5 centimetres (1 inch) thick. Another method was to dry the cakes thoroughly on one side and then to turn them over onto another set of leaves or grass and peel off the original layer to allow the other side to dry. Some berries – for instance, certain varieties of saskatoons – were dried individually like raisins. Other saskatoon varieties and some other fruits were valued for their juiciness; the juice from cooking them was collected separately and used to sweeten or marinate

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5-10  |  Rolled-up dried berry cakes, prepared by Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla).

other berries, meat, and fish. On the Northwest Coast the Kwakwaka’wakw, Ts’msyen, and others dried their cakes in rectangular or square wooden frames of standard size, thus producing berry cakes of a set size – often with the same dimensions as bentwood storage boxes – that could be used in trading. Once dry, berry cakes were sometimes rolled up and placed between mats or in wooden boxes or baskets for storage (figure 5-10). They could be easily rehydrated by soaking them overnight in water, using just the quantity of berries required. “They would just cut off some when they wanted berries” (Belle Eaton, pers. comm., 2005). Rehydrated berries were served, often mixed with grease, and more recently with sugar, at family meals or feasts. Many elders still think of these berry cakes and reconstituted berries with great fondness. Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1998), for example, remembered the berry cakes prepared by her grandmother, one of her favourite foods as a child. They were like “fruit leather” made from wild raspberries (sʔeytsqwu), thimbleberries (stł’éqwu), blackcaps (metsúkw), huckleberries (wənéx), or strawberries (tqítq’e) mashed up and spread out on a tin plate to dry in the sun. First, the berries dried on one side, and then her granny turned them over to dry on the other; when they were finished, the inside was just like sweet jelly. These dried fruit leathers were stored in a woven sugar bag. Mary recalled, “When we saw her getting out

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the sugar bag we knew we were going to get a treat. She’d get them, cut and divide one up, and that was our candy!” More acidic fruits like highbush cranberries, bog cranberries, lowbush cranberries, or lingonberries, cloudberries, red elderberries, and Pacific crabapples were often harvested before they were completely ripe and soft. Rather than being dried in cakes, they were either stored raw or were cooked and stored immersed in water, sometimes with a little grease or oil. For raw storage, they were placed whole in underground cache pits, sometimes lined with bark or skunk-cabbage leaves. Usually, however, they were cooked slightly – in cedarwood boxes, large wooden or bark vessels, or more recently, large enamel pots – and preserved in water or in their own juice, to be kept in a cool place until needed for family meals or feasts. Highbush cranberries, when cooked slowly, often release their seeds, which float to the surface and can be skimmed off and discarded. Crabapples and elderberries were often cooked with their stems intact; these were removed after cooking or discarded by the person eating them. Sometimes elderberries or crabapples were cooked into a sauce. These fruits were often mixed with grease or covered with a layer of grease and skunk-cabbage leaves for storage. More recently, large crocks or manufactured barrels – such as 5-gallon (about 20-litre) wooden molasses kegs – were used for storing these acidic fruits. Elders of the Gitga’at Nation of Hartley Bay recall their Eagle matriarch of the early to mid-1900s, Lucille Clifton, putting by four or five kegs packed with moolks (crabapples) and łaaya (highbush cranberries) every winter, to be served later at feasts, with hand-whipped oulachen grease. She preserved some separately and some mixed together. She often buried the barrels in the ground, with only the top showing (Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012; Turner and Thompson 2006). Another account of storing crabapples and other fruit in water is from the village of Kake, Alaska (Kake 1989, 17): “They used to put that [crabapples] in fresh water. And bury the barrel in the ground. The same way with cloudberries [Rubus chamaemorus]. They just put them in clear water and bury them in barrels. That way, whenever you got hungry for fresh stuff, they unpacked it. They took out so much, and then they’d bury it again. Really good stuff.” Red elderberries present a notable example of a fruit once highly regarded but now little used. Formerly, all along the Northwest Coast, the berries were harvested in immense quantities and served at feasts. Today, many people consider them inedible, and some regard them as poisonous (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1989). Because the seeds contain cyanogenic glycosides (as do the stems, leaves, bark, and roots), the berries were almost always cooked to dispel the toxic elements. Curtis (1915, 40) described using a large canoe for large-scale boiling of these fruits by the Kwakwaka’wakw. They were sometimes also pitcooked, and as described by Boas (1921, vol. 1, 564), there were other protocols around how they were eaten:

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The berries were usually cooked overnight in steaming pits lined with dried fern leaves and skunk-cabbage leaves bent up around the edges to hold the juice. When the berries were done they were ladled into cedar frames set over warmed skunk-cabbage leaves from which the midveins had been cut. They were then dried over the fire for 24 hours. The cakes were tied in bundles of five with cedar bark and stored in boxes for winter. Elderberry cakes were always eaten at noon. They gave one a stomach ache if they were eaten in the morning. They were often eaten at large feasts during the winter ceremonials. They were broken into dishes, soaked in water, and rubbed against the side of the dish until they fell apart. Then oil was poured over them, and people ate them with spoons. Only the juice was swallowed; the skins and seeds were spat out. One always drank water after eating elderberries in order to rinse out the seeds. Elderberry cakes, after being soaked, were sometimes mixed with salmonberries, huckleberries, or salal berries to make them more palatable. Unripe elderberries also used to be eaten but only by the old women. They were steamed in a kettle, still in bunches, and then mashed with the back of a spoon. Oil was poured over them, and they were eaten with fire tongs. Roasted salmon was eaten afterward to prevent the women from getting sick (Boas 1921; Turner and Bell 1973). Some other types of berries, such as saskatoons, were also sometimes pitcooked. Saskatoons and other fruits could also be buried in cache pits for winter storage (Lepofsky 2004; Nicholas, Bonneau, and Westfall forthcoming). Blue elderberries (Sambucus nigra ssp. cerulea) were sometimes simply heaped up in clusters and covered with a layer of dried needles at the base of a ponderosa pine tree, soon to be blanketed by winter snows. The juice would stain the snow red, revealing the place where the berries were located, so people could dig them out periodically to get a taste (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Especially in the north, it was possible to bury many types of berries, allowing them to quickly freeze. Sometimes northern peoples used a fermentation, or “souring,” technique to preserve some of their berries, as well as greens and root vegetables, in a “poke” made from the stomach of a seal or other animal, in lengths of animal intestine, or more recently, in barrels – in a process similar to making sauerkraut. Anore Jones (1983) describes the techniques of fermenting and storing foods in the north in detail. Whipping preserved berries and greens together with fat, and sometimes snow, produced a favourite type of dish, which was commonly known as “Indian ice cream” or “Eskimo ice cream” (not to be confused with soapberry whip, which is also sometimes called “Indian ice cream”) (see Russell Kari 1987; A. Jones 1983; and Kuhnlein and Turner 1991). Some fruits like kinnikinnick, or bearberry, rose hips, Pacific crabapples, and highbush cranberries remain on the bushes into the winter and even into

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5-11  |  Whipping soapberries (Shepherdia canadensis) into a frothy confection, Nass Valley, BC .

spring, to be harvested as needed (A. Jones 1983; ‘Ksan 1980). These could be eaten raw in times of emergency but were more usually picked in season and cooked. Kinnikinnick berries, for example, were often picked in late summer or fall and fried in hot lard or salmon oil or boiled with salmon eggs, salmon, or venison in soups. Kinnikinnick berries were also dried for storage or buried fresh in birch-bark containers. A favourite treat for children was to eat these berries as a snack after they were fried on a hot stove (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). The Selish (Flathead) mixed dried, powdered kinnikinnick berries with deer liver to make a kind of pemmican (Hart 1976), and the Nuxalk cooked them with melted mountain goat fat, to be served to chiefs at feasts. More recently, the dried berries were boiled with “dumplings” made with flour and water (Turner 1973). Crabapples, highbush cranberries, and other tart fruits become sweeter after the first frost, particularly crabapples, which become soft, turn brown, and develop a unique flavour – similar to that of bletted medlars (Mespilus spp.) of European traditions. Many elders recall enjoying them at this stage in particular. In the Interior Plateau,

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another fruit of unusual flavour, red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea), was eaten as a mouth freshener or mixed with saskatoon berries to make a dish sometimes called “sweet-and-sour” (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994). Soapberries present a special case among the range of fleshy fruits used across the study area. Containing saponins, which are natural detergents, these berries foam readily when mixed with water and whipped (figure 5-11). An entire culture of soapberry use extends into the distant past, judging from the early terms in Salishan and possibly Dene (Athabaskan) proto-languages and the high level of congruence of names across the language families (Turner and Burton 2010; see also chapter 3). Soapberries are harvested uniquely, as described previously, and are also prepared in a specific way, with their own associated suites of implements – berry whippers, vessels for whipping, and special spoons for eating the whip – and cultural protocols surrounding its use. Soapberries, like other fleshy berries, were cooked and dried in cakes and then reconstituted for whipping. However, they were generally sweetened, originally with other fruits such as saskatoon berries and more recently with sugar, because they are quite bitter. Almost all fruits, nowadays, are served with sugar, and the usual way of storing them, rather than dehydration, is to “can” them in jars, make them into jam or jelly, or freeze them. Other than soapberries, which will not whip if they come in contact with grease, many berries and fruits are still served with oulachen grease on the central and northern coast. Seeds and Nuts First Peoples in the study region ate relatively few nuts and nut-like seeds. The primary types are hazelnut on the coast and in the Interior Plateau, whitebark pine seeds and balsamroot achenes in the Interior Plateau, and acorns of Garry oak on the southern coast. All of these are known from archaeological contexts, and species of Corylus, Pinus, and Quercus are widely recognized as longtime sources of human food across the northern hemisphere, including eastern North America, Europe, and Asia (Turner, Luczaj, et al. 2011). It is curious that grains and seeds of herbaceous annuals and other flowering plants, which were harvested prolifically and eaten as pinole and other seed dishes by Indigenous peoples of California and the Great Basin (see M.K. Anderson 2005; Fowler 2000; and Timbrook 2007), have apparently never been used extensively in the northwestern region. Some of these species, such as tarweed (Anisocarpus madioides), yellow pond-lily, eelgrass, Indian ricegrass (Achnatherum hymenoides), and springbank clover, occur in parts of northwestern North America and would have been available to people but evidently were not sought out in this form (except in the Willamette Valley, where the Kalapuya burned for and harvested tarweed) (Boyd 1999b). Rhizomes of Nuphar were important as medicine in both the Northwest Coast and interior regions, and the rhizomes of

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both springbank clover and eelgrass were used as root vegetables on the Northwest Coast. Chenopodium species are among those plants whose seeds and greens were eaten by Indigenous peoples of the Southwest. Chenopod seeds have been recovered in significant quantities from archaeological sites in northwestern North America, such as at Keatley Creek and Kamloops (see Lepofsky 2004), but there is no indication, so far, that people actually ate Chenopodium in this region. Nevertheless, palaeoethnobotanical analyses of pithouse sites dated to within the last millennium along Elk Creek, a tributary of the Rogue River in Oregon, have produced many edible seeds, nuts, and berries, including a high number of chenopod seeds, which may indicate that chenopods were in fact processed and eaten at this site (ibid.), and it is possible that their use extended northward in the past. Significantly, the methods for harvesting and processing balsamroot achenes in the Interior Plateau seem to parallel those used for the various seeds gathered by peoples of southern Oregon, California, and the Great Basin. Seeds and nuts are often stored in underground caches and roasted in a fire to help extract the kernels and separate out the shells (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Archaeologically, therefore, these foods frequently occur in the context of cache pits and hearth sites. For example, an abundance of whitebark pine seeds have been found in Interior Plateau sites, most notably in the vicinity of the Keatley Creek pithouse village site, in the context of storage pits and earth ovens (Lepofsky 2004). Furthermore, the processing methods applied to nuts and acorns – roasting, pounding, and grinding – are similar to those for camas bulbs. In archaeological contexts in the Willamette Valley, Long Tom Valley, and other archaeological sites just south of the study area, remains of hazelnuts and acorns actually occur in hearth sites and in association with stone grinders and pounders, together with camas bulbs. Manos and grinding slabs are more common in early archaic sites of central California, where the economy was more focused on plant seeds. Significantly, they are rare or completely absent on the Northwest Coast north of the Fraser River region. They do occur, however, from around 3,500 to 1,500 years ago in the Locarno Beach sites of the lower Fraser, although they may have been used for processing chokecherries or saskatoon berries rather than seeds or nuts (Ames and Maschner 1999). Only the physical presence of the plant remains themselves – of hazelnut shells or pine seeds, for example – can confirm ancient seed collecting and processing.28 Garry oak acorns, due to their high tannin levels, require considerable leaching and long-term processing before they can be readily consumed, as evidenced by the Sauvie Island acorn-processing site described in chapter 2, in which acorn-filled pits lined with hemlock boughs and marked with stakes were located in contexts in which the acorns were exposed to strong groundwater seepage. Other Quercus species (e.g., Q. kelloggii, California black oak) require

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less leaching, but the methods used for Garry oak acorns may originate with the processing of these other species. Conversely, acorn processing conceivably derives from methods used in the ancient Jomon culture of Japan, dating to between 12,000 and 2,000 years ago (Croes et al. 2007; Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009a, 2009b). Hazelnuts in particular have long been highly valued in northwestern North America, as evidenced by the widespread occurrence of names from at least two Proto-Salish ancestral terms, one of which (s-ts’ik’ or s-ts’ik) has been semantically transformed in various languages into names for acorns and whitebark pine and other conifer seeds, as well as being applied to “squirrel” in some languages (see chapter 3 and appendix 2). From Vancouver Island, the lower Fraser and Columbia Valleys, and the Willamette Valley, hazelnut use extended east to the North Thompson region and Kootenays of the Interior Wet Belt and north to the Skeena and Nass Rivers. Largely replaced today by commercial filberts and other nuts, wild hazelnuts were formerly much gathered and traded – including to white traders and settlers during the fur trade and colonial eras. Some Interior Salish elders remembered their grandparents bringing home gunnysacks full of hazelnuts at Christmas time. Considerable energy was expended in the dehusking and cracking of hazelnuts; sometimes people sought them, already harvested and “cleaned,” from the caches of squirrels and other rodents, but they would leave behind enough, or some equivalent food, for the animal to survive (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001; J.A. Ross 2011). The use of whitebark pine seeds parallels in many ways that of pinyon pine (Pinus edulis and other spp.) in the southwestern United States. Whitebark pine seeds were harvested, usually in September, from timberline sites, either by climbing the trees, using poles, or cutting down branches to get the cones, which were then roasted and the seeds extracted, to be cracked open and eaten immediately or stored for later. Elders of the 1900s from the northern Interior Plateau recalled their families collecting and storing large quantities of whitebark pine seeds (Teit 1906a; Turner 1992b, 2004b; Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Teit (1906a, 222) reported, for example, that “considerable quantities of [whitebark pine] nutlets are gathered by the Upper [Stl’atl’imx] people.” Stl’atl’imx elder Edith O’Donaghey (pers. comm., 1984; also cited in Turner 1992b) used to eat lots of these seeds at Shalalth on Seaton Lake, where she grew up: “It’s just like roasting peanuts ... If you put [the cones] in the fire, it’ll open up and then you pick [the seeds] out. Or put them in a pit ... And then they’ll open up and you just pick them up ... My dad used to bring it home by the sackful.” Sometimes, as with hazelnuts, caches of these seeds made by squirrels were sought, both by people and by bears, who used to dig up the earth and even climb the trees to obtain them (Sam Mitchell, pers. comm., 1972). Whitebark pine seeds were said to store well. They were sometimes mixed with mountain sheep fat (Bouchard and Kennedy 1977b) or dried

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saskatoon berries (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). A few other types of conifer seeds, such as those of ponderosa pine, were sometimes eaten but usually only opportunistically (see also Teit 1909, 515). Greens Green vegetables consisted mostly of peeled, succulent young shoots of species like thimbleberry, salmonberry, cow-parsnip, and fireweed but also leaves and stems of species such as western dock (Rumex aquaticus var. fenestratus) and “wild celery,” or Indian consumption plant (Lomatium nudicaule), as well as prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.) pads in the Interior Plateau. These greens were especially relished in the springtime, when they are generally most available and digestible as tender young growth. Edible greens are not usually evident in the archaeological record and have been little noted by archaeologists, but their use is likely quite old. Eating greens such as fireweed, western dock, and cow-parsnip, for example, may extend back to the earliest peoples entering the New World. Comparable to lettuce, cabbage, asparagus, and celery of the European diet, the wild green vegetables of the study region generally have a high moisture content and contain carotene and other vitamins (e.g. vitamin C, B vitamins, and folic acid), as well as essential minerals (e.g., iron, calcium, and manganese) (Kuhnlein and Turner 1987, 1991). As noted previously, most of these shoots and edible greens are available for only a short window of time early in the growing season, after which they start to become too fibrous, woody, and strong-tasting. Seldom used today, they were usually eaten fresh, often with a dressing of oulachen “grease,” processed fish eggs, or more recently, sugar or molasses. Salmonberry sprouts were sometimes pit-cooked in bundles and then eaten with dried salmon (Gunther 1973; Turner 1995). Leaves of western dock and the fleshy leaves of stonecrop (Sedum divergens) were also eaten with fish oil, or dried fish, and western dock was sometimes mixed with northern riceroot bulbs (Turner and Thompson 2006). Despite their ephemeral seasonal use, these green vegetables would have been critically important as sources of vitamins after a winter of consuming mostly dried and stored food. Greens such as “wild celery,” for example, are notably rich in vitamin C, which may have been a nutrient in short supply in late winter (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990). On the central coast, as well as in the Interior Plateau, the aromatic seeds of this plant were used as a flavouring, incense, and medicine, but Interior Salish peoples relished the young leaves – “the very first kind of fresh plant that was eaten ... before it came into bloom,” as described by Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001). She explained further, “I guess our people used to really hunger for something fresh. You were eating dried meats, dried food and ling cod in the winter and everything was dried. In the spring they would crave for something fresh and these were the

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plants that they usually indulged in first thing in the spring.” Many other elders have recalled how, as children and young adults, they eagerly looked forward to their first springtime “feed” of thimbleberry or cow-parsnip sprouts and how much the whole community appreciated the ones who brought them to share; this was a time for a special kind of meal or feast (Boas 1921; George 2003; Turner and Turner 2008). Green vegetables were casually gathered wherever they were encountered in the right season, as well as purposefully harvested in quantity by groups of women, children, and families, who would bring back armloads of cow-parsnip, fireweed, thimbleberry, or salmonberry shoots or “wild celery” greens, depending on the region. For example, Chief Earl Maquinna George (2003, 76–7) remembers women from his village returning home with mounds of thimbleberry shoots in their canoes: “The ladies around Ahousaht used to bring in armfuls of chashxiwaʔ ... and called the other women to come and help with it ... The kids used to ask to eat it, and they’d give them a little bit. Men ate some, but very little; it was a belief that this food was for women. They had it with ‘cheese’ made out of fish eggs.” Nuu-chah-nulth men sometimes brought these greens to their halibut-fishing sites, to share and trade. Many people up and down the coast have fond memories of eating these greens with cured salmon eggs, oulachen grease, and later, molasses or sugar (Turner and Thompson 2006; Turner and Turner 2008). For some of the Stó:lō peoples, thimbleberry shoots were so important that some people held a First Shoots ceremony, similar to the more common First Salmon ceremony, to give recognition to the spirits of this plant so that such foods would always be plentiful (Charles Hill-Tout, in Maud 1978c, 115; see also chapter 11). In the Interior Plateau greens were equally significant. According to Teit (1909, 515), for the Secwepemc, cactus was “much used” by the southern bands, and “wild rhubarb” (cow-parsnip) shoots were “very much used,” although in this region fireweed shoots were “rarely eaten.” Green vegetables are usually peeled, and in some cases, such as with salmonberry and cow-parsnip shoots, they must be peeled before they can be consumed. For the latter, peeling the stalks – both leafstalks and flower budstalks – is essential because the skin contains concentrated amounts of “phototoxic” chemicals called furanocoumarins, which are activated in the presence of sunlight and can cause severe blistering, irritation, and discolouration of the skin, especially around the lips (Kuhnlein and Turner 1987; Turner and von Aderkas 2009). Other than peeling, most greens require little preparation; since they are usually eaten fresh, they do not require the use of cooking implements or baskets for storage. However, some greens are cooked. For example, the Nuu-chahnulth and other Northwest Coast peoples sometimes bundled and pit-cooked salmonberry shoots. Some greens, like “wild celery” leaves, may be dried for storage. Cow-parsnip shoots and other greens have also been preserved by canning or, more recently, by blanching and freezing.

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The rhizomes and tender central leaves of eelgrass provided a particular springtime treat – a combination of root vegetables and greens – for the Kwakwaka’wakw and neighbouring peoples of the Northwest Coast, who sometimes celebrated this food with a special feast (Boas 1921; Cullis-Suzuki 2007). During the spring tides of May, people sought this salty-sweet food using a long, thin stick or pole called a k’əlpbayuw (named after “twisting”), which was extended down to the seafloor from a canoe, carefully twisted to entangle the long, ribbon-like leaves, and then pulled to uproot the plants. The eelgrass-twisting pole is a special and sophisticated implement. Only western hemlock trees from a deep forest, having few branches and long, slender, and slow-growing trunks, with very dense wood, are selected, debarked, and cut to length. Because hemlock has a bent-over top, a hemlock pole is curved at the end and thus more proficient at entangling the eelgrass leaves. Kwakwaka’wakw elders Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) and Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth) described the eating of this springtime treat, as remembered from some forty or fifty years ago. The sweet rhizomes, orange-brown outside and whitish inside, are broken in segments, with all but the innermost leaf removed. This thin, tender leaf is wound around the rhizome to make a small bundle, which is then dipped in oulachen grease or seal oil and eaten fresh, sometimes out on the water, sometimes at home at family meals, and sometimes at special feasts where many chiefs and nobility are called together (Cullis-Suzuki 2007). Edible Cambium and the Inner Bark of Trees Possibly among the very oldest vegetal foods used by Indigenous peoples across the circumpolar region are the inner bark and cambium29 tissues – sometimes referred to as “bast” – of various types of trees (Dilbone 2011; Dilbone, Turner, and von Aderkas 2013; Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Östlund et al. 2009; Turner 1995, 1997a; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009). Predominantly used in the study region were the cambium tissues of lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine, western hemlock, Sitka spruce, and black cottonwood.30 Like the edible greens, tree cambium is usually at its prime for only a short window of time near the beginning of the growing season, when the sap starts to run. After testing for readiness, people would cut rectangles of tree bark from the trunks and, using special implements, scrape off the edible tissue, either from the outside of the exposed wood or from the inside of the bark sections, depending on the species and the growth stage of the tree. A common practice in harvesting edible cambium was to remove the bark from only a portion of the trunk and not to girdle the tree, which would kill it. As a consequence, some harvested trees continue to live and often provide an archaeological record and geographical context for cambium use (Turner, Ari, et al. 2009). In the interior of the study area, from the Yukon to Montana, hundreds of “culturally modified trees” (CMT s) of lodgepole and ponderosa pine 310 | part two – development

showing past removal of sections of bark from the trunks are evidence of widespread and intensive harvesting of cambium as food (L.M.J. Gottesfeld 1992a; Magne 2007; Stryd and Eldridge 1993; Swetnam 1984; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009). Along the coast, occasional CMT s reflecting past cambium harvesting of western hemlock, amabilis fir, and Sitka spruce can also be found. Knives and scrapers used to harvest cambium also occur in archaeological contexts (see Hayden 1992). Dendrochronology studies can sometimes provide quite accurate dating for such CMT s; their frequency and abundance in a particular area can give indications not only that people were harvesting this food but also of the actual season and timespan of their collection activities – in some cases, only for one or two seasons, sometimes extending over a century or more (Swetnam 1984). A detailed account of harvesting western hemlock cambium by Wuikinuxv peoples of Rivers Inlet on the central Northwest Coast was provided by ethnographer Edward S. Curtis (1915, 38–40): In the beginning of June those tribes that prepare hemlock bast for food (such as the Rivers Inlet group [Oweekeno/Wuikinuxv Nation]) scatter in small bands among the forest-girt lakes. The work begins about the middle of June at the time when salmonberry shoots have become too woody to be eaten and skunk-cabbage leaves have attained their full size. By means of a climbing apparatus of cedar-withe ropes and a yew block supporting the feet, a man slowly climbs spirally up a hemlock tree eighteen inches to three feet [45–90 centimetres] in diameter, attaining a height of as much as forty-five feet [13.5 metres] if the trunk is free of branches to that height. Then leaning out on the rope that supports the back, he cuts through the bark from the rope to a point about three feet [about 1 metre] above it. At the latter level he then scores the bark clear around the trunk, and after loosening this section he breaks it off at the level of his rope, drops it to the ground, and descends three feet to repeat the operation.31 A piece of whale-rib with sharpened end was the primitive tool for this work. At the foot of the tree a woman gathers up the sections of bark, and with a mussel-shell she scrapes off the bast in shavings four or five inches [10 to 12.5 centimetres] long and two or three finger-breadths wide. As she works these shavings are thrown into an uncovered cedar box twelve by fourteen inches, by eighteen inches in depth [30 by 35 by 45 centimetres], and from time to time the mass is compressed by treading on a superimposed square of scraped bark. As Curtis (1915) further described, the scraped-off cambium was then cooked in an earth oven. A pit used to roast ten full boxes of cambium tissues – a quantity harvested annually by some families – would have been about 30 to 35 centimetres deep, over 1 metre wide, and almost 2 metres long. Stones were heated Plants as Food  |  311

“white hot,” all cinders were carefully removed, and a thick layer of moistened dead fern fronds was spread over the stones, followed by a double layer of skunk-cabbage leaves. Two hollow bark cylinders were placed at opposite sides of the pit, and the cambium was spread out over the skunk-cabbage leaves and covered with a mat and then a layer of earth. About 20 litres (“five gallons”) of boiling water were poured down the hollow cylinders, which were then quickly plugged, and the cambium was left to cook for several hours – from early morning until noon. A man and his wife and children then sat around the edges of the pit, each removing handfuls of cambium, kneading it over and over on a slab of sandstone, shredding it and working it until it became smooth and pasty, and then rolling it into a ball and laying it in a wooden box. This work sometimes continued over a two-week period, after which the family would return to their village. The woman then removed each ball of cambium and beat it on a mat with her knuckles to form a loaf the size and shape of the mat, which was cut to fit the dimensions of the storage box (about 30 by 45 centimetres and about 1 centimetre thick). The formed loaves were laid out one after another on a drying frame, which was then placed, when full, on a drying rack above the hearth. The loaves were dried over the fire overnight and most of the next day and then stored in bentwood cedar boxes, ten loaves to a box, to be kept until winter, when they were served at the winter dances, with a dressing of oulachen grease. The taste of the edible cambium is generally resinous and quite sweet. It is known to contain carbohydrates in the form of sugars, as well as to be high in dietary fibre and, in some cases, vitamin C (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Östlund et al. 2009; Swetnam 1984; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009). One detailed study revealed that lodgepole pine cambium collected from the British Columbia interior contained significant quantities not only of sugars but also of protein, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and magnesium (Dilbone 2011; Dilbone, Turner, and von Aderkas 2013). Tree cambium is also well known as an emergency food because even in winter some food value can be gained from these tissues. Quantities of cambium harvested varied widely across the region, but as reflected in Curtis’s (1915) account, on the central and northern coast, considerable amounts of cambium of western hemlock and other conifers were harvested each year. Gitga’at elders from Hartley Bay, where this food (called ksiiw) was harvested up until about the 1960s, said that it was easy to fill two large (“10-gallon”) buckets with ksiiw when they went to harvest it; this amount – about 75 litres – might be used by a family over the year (cited in Turner and Thompson 2006; see also Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012). Interior peoples also used large amounts of this cambium. According to Teit (1909, 515), for the Secwepemc, for example, “the cambium layer of black pine [P. contorta] was in great demand,” and “cambium of the yellow pine [P. ponderosa] was used by the Bonaparte and Kamloops people, and that of the aspen (possibly mistaken for cottonwood P. balsamifera) and ‘nut’ pine [P. albicaulis] were

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occasionally used.” Once harvested, edible cambium is often eaten fresh and raw because it is said to sour or ferment quickly. However, the Gitga’at and other northern coastal peoples fried their cambium and dried it in square cakes, as they did berries, seaweed, and other foods. They then soaked it, cooked it, and served it with highbush cranberries and grease (Turner and Thomspon 2006). Some people also started preserving cambium by canning and freezing. Tree cambium is seldom eaten today, except by a few knowledgeable elders, especially in the northern part of the area, who still crave this ancient and unique food. Mushrooms and Black Lichen Peoples of the southern Interior Plateau were evidently the only ones within the study area who sought out and ate mushrooms as a significant part of their diet (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Turner 1995, 1997a). Other peoples, especially in the north, held strong taboos against their use.32 Mushrooms and puffballs are often associated with ghosts, as reflected in their names – for example, “ghost’s hat” or “owl’s hat”33(appendix 2). Two of the species that are eaten by Interior Plateau peoples are in the same genus, Tricholoma, namely T. populinum (cottonwood mushroom) and T. magnivelare (American pine mushroom, or matsutake) (Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger 1985).34 One species that was sought by Stl’atl’imx and Nlaka’pamux peoples, Hygrophorus gliocyclus (slipperytop), had not even been collected by mycologists in the region until Stl’atl’imx elder Edith O’Donaghey identified it as one that they harvested around Lillooet (Turner 1997a).35 Few studies have been done on the nutrient contents of wild mushrooms, but evidently they are nutritionally comparable to commercially available types, with minor but significant amounts of total carbohydrates, fibre, protein, lipids, and some minerals (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger 1985). Mushrooms were usually fried in grease or lard and cooked in soup. Sometimes they were sliced and dried to preserve them for winter use. Only one species of lichen – wíla, or black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii), sometimes referred to as “black moss” – was used in any quantity as food, and its use was largely restricted to the peoples of the Interior Plateau. It was intensively harvested by some and used only sparsely, as a famine food, by others. The Sec­ wepemc reportedly ate “a good deal of black moss” (Teit 1909, 515). In some areas, such as parts of Montana, over 10 kilograms (“25 pounds”) per person of this lichen were reportedly harvested annually (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991). Neither edible mushrooms nor Bryoria have been documented archaeologically, as far as can be determined, although archaeologists have identified a paddle-shaped implement that they think was used for pounding the lichen during processing (Keddie 1988; S. Crawford 2007). Hanging from the branches of coniferous trees of montane forests throughout the Interior Plateau, it was generally harvested with a long pole thrust up

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into a mass of lichen in the branches and then twisted to entangle it and pull it down. Sometimes a crosspiece was fixed at the end of the pole to help ensnare the lichen. This species has potentially toxic look-alike relatives or strains, so its identification was important. Elders like Mary Thomas were able to assess the edible type readily by examining the colour (the darker the thallus, the less bitter) and by tasting a small amount. Sometimes hunters would bring home samples of the lichen for their grandmothers to taste, and only after a particular patch of lichen was approved was it harvested in quantity. Then it was bundled into bags or tied in bales and carried or rolled down the mountainside to a campsite or village. People processed this lichen by pounding and then soaking it, usually in the running water of a creek, to leach out the bitter or toxic compounds, such as vulpinic acid. It was almost always then pit-cooked for a lengthy period of time, sometimes for forty-eight hours or more. Due to its complex lichen carbohydrates, wíla is evidently not actually digestible, even after prolonged pit-cooking. However, recent investigations (S. Crawford 2007, forthcoming) have demonstrated that the thallus of Bryoria has the ability to absorb significant amounts of sugars (fructans) from camas bulbs, which are frequently cooked together with it, thus capturing nutrients that would otherwise be lost in the cooking process. As this lichen was almost always pit-cooked with camas or other plant foods, such as nodding onions or even saskatoon berries, this capacity to absorb extra nutrients is an important feature. Further research is needed to know whether Bryoria itself contributes any nutrients to those who consume it or whether it is solely a secondary source of nutrients derived from the foods with which it is cooked or otherwise processed. Mourning Dove (1933, 124–5), in connection with her Okanagan story on the origin of black tree “moss” (the lichen Bryoria fremontii) from Coyote’s hair braid (see chapter 12), provides a detailed description of cooking “black moss,” similar to those for cooking camas and other root vegetables, provided earlier. Layers of vegetation are spread in a thick carpet over the hot rocks in the bottom of the pit, followed by a layer of camas bulbs and then “a compact heap” of lichen. More vegetation and tule matting (more recently canvas or gunnysacks) cover the pit, and finally a layer of dirt. One or more thick sticks, inserted as the pit is constructed, are withdrawn at this stage, and water is added through the channels to generate steam. A hot fire of logs is built on the pit oven and maintained for about forty-eight hours. On the third or fourth day, after the ashes have burned down, the oven is opened and the food taken out. As described by Mourning Dove, “The moss has melted and run together, forming a thick, jelly-like substance bluish-black in color. It is cooled and then is sliced and eaten. Or, it may be dried and stored for future use, in which event it has to be heated or boiled before being served, and resembles molasses. Dried, it becomes hard and keeps indefinitely.” As noted, Stuart Crawford’s (2007) research suggests that the main

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nutritional contribution of “black moss” is the substantial quantities of fructose (up to 30 per cent of the total content) absorbed from the camas bulbs. Other Plant Foods Edible seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae and related spp.; syn. Porphyra spp.) (see Sutherland et al. 2011) was, and still is, immensely important in terms of quantities harvested and nutritional importance, not only for coastal peoples but also for many interior peoples who obtained it through trade (Turner 2003a; Turner and Clifton 2006). The Gitga’at of Hartley Bay still travel each spring to their seaweed camp at K’yel on Princess Royal Island to harvest and dry their seaweed, and other peoples up and down the coast – from Alaska to Vancouver Island – do likewise. Although much has changed in terms of the containers used to pick and store the seaweed, the vessels used to access the seaweed-picking grounds, and the processing and storage, the quantities harvested remain very large.36 Families generally pick the seaweed into sacks with a 50-pound capacity (over 22 kilograms); each family gets as much as time permits. Once dried, the seaweed is used for trade and as gifts, as well as being a major food in each household. These days (as of the twenty-first century), if the weather is too bad to dry the seaweed immediately after harvesting, it is frozen, later to be thawed and then spread out and dried (people now have freezers powered by generators at their seaweed camp) (Turner and Clifton 2006). Other plant food products, consumed on a more casual basis, include gum of various coniferous trees, such as lodgepole pine and spruce (Picea spp.), which was chewed for pleasure, as well as for use in technology – caulking baskets and canoes – and for medicinal purposes. One Tsilhqot’in elder (pers. comm., 2003), for example, noted that people were always chewing lodgepole pine pitch in the old days. Some people don’t like it, he said, but “for the oldtimers, it’s chewing gum.” The gum, which contains a host of different resinous and aromatic compounds (both water soluble gums and nonsoluble resins), would be expected to improve the health of teeth and gums through its antibiotic properties (Turner 2009). Another casually used type of food is flower parts, such as petals of wild rose (Rosa spp.), fireweed flowers, and buds of mariposa lily. Children sometimes sucked the flower nectar of honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa), paintbrush, and salmonberry blossoms, possibly in imitation of hummingbirds seeking out these flowers. Flowers are usually low in protein, but some are rich in vitamin C and vitamin A (as carotene) (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991). The flower nectars are among the very few sweet substances (other than wild strawberries, saskatoon berries, and other sweet-tasting berries, as well as cambium tissues of pine and some other trees) in the food systems of the region

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(see chapter 4). Although both bigleaf maple and paper birch can be tapped in the spring for sap that can be rendered into syrup (similar to the syrup of sugar maple and some other species of eastern forests), Indigenous peoples of the study area did not process sap in this way. However, in the Interior Plateau, a white crystalline sugar exudes under certain environmental conditions from the boughs of interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca), and many people formerly harvested this sweet substance whenever they came across it, eating it alone as a candy or mixing it with other foods (Davidson 1919; Turner 1997a).37 Coastal peoples sometimes sweetened their medicinal preparations with the rhizomes of licorice fern or chewed these as a mouth sweetener or appetizer. Camas bulbs, sweet from the fructose produced in pit-cooking, were also sometimes sought as a sort of candy, as were the pit-cooked roots of balsamroot and nodding onions, which are sometimes referred to as “dessert” or “candy” (Turner 1997a). The special whipped confection made from soapberries, described earlier, was sometimes sweetened with camas or berries. In the Skeena River area and farther north, people mixed in the fleshy inner cortex of fireweed to sweeten soapberry whip and help it to retain its stiffness (Johnson 1997; Turner and Thompson 2006). When molasses and sugar were introduced, they were quickly adopted into use and became standard accompaniments, along with various oils and fats, to the traditional plant foods, including greens, roots, and berries. A number of aromatic plants in different parts of the study region were used to flavour food or to make beverage teas. Field mint (Mentha arvensis) and Labrador tea are two examples of widely used beverage plants.38 Teas of many other types of plants, prepared from single species or sometimes mixtures and made by infusion (steeping) or decoction (boiling), were drunk mainly for medicinal purposes but would also have contributed key nutrients, including vitamin C and calcium (Keely 1980; Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Turner 2009). Aspects of Plant Food Use: Discussion This section presents some general observations and overarching features of plant food harvesting, processing, storage, and nutrition. Some of these topics have been covered in the previous sections and will not be repeated in detail here. However, all of the food categories discussed are components of integrated Indigenous food systems, and the roots, berries, and other foods cannot stand alone in considerations of peoples’ overall nutrition and food cultures. Whereas plants contribute some carbohydrates, essential vitamins and minerals, dietary fibre, and diversity in peoples’ diets, animal foods yield the bulk of protein and fat, as well as some other key nutrients such as iron. Fish, meat, and other food derived from animals have always been a dominant element of Indigenous peoples’ food systems in northwestern North America; although animals are not

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Table 5-3  |  Proto-Salish, Proto-Interior-Salish, and Proto-Coast-Salish terms for food plants

Proto-Salish: 13–14 proto-terms (8–9 for berries, 2 for seeds and nuts, 3 for roots)

Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa) (see also Rubus spectabilis, Rubus ursinus, Fragaria spp., Vaccinium spp.)

qw’al, qw’ay, ‘to scorch (burn to) ashes, black; roast, ripe(n)’ (cf. Nuxalk sqw’alm, sqw’almiixw, sqw’alqw’almłp)

Camas (Camassia sp.), onion (Allium sp.) (‘edible tuber’)

qwlawl

Nuts and seeds: hazelnut (Corylus cornuta), whitebark pine and other pines (Pinus albicaulis, Pinus spp.), Garry oak (Quercus garryana) (‘fir or pine cone, acorn, nut’)

sts’ik’, sts’ik

Hazelnut (Corylus cornuta)

Salal (Gaultheria shallon) (‘berry sp.’)

q’əp’xw, q’əpxw (cf. Comox q’əpxwim ‘crunching noise’; cf. also q’əpxw, q’əp’xw, q’əpkw, q’əp’kw’ ‘to crunch when chewed’)

t’aqaʔ

Currant (Ribes sp.) (‘a shrub,’ ‘a type of currant’)

p’uqway

Blackcap (Rubus leucodermis)

mətsə́kw

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa) and blue elderberry (S. nigra ssp. cerulea) Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis)

ts’ikw

‘Berry species’: trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus), also Secwepemc Vaccinium oxycoccos

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)

Cattail (Typha latifolia) and scouring rush (Equisetum sp.) (‘a plant [cattails, scouring rush]’)

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule, V. opulus)

s-kətuxw

s-t’aqw’m xwus ‘to foam’ (cf. s-xwus-m ‘soapberry’) t’unxwn, t’unxw

t’əls

Proto-Interior-Salish: 12 proto-terms (4 for berries, 5 for roots, 1 for greens, 1 for mushrooms, 1 for lichen)

Black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii)

Mushrooms (Tricholoma spp. and other spp.) (‘mushroom’)

s-qwəl’ap

s-mətł’-qin’, s-pətł’-q’in’, s-p’ətł’-q’in

Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) (‘spring sunflower’)

s-mukwaʔ-xn

Black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii) (‘thornberry’)

s-tməqw

Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata)

s-kwnkwin-m

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Table 5-3 | continued

Strawberry (Fragaria spp.)

tq’im

Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva)

s-p’atł’-m

Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus)

timuʔ, tamuʔ

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum)

Tiger lily, or Columbia lily (Lilium columbianum) Wild roses (Rosa spp.) (‘rosehip’)

Grouseberry, blueberries (Vaccinium scoparium, Vaccinium spp.)

xwt-alhp (cf. xwtam ‘to cut up’) təx-tsin (cf. tax ‘wrong, bitter’) s-kwəkwaw’

səp ‘to shake off berries from a bush’ (cf. səsəpi ‘blueberry or huckleberry’)

Proto-Coast-Salish: 14 proto-terms (8 for berries, 4 for roots, 2 for greens)

Sword fern (Polystichum munitum), spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa), and/or tiger lily (Lilium columbianum)

ts’əkwaʔ ‘an edible root’ (sword fern, tiger lily)

Chocolate lily (Fritillaria lanceolata)

q’awax (Coast Salish term of limited distribution)

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum)

saʔq

Salalberry (Gaultheria shallon)

mikw’əł

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum)

yalup ‘Indian rhubarb’

Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus)

kw’ukw’

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)

qw’il(a)

Gooseberry (Ribes sp.)

t’aməxw (cf. Proto-Salish t’am-; extension -xw is Coast Salish)

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)

yətəwan

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa)

k’ipt

Western dock (Rumex aquaticus var. fenestratus) Elderberry (Sambucus spp.)

Red huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium) Highbush cranberry (Viburnum spp.), kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), and other berries with large seeds

t’əmuts ‘wild rhubarb’ ts’ikw, ts’iwq’ ‘elderberry’

s-t’əxwlm (cf. t’əxw ‘to brush, sweep, shake out’) tl’əl (‘to crackle, pop,’ ‘a plant providing berries or seeds’)

Source: For Proto-Salish terms, see Kuipers (2002). See also the associated database posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091).

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a focus of these books, they are critically important in virtually all aspects of peoples’ cultures. There are many narratives – extending back to the myth-times of the Transformers and other supernatural story heroes – about the ancient origins of certain plant foods and their significance as foods of the ancestors and supernatural beings. A survey of Proto-Salishan terms that are related to plant foods from Kuipers’s (2002) Proto-Salish dictionary (table 5-3) identifies at least 39 terms for roots, fruits, and other plant foods. These include 13 to 14 Proto-Salish words (8 to 9 for berries, 2 for seeds or nuts, and 3 for roots), 12 Proto-InteriorSalish terms (4 for berries, 5 for roots, and 1 each for greens, mushrooms, and black lichen), and 14 Proto-Coast-Salish terms (8 for berries, 4 for roots, and 2 for greens). These early terms are indicators that many of these plants have been used over thousands of years.39 Harvesting, Processing, and Storing Plant Foods

Although some types of greens and berries can be eaten directly from the bush or plant, with little preparation other than peeling or destemming, most were processed in some way, as seen from the descriptions in the previous sections. For some, special processing is essential to render them digestible or to eliminate toxic components. Many plant foods were prepared for storage, to be reconstituted and consumed later in the year, especially during the winter months, a time when little fresh food was available. Harvesting and processing plant foods required a range of specialized techniques and equipment, summarized in table 5-4. Different stages of processing often took place at different sites. For example, freshly dug roots would undergo preliminary cleaning and might also be washed or peeled close to the site where they were dug. Then, after transport to a camp area or village, they would be cooked by boiling or steaming in an underground pit, after which they might be dried. Still later, in the winter – and possibly far from the original preparation site if they were traded – they might be soaked and then boiled in a basket or box, to be eaten at a family meal or feast. Many of the tools, mats, and vessels used in harvesting and preparing various plant foods have had ancient origins, as reflected in the archaeological record. Indeed, some of the earliest stone and bone tools found throughout the region may well have been employed in harvesting and preparing plant foods – cutting and scraping off inner bark, digging roots, cutting green shoots, or pounding seeds, berries, and roots – but many were probably multi-use tools, used equally for preparing fish, meat, and plants. Then, as peoples settled in and diversified their resources and cultures, they developed increasingly sophisticated and specialized tools. However, since many of the more recent processing tools and equipment are of wood or fibrous materials, they are not readily revealed in archaeological sites.

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Table 5-4  |  Types of equipment used in harvesting and processing plant foods in northwestern North America Type of food

Equipment/ implements used in harvesting

Equipment/ implements used in processing

Changes in implements/ equipment since European contact

Black tree lichen, or wíla (Bryoria fremontii)

Twisting stick; twine for binding; sacks, baskets for transport

Buckets, burlap sacks, pots, cheesecloth strainers

Mushrooms

Stick for poking; knives for cutting stalks off; baskets for carrying

Water and pounders for washing, leaching; cooking pit; other root vegetables

Knives for cutting; strings and awls for drying

Cambium and inner bark

Ax, adze, knives, scrapers; baskets, trays for holding; baskets for transport

Fire, trays, boxes, baskets, drying racks

Metal axes, saws, scrapers, knives, canning jars, buckets

Hooked sticks or long poles for pulling down branches; baskets; combs for some blueberries, huckleberries

Boards for cleaning berries; baskets or boxes for cooking; hot rocks; tongs; skunk-cabbage or other large leaves, mats, or trays; wooden berry mashers

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis)

Stick to hit branches; mats, trays, or baskets to collect and transport berries

Green vegetables

Knives, scrapers, baskets for harvesting

Boards for cleaning berries; special whipping implements, baskets, and paddle spoons

Berries and fleshy fruits

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Boxes, trays, cutting blocks, adzes for seaweed; hot rocks and cooking pit vegetation; baskets, bags

Paper bags, cotton string and bags, knives, metal buckets, cooking pots and frying pans

Plastic buckets, cotton sacks, metal buckets, freezers, mesh trays, cotton sheets and pillow cases, corrugated cardboard as drying trays, wooden barrels for storage, jars

Electric mixers

Knives, peelers, nylon sacks for seaweed, corrugated cardboard for drying seaweed, cotton sheets, axes

Table 5-4 | continued Type of food

Equipment/ implements used in harvesting

Equipment/ implements used in processing

Changes in implements/ equipment since European contact

Roots and root vegetables (bulbs, corms, tubers, rhizomes, etc.)

Digging sticks (various types); root-washing baskets, pack baskets (some with tumplines); mats

Digging sticks of metal, with wooden handles; garden forks, pry bars used for harvest; burlap and nylon sacks; plastic buckets and other containers; cotton and later nylon string; metal cooking pots and baking dishes; wooden barrels

Seeds and nuts

Baskets, sacks, hooked sticks for pulling down branches; sticks for probing squirrel caches Twisting pole and canoe, baskets

Knives or scrapers for peeling, cutting; pounders (e.g., mortars, pestles); drying mats; drying racks; cooking pits, trenches, or hot coals; fibre strings, awls, and wooden skewers for drying and storage; hot rocks and cooking pit vegetation

Eelgrass (Zostera marina)

Other plant foods (beverages, flavourings, casual foods, famine foods)

Assorted baskets and containers, scrapers, etc.

Fire, stones, fuel for roasting, hammers, manos for cracking nuts

Knives for peeling, cutting Baskets, boxes for cooking

Gunnysacks, onion sacks; metal baking and roasting trays; hammers; cotton sacks

Pots for cooking, making tea; teapots

Sources: Boas (1921), Kuhnlein and Turner (1991), Lepofsky (2004), Teit (1909), Turner (1995, 1997a, 1998, 2004a), Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy (1980), Turner, Thomas, et al. (1983), Turner and Thompson (2006), Turner, Thompson, et al. (1990).

Some implements are very specific to the plant foods with which they are associated. Harvesting and processing cambium and the inner bark of trees, for example, require special techniques and implements, some of which may have been very old, known to Ts’msyen, Kwakwaka’wakw, Dene (Athabaskans), and Interior Salish, as well as to Cree and other northern peoples. Bark peelers – tools used to remove pieces of bark from the tree – were originally made from the bone or antler of ungulates, or sometimes of horn or wood. Scrapers used to

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separate the cambium, or “sap,” from the sections of outer bark were generally made of antler, shoulder blade bones or ulnas of black bear or deer, or rib bones of various animals; some were double-ended (Teit 1909). These implements have been recovered from archaeological sites, such as late pithouse sites in the Interior Plateau at Keatley Creek and elsewhere (which apparently provide the oldest actual evidence for cambium harvesting in the study area) (Lepofsky 2004). In more recent times, especially following European contact, metal knives, axes, or adzes were used to peel off the bark, and implements made from the rounded and sharpened section of a tin can, as well as metal scraping knives with a special shape to be held in the hand, were fashioned as inner bark scrapers (Turner and Thompson 2006). Other harvesting implements are described under the foods for which they are most commonly used: digging sticks for roots, hooked sticks for fruit harvesting, eelgrass and black lichen twisting poles, and so forth. Baskets and other containers, required for virtually all types of harvesting, are described in more detail in chapter 6, along with mats and other general harvesting and processing equipment. Dehydration, by sun, wind, or heating over a fire, was a very common and widespread method of preparing plant foods for storage and transport. Thoroughly dried foods could be kept for a considerable period of time – months or even years if necessary. Before being consumed, they were usually reconstituted by soaking in water or boiling in a broth with meat, fish, or other foods and sometimes were even pit-cooked after soaking. Preservation by drying was especially common for berries and roots but was also used for mushrooms, seaweed, lichen, cambium, plants for tea, and even some leaves and shoots. Depending on their characteristics and on their intended use, foods could be dried loosely or individually or be mashed and dried in loaves or cakes. Roots and mushrooms might be strung on strings or threaded onto skewers for drying. As well as preserving the food, dehydration rendered it lighter and more compact for transport from harvesting and processing sites to permanent winter quarters – an important advantage, especially before the convenience of horses and other forms of land transportation. Earth ovens or cooking pits have already been described in detail under the sections on root vegetables and tree cambium. This cooking method has great antiquity. Variants of pit-cooking have been developed and widely used in many parts of the world, from North, Central, and South America to Polynesia, Micronesia, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as apparently in Europe and Eurasia (W. Gregory Hood, pers. comm., 2007; Gott 1983, 1999; Goring-Morris 1995; Kubiak-Martens 1996; Wandsnider 1997; Wollstonecroft et al. 2008).40 In North America, besides being used for root vegetables and cambium, earth ovens were used to cook a range of different plant foods – some elderberries, saskatoon berries, cactus, salmonberry sprouts, and black tree lichen – as well as shellfish, fish, meat, and eggs. Linda Smith (2008b) notes that in one version of the story

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of “The Woman Who Married a Bear,” roots and birds’ eggs were pit-cooked together.41 The pit-cooking process obviously requires a great deal of preparation and commitment of time and energy. Its advantages are its capacity to process large quantities of food, either for immediate consumption or as part of a broader series of steps in food preparation. For example, roots like springbank clover and Pacific silverweed could be first pit-cooked and then dried, making it easy to reconstitute them later simply by soaking in water or cooking in soup. A depth of knowledge and experience is required at each phase, from selecting the location for an earth oven to determining the size of the pit, the quantity and quality of rocks to be used, the fuel and type of fire, the type of vegetation to be used to surround the pit, the means of adding water – and the quantity of water to be added – for steam generation, the cooking time, and of course, the relative amounts of food that could be accommodated in relation to all of these other factors. Trial and error would have been a major learning method in pit-cooking. Even with the expertise and experience of elders, the learning curve for successful pit-cooking can be steep, as testified by elders like Mary Thomas (Secwepemc) and John Thomas (Ditidaht), both of whom learned about pit-cooking from their mothers and had to learn from failures before finally succeeding. Perhaps this is why a number of taboos and restrictions have been developed around earth ovens and root processing, especially in the Interior Plateau (Peacock 1998; Peacock and Lepofsky 2009; Teit 1900; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Food storage is universally important in the seasonal environments of northwestern North America, with equipment, locations, and techniques for storage varying according to the region and types of food involved. Foods that were dried – berry cakes and dried roots, for example – had to be kept dry or they would easily mould and spoil. Foods stored under water could also rot if exposed to air. All food had to be protected from infestation by insects or rodents. Storage methods have evolved over thousands of years and are just as critical to people’s survival as knowing which foods are edible and how to harvest and process them. Ames and Maschner (1999) suggest that techniques for sun and wind drying, as well as smoking and freezing, were probably known to the continent’s earliest peoples and that it is unlikely humans could survive in any numbers, particularly along the northern coast, in the absence of storage, even in times that were warmer and drier than at present. Cache pits – pits dug in the ground, lined with bark or other plant material, and used for both short- and long-term storage of food – may be the oldest storage technology42 and are commonly seen in archaeological sites, sometimes with food, such as saskatoon berries or dried fish, still contained within them. In the period of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, as well as in montane and northern sites today, food storage per se would not have been a problem

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in terms of food spoilage because the food would have remained frozen for a good part of the year, but keeping animals away from the food would have been another important function of underground caching. Such caches also served to contain the food in convenient locations – near campsites or village sites, where it could be accessed at times of need. Indeed, humans may well have learned lessons about caching food from animals even in the Early Holocene. Then, as more recently, they probably observed and took advantage of mice’s, voles’, squirrels’, and other animals’ food caches of spring beauty and other corms and of hazelnuts and other types of seeds and roots (A. Jones 1983; Russell Kari 1987; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Turner 1995, 1997a). Caches in trees and in raised structures or under large rocks and shelters may have been the first modes of storage. Fully formed pit caches started to appear in the archaeological record by about 5,500 years ago, with widespread use by about 5,000 years ago. Development of an economy based on large-scale storage occurred around 3,500 years ago. One of the most impressive and complex cache pit finds is at a mid-elevation campsite in the northern Interior Plateau at Kamloops (site EeRb 140), one among dozens of sites on glacial lake terraces along the north side of the South Thompson River near the confluence with the North Thompson. This and nearby sites were intermittently occupied over a long period of time. The earliest sites so far date to between 6,000 and 4,000 years ago. Several areas of concentrated firecracked rock indicate cooking and/or processing food for feasting or storage, possibly the abundant root vegetables – nodding onions, balsamroot, desert parsley (Lomatium macrocarpum), and other species – that would have helped to support an increasingly sedentary lifestyle associated with pithouse villages of the Shuswap Horizon period between about 3,800 and 2,400 years ago (Nicholas, Bonneau, and Westfall forthcoming; Nicholas and Tryon 1999; Nicholas, Wollstonecroft, and Baptiste 1997; Wollstonecroft and Baptiste forthcoming).43 The cache pit excavated from EeRb 140 is the single most impressive feature of the site, showing sophistication and complexity, with upper and lower portions of the feature. The upper part, about 34 centimetres deep, contained a layer of fire-cracked rock, indicating a hearth built within a depression, with deer and other animal bones, stone artifacts, numerous birch-bark rolls, and several long pieces of wood, probably ponderosa pine. Also found were large amounts of charred saskatoon berry and chokecherry seeds, Douglas-fir needles, and raspberry or thimbleberry seeds (Rubus sp., probably R. idaeus or R. parviflorus), a Ribes (currant or gooseberry) seed, and several types of grass and sedge fruits (Wollstonecroft 2000; Wollstonecroft and Baptiste forthcoming). There was also a charred onion-like plant material, probably Allium cernuum. The lower portion, topped by a small amount of fire-cracked rock, contained birch-bark rolls, sheets of birch bark and ponderosa pine bark, and numerous pieces of wood.

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The feature seems to embody both cooking and storage and perhaps indicates that it was a berry-processing site for at least part of its existence. Birch-bark sheets also lined part of the sides of the feature. Resting on and between the birch-bark sheets and pine-bark slabs at the bottom was an articulated salmon skeleton. Many long, thin wood fragments were uncovered from part of the bottom of the feature. Arranged in a mat-like fashion, these may represent a berry-drying frame. Uncharred plant materials found in the lower pit included the distinctive hard seeds of stoneseed (Lithospermum ruderale) (occurring in several different sites in the vicinity), pine seeds (Pinus sp.), chenopod seeds (Chenopodium sp.), red-osier dogwood seeds, a number of as yet unidentified species, and the fruit species also represented in the upper portion: saskatoon berry, raspberry or thimbleberry, and chokecherry (Wollstonecroft 2000). All of these plant materials, except perhaps the Chenopodium, have names and specific reported uses among modern Secwepemc peoples (Teit 1900, 1909; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming). The increasing visibility of storage technologies in the archaeological record from the Mid to Late Holocene apparently represents a shift in emphasis and an increasingly heavy reliance on storage as populations rose and food production intensified. Hayden (1997) suggests that the ability to own and store large amounts of food may have led to increasing inequalities in social organization because the capacity to amass quantities of food and thus reduce future risks can work to the advantage of some individuals, who may develop prestige through sharing stored food at critical times and become societal elites. Certainly, in Indigenous narratives, the ability to accumulate, and then to distribute, food to family and community in times of shortage seems to be associated with the culture heroes and recognized leaders. At Keatley Creek and many other sites, cache pits were dug into the floors of some pithouses and used to store dried salmon, dried saskatoon berries, and other foods. Within the past two centuries or so, fresh and dried roots, berries, dried salmon, and many other foods were routinely stored in Interior Plateau cache pits, as described by Charles Hill-Tout in 1899 for the Nlaka’pamux: “The food supplies of the central Thompson were invariably stored in caches ... which were roofed with poles or boards, and then again covered with earth or sand. The food was commonly protected by bark. Remains of these caches or cellars, with rolls of birch bark and other bark in them, may be seen at any of the old camp sites” (in Maud 1978a, 58). Teit (1909, 495) also described caches – both underground and raised, or box, caches – and their importance in the Interior Plateau: The most common cache, especially among the southern [Secwepemc] bands, was the circular cellar, as among the Thompson [Nlaka’pamux] tribe. Probably they were most used in the south because of the dryness

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of the climate and the sandy nature of the soil. Fish and other food kept fresher in them than in any other kind of cache. The box-cache was also used extensively, and especially by bands inhabiting the more timbered parts of the country. It was the only cache which is said to have been proof against the attacks of the wolverene [sic]. Some of them were built on trees, but most were placed on a platform supported by four posts. They were made of poles, were roofed with bark, and access to them was by means of an Indian ladder or notched log. They were the same in every way as those obtaining among the Lillooet and Thompson Indians. Plants and Food Preservation

Also relevant to Indigenous food systems, certain plants are known to have preservative properties and are valued as aids in food storage. As well as providing physical barriers to small animals and insects, many of the plant materials from which cache pits, box caches, and storage containers were constructed contain preservative qualities in their tissues, which would have helped to protect the food stored within them. Thick bark sheets of cottonwood and aspen (Populus spp.), spruce (Picea spp.), and pine (Pinus spp.) used to line cache pits all contain resinous pitch and other preservative compounds in their tissues. Birch bark also contains the insect-repelling preservatives suberine and betuline, as well as waxes and oils, making this material ideally suited for food preservation – both for lining cache pits and for constructing food storage vessels (Suryawanshi 2006; Turner, Luczaj, et al. 2011). Western redcedar wood and bark are particularly known for their preservative qualities. Cedar products contain a range of terpenes and other strong-smelling compounds that effectively protect food being stored against mould and predation by insects and other pests.44 It is not surprising, therefore, that bentwood cedar boxes – also used for cooking food – were a universal storage vessel, especially on the central and northern coast. Every household had many, many boxes, which they used to store dried berries, crabapples, and highbush cranberries in water and oil, as well as many other foods.45 Even in the 1900s bentwood cedar boxes were being used daily; at Hartley Bay, for example, Eagle matriarch Lucille Clifton owned and used about ten bentwood cedar boxes, which were passed down to her grandchildren, elders of the present who still use them for their seaweed (Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012). Cedar-bark storage baskets for food, too, were being used within the past century, but almost everywhere they have gradually given way to glass jars, freezers, airtight tins, and plastic totes. Skunk-cabbage leaves also seem particularly suited to aiding in food processing and storage, not only because of their large size but also because of the waxy coating on their leaves, their flexibility when warmed, and possibly, too, the raphides of calcium oxalate in their tissues that might deter pests. These leaves

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were used for multiple purposes: to line cooking pits, or earth ovens; as a surface on which to dry berries; for makeshift drinking cups and berry containers; for covering highbush cranberries, currants, and other berries being stored; and for lining pits and, later, barrels used to make fermented salmon eggs.46 The value of skunk-cabbage in preserving food is summarized by one Nisga’a elder: “They really treasured skunk cabbage. This was their wax paper. This is what they did. After they turned it over on the wood [heating] and they get soft. They didn’t rot. They stayed fresh, because they don’t rot after they cook it. This is where they put the elderberries and hawthorn berries after they are cooked. Skunk-cabbage is used for everything after you have finished cooking it. If you don’t cook it they get rotten” (cited in Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a 1995, 87). Other plants with known applications in preserving food include yarrow stalks (used for skewering clams for drying), sagebrush (Artemisia spp.), field mint, wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), and western redcedar, whose aromatic leaves or boughs are sometimes placed between layers of dried fish, dried seaweed, and other preserved products and are said to keep insect pests away (Kuhn­lein and Turner 1991; Turner 1995, 1997a, 2009). Food Combinations

Roots, berries, and green shoots were eaten with the fingers or with spoons and were almost always dipped in a condiment of oulachen grease, seal oil, bear fat, or whale oil – whatever was available. Oils and fats were often used to enhance the flavour of plant foods (‘Ksan 1980; Laforet, Turner, and York 1993; Port Simpson Curriculum Committee 1983; Turner 1995, 1997a). Recently, the indigenous oils have been replaced by commercial vegetable oils like corn oil, and often the foods are dipped in sugar or molasses before being eaten. Many of these foods were traditionally served at large feasts, as described by Boas (1921) for the Kwakwaka’wakw, with strict rules of etiquette for their serving and eating. For example, in general, only chiefs and nobility were served long, straight Pacific silverweed roots, whereas the commoners ate the shorter, curly ones. Sometimes at feasts, guests could take leftovers home; at other times and for certain foods, they were expected to eat all of the food in front of them (Boas 1921, 527–31). Although many roots, berries, and greens can be eaten on their own or with a dressing of oulachen grease or other oil, many other food combinations are common. On the northern coast, among the Ts’msyen and Nisga’a, northern riceroot, or “Indian rice,” was generally eaten with ksiiw, the inner bark of hemlock or amabilis fir, or sometimes with western dock greens and grease. Thimbleberry shoots were frequently enjoyed in combination with cured salmon eggs (Turner and Thompson 2006; Turner and Turner 2008). Edible seaweed is often sprinkled on halibut head soup (Turner 2003a). Clover rhizomes and other root

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vegetables were often eaten as an accompaniment to other foods. Edwards (1979, 7) describes a stew made by the Nuxalk of Bella Coola with clover and silverweed roots, fermented dog-salmon eggs, oulachen grease or seal oil, kinnikinnick berries, wood fern rootstocks, and recently, flour and sugar. An equivalent “soup” or pudding served by the Nlaka’pamux and other Interior Salish peoples, called ngéxw, was made with combinations of reconstituted dried roots – bitterroot, yellow glacier lily, spring beauty, tiger lily, and desert parsley – along with dried saskatoon berries, fermented salmon eggs, deer fat, dried venison, and black tree lichen, with flour and sugar again being recent ingredients (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). A similar, recent Okanagan recipe, also using dried cakes of black tree lichen, calls for boiling them in water with flour or tapioca and butter to make a pudding that is mixed with other foods, like bitterroot, roots of wild caraway, or yampah, Douglas-fir sugar, raisins, apples, or brown sugar (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York described another interesting food combination: “the swáz-uʔ [young shoots of balsamroot], they gather those just as they come up, and they snip them ... and put it in their basket. And while they’re eating fish, they take that and they chew it ... and your mouth gets blue [from it]” (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 177). Famine and Emergency Foods

The use of plants as famine and emergency foods is a topic often overlooked in discussions of the dietary role of plants in northwestern North America. The cultural aspects of this type of use are complex and multifaceted, including such factors as migration, establishment of social alliances, warfare, trade, food sharing, ritual and ceremonial practices, and stories (such as those recounted in chapter 12). Food scarcity can occur for an individual or family or for a whole community or region and can result from any number of factors or combination of factors: ability to procure food directly, ability to process food for optimal nutrition, ability to accommodate numbers of people to be fed, quantity and quality of food available for immediate use and storage for the future, quantity and quality of stored food available, ability to obtain food through trade or exchange, season of the year and seasonal fluctuations, annual and multiyear variation in weather/climate, productivity of food sources in a given year or season, and occurrence of natural or human-caused calamities. In 1993 Alison Davis and I reviewed about sixty species of plants used, mostly in the past, in alleviating hunger and suggested a categorization of four general classes (Turner and Davis 1993). In the first category were foods that were eaten in normal circumstances but that, because of ready availability, became exceptionally important in times of scarcity, such as in early spring, when most foods

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were unavailable. Examples of such foods include tree cambium, edible seaweed (Pyropia spp.), green shoots and prickly pear cactus pads, “roots” (e.g., camas bulbs, thistle and desert parsley roots, tiger lily bulbs, and bracken fern rhizomes), and a few fruits that remain on the bushes over the winter (e.g., highbush cranberries, rose hips, and kinnikinnick berries).47 The second category included “alternative” foods – less preferred foods that took on greater significance when regular, preferred foods were in short supply. Alternative foods included the inner bark of black spruce (Picea mariana), mature stems of fireweed and some other greens, “roots” of sea milkwort (Glaux maritime) and sword fern, and assorted berries and fruits, such as rose hips, black hawthorn fruits, and Oregon-grapes. The third category could be classed as true famine foods – plants and parts of plants that were never eaten except in emergencies. These foods included certain species (e.g., black tree lichen) that were eaten as a regular food when properly cooked but that were consumed raw in times of necessity.48 Finally, there was a fourth class of plants that were used as hunger suppressants and thirst quenchers, generally over the short intervals of food or water deprivation that hunters, berry pickers, or travellers might have encountered. In this category were substances such as young leaves of salal, arbutus leaves (Arbutus menziesii), young bough tips of western hemlock, and the young fronds of deer fern (Blechnum spicant) (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Turner and Davis 1993; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). One example of the use of such foods is the Lushootseed’s use of wild caraway, or yampah, called sch’əsdúʔ: “A hunter would chew on this while out hunting and it would dull his hunger pangs. He would use the tips of cedar boughs for the same purpose” (Bates, Hess, and Hilbert 1994, 71). All of these foods could, at times, be critical to people’s health and well-being because of their survival value. Some would have provided important nutrients, such as vitamin C, as well as required food energy in perilous times. Cove and MacDonald (1987, 170, 173) mention two instances in narratives of people using wild rose hips, which are notably good sources of vitamin C, as famine food. In one of these, two starving sisters of Kitselas divided one wild rose “bulb” between them.49 Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York was told by her grandaunt Josephine George of the Nicola Valley of a famine time, apparently in the springtime in the late 1800s:50 They had nothing, no fish, everything was scarce ... So they went up Broadback [Mountain] ... to try to get up to where this sk’ám’ets [yellow glacier lily] may be ... they went up there in the spring ... And the people that eats hákwuʔ [cow-parsnip] ... was the ones that survived ... They’re very valuable food, when Indians had that hákwuʔ ... and tetúwn’ [spring beauty] ... what they could dig out ... survived. But the ones that didn’t

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eat them, they’re just trying to get a deer or something, then they died ... [Those that ate] cow-parsnip and spring beauty, glacier lily, tiger lily ... and Indian carrot [Lomatium macrocarpum], and thistle [Cirsium undulatum] ... so they eat that and they survive. They survived on that, too, the séʔaq root [bracken fern] ... They go out and get that in the winter time ... then take it and hit the bark off, and it’s just the white in there, and you chew it. (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 32; see also Turner and Davis 1993) For the peoples of the Interior Plateau, prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.) was also recognized as a food that people might seek out when other food was unavailable, even in the middle of winter, when it could be dug out from under the snow. If the spines were singed off and the flesh cooked a little, it could be a tasty and nourishing food, similar in flavour and appearance to greengage plums (Edith O’Donaghey, pers. comm., 1984). Named skəz’kə́z’ in the Nlaka’pamux language, cactus was also recalled as a famine food by Annie York: “The skəz’kə́z’ – they always eat it all right enough, but they had to eat it [during a famine]; my grandaunt told me, ‘We eat that three times a day!’ she says. There was no fish, nothing. And that [cactus] was all the children, even to the babies, had to eat ... after they steam it. That was in springtime” (see Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 195). A story of how Skunk-Cabbage provided food for the Chinookan, or Kathlamet, people of the lower Columbia River in times of food scarcity, and was rewarded by the Salmon people for this service, is told in chapter 12. An interesting parallel is in a southern Okanagan narrative, in which Salmon threw cactus onto the prairie and proclaimed it would be food for the coming people (Spier 1938, 225).51 In other parts of the study region, as in Nlaka’pamux territory, root vegetables took on particular importance at times of food shortage, as in early spring. For example, referring to the Haida, Niblack (1890, 276–7, emphasis added) noted, “Some of these berries are collected and dried for winter’s use, forming, with dried fish, the principal winter’s supply ... they often ... eat up all the dried berries before spring, and were it not for a few bulbs which they dig out of the soil in the early springtime [apparently referring to northern riceroot, Fritillaria camschatcensis], while awaiting the halibut-season, numbers of Indians really would starve to death.” The rootstocks of spiny wood fern are another good example of an effective emergency food (Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992). These rootstocks were dug, pit-cooked, and eaten, often in quantity, from fall through spring and were also known in many areas as a good famine food. They have been compared favourably with clams and the inner bark of hemlock as a “survival food” that “has warded off starvation more than once” (‘Ksan 1980, 79; see also Russell Kari 1987, 130; and Jeff Harris Sr, cited in Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992).

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Poisonous Plants

Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994, and on many other occasions) and other knowledgeable elders always cautioned that one must check plants carefully before eating them or using them for medicine. The leaves of “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule) and the roots of water-parsnip (Sium suave), for example, must be examined to ensure that they are not confused with those of their highly toxic relative, water-hemlock (Cicuta spp.). Only a few species within the study area are known to be deadly; many others are regarded as simply not good to eat, often being described as a food of some kind of animal (e.g., “bear’s berries,” “frog’s berries,” or “snake’s berries”)52 but not for humans. Another plant that people commonly warn against is death camas, or “poison onion” (Zigadenus venenosus and its relatives) (Turner and von Aderkas 2009). Harvesters of edible bulbs such as nodding onion and blue camas must be particularly vigilant not to inadvertently dig up Zigadenus bulbs, and sometimes people will dig up and discard these poisonous bulbs to prevent future accidents (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 2011). Another is the related false hellebore (Veratrum viride). Both of these species contain a group of highly toxic alkaloids that affect the heart and nervous system. There are stories, passed down over generations, of people being poisoned, sometimes fatally, by these and other poisonous plants. In the Ulkatcho Dakelh and Tsilhqot’in region of the northern Interior Plateau, people still recount how, in the 1920s, a six-year-old girl ate waterhemlock roots and died.53 Tragic as this incident was, that it is still remembered and discussed is a positive indication that people learn from such events, and perhaps this story has prevented other poisonings. Other incidents are related to misuse of potentially toxic medicines.54 Food as Medicine

Indigenous people often say, “Our food is our medicine” (Turner and Ommer 2004) since many indigenous foods are considered to be very healthy, and some, such as soapberry whip, chokecherries, and fireweed shoots, have explicitly attributed medicinal properties. It is interesting to note that, among the thirtyfive different plant species used by the Indigenous peoples of the Canadian boreal forest to treat symptoms associated with diabetes, 60 per cent were also used as beverages or tonics and 63 per cent were used in some way as food (McCune 1999; McCune and Johns 2002). We can assume similar proportions of food and medicinal plants in the northwestern region of the continent. Chapter 7, on healing plants, provides a more detailed discussion of the food-medicine continuum in relation to plant food and herbal medicine. The total dietary contributions of plant foods are dependent not only on the nutrients they contain but also on quantities consumed, as well as on the

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methods used for cooking and/or storing the foods. Little work has been undertaken to quantify the total amounts of plant foods consumed by different peoples in the study region. Quantities have obviously varied from place to place, over different seasons and different years, and over the centuries and millennia as vegetation patterns have changed and human populations have moved, expanded, and adapted to new conditions. Available data suggest, however, that the quantities of plant foods consumed – especially fruits and root vegetables – were considerable in the past, although the amounts of indigenous species used have generally diminished significantly over the time since European settlement in the region (Turner and Turner 2008). Chapter 4, focusing on changes in plant use, availability, and knowledge since the time of European arrival, has already detailed some of the consequences of declining use of traditional food in the wake of colonization, globalization, and industrialization of the landscape. Conclusions By every measure – people’s time and energy devoted to harvesting and processing, the diversity and antiquity of species named and used, innovations in preparation, quantities cooked and stored, the importance in narratives, and nutritional contributions – plant foods played a major role in the development and maintenance of the diverse cultures and lifeways of First Peoples in northwestern North America and have always done so. Plant foods – including root vegetables, fleshy fruits, nuts, greens, and inner bark – supplemented, complemented, and sometimes replaced for key intervals of time the salmon, game, and other animal foods that have received more attention in much of the archaeological and ethnographic literature. Their service as a safety net in times of emergency and famine also should not be overlooked. As Ames and Maschner (1999, 116) note, the “so-called secondary resources played an essential economic role, if not greater ... as did salmon.” The role of plant foods has undoubtedly varied over time, evidently intensifying along with other food production intensification in the Late Holocene, and over geographic space, but many types may well have been used since the earliest human arrivals in North America, with knowledge about their identification and use possibly having been brought from similar species growing in Asia (see chapter 2, table 2-1). For example, it seems likely that the inner bark of trees like pine – which is considered an extremely early plant food among hominids, with use reaching back to Neanderthal times in Europe (Matson, Coupland, and Mackie 2003; Sandgathe and Hayden 2003; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009; Turner, Luczaj, et al. 2011) – was exploited by the earliest North Americans, as it was by their ancestors in Asia. Mushrooms present a special case in the area’s food systems: only some groups, notably Interior Plateau peoples, ate mushrooms (Turner,

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Kuhnlein, and Egger 1985); others avoided them, even on the Northwest Coast, where a wide variety of edible mushrooms occur. This “mycophobia” may have originated with ancestral peoples of northeastern Asia, who also have avoided mushrooms as food, although Japanese, Asians, eastern Europeans, and Russians have relished them (Turner and von Aderkas 2009; Yamin-Pasternak 2011). Still to be added to the picture is the way that plant foods have influenced social organization and practice. Ida Jones’s words at the beginning of this chapter reflect a key element of plant-gathering and -processing activities – namely the social, gendered, and intergenerational aspects of plant use and management. Division of labour in food production, children’s roles in food gathering, ceremonial and ritual aspects of plant food, and the importance of plant food in feasting, gifting, and trade are topics for discussion in chapters 9 and 10. Also to be addressed is the development of management practices and systems for enhancing plant food productivity and the underlying belief systems that help to sustain food production (see chapters 11 and 13). The harvesting and preparation of most plant foods have been largely in the domain of women, who have also been the main harvesters of shellfish and primary processors of fish, meat, and animal foods procured by men. Some of the harvesting and cooking implements and vessels used by women – such as digging sticks, eelgrass twisting poles, fire tongs, and bentwood boxes – have been made by men, but women have almost always been responsible for creating the immense array of basketry and woven mats and bags used in food transport, processing, and storage (Turner 2003b). Sometimes the importance of these items – and the processes accompanying food production, such as dehydrating and pit-cooking – are overlooked, or at least underplayed, in considerations of cultures in northwestern North America in both archaeological and ethnographic accounts. Furthermore, the role of plant foods as essential complements, culturally and nutritionally, to fish, shellfish, and meat has sometimes gone unrecognized. As well, plant materials have been necessary in the processing and storing of animal foods, not to mention in their procurement. Pits for preparing fermented salmon eggs and rendering oulachen grease, for example, were lined with wood, leaves, and other plant materials. Clams, salmon, halibut, deer, seal, and other meats are cured by smoke from alder wood and hung to dry on sticks of cedar wood and other types of wood. The following chapter focuses on the diverse roles of plants as materials in a wide range of food production and other technologies that Indigenous peoples have developed and perfected over the millennia of their occupancy of northwestern North America. The selection, origins, production, harvesting, processing, sharing, and consumption of plant foods are parts of immense and complex food systems, unique to every place, language group, community, and time period. It is not possible to grasp the total complexity of these systems, but knowing that the assemblages of plant and animal foods Indigenous peoples were using at the

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time of European contact had multiple origins and were derived from multiple habitats, with diverse methods of production, means of harvesting, and modes of preparation, gives a deep appreciation for peoples’ ingenuity and industry, as well as for the resources that they were able to access. Of the dozens of different berries, roots, green vegetables, and other plant foods people were routinely eating just 100 years ago or less, very few are still commonly used, and many have been forgotten by all but the oldest generations. Research focusing on the ecological, biological, nutritional, and cultural characteristics of these foods is imperative, given the extent to which Indigenous peoples’ dietary patterns are being displaced by marketed foods, many of lesser nutritional value and more expensive than the Indigenous foods of past generations. The displacement of local Indigenous food is most rapid in areas closest to urban centres but is also occurring in the most remote regions of northwestern North America. The reasons for this “nutrition transition” are complex (Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Creed-Kanashiro, et al. 2006; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Spigelski, et al. 2013; Turner and Turner 2008). As described in the previous chapter, it is a global phenomenon that has accelerated in the past half-century, with increasing replacement of locally and regionally produced food by marketed and often highly processed and refined food from other parts of the world. This movement away from nutritious, local, indigenous food presents one of the major challenges in terms of health and well-being of Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America. The intimate connections between food use and traditional knowledge systems makes the situation even more problematic because once people stop harvesting and using a food, the knowledge, practices, and perspectives associated with it are soon lost. Any efforts to reincorporate the food back into the diet will require finding a means of recovering its associated knowledge and adapting the food in meaningful ways to a new context. In such an endeavour, lessons from the past will be critically important.

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6 Plant Use in Technology over Time and Space

The birch tree is really important to our people. It has a lot to offer our people. The bark is made into a container ... When we go to gather our material for the basket making, it takes about a whole day of searching and hunting for the right kind of bark. You don’t just go to any tree and strip it. You have to look for the right texture ... You take about a day to gather your material, and then sit down and cut it out and leave it. You’ve got to remember that you have to have cedar roots to finish it. (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001)

Introduction Every woven or stitched container, every fishnet, every digging stick, and every dugout canoe reflects an immense array of complex knowledge about plants and their materials, where to find them, how and when to harvest them, how to prepare them for use, the techniques of creating the final product, and finally, how to use or apply the finished item in procuring food, creating shelter, or whatever other purpose is intended. All of this knowledge is built up over generations of experimentation and observation and is passed on to succeeding generations through experiential learning, demonstration, and instruction. Plants – from trees to marine algae – have been a major source of the materials, whether for fuel, implements, containers, houses, conveyances, ceremonial regalia, or art, that have supported the lifestyles and food production systems of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America since their entry into the continent. Without the wood for fuel and construction, the fibrous materials for cordage, basketry, mats, and clothing, the pitch for glue and caulking, or large leaves such as those of skunk-cabbage for lining drying racks and cooking pits,

the cultures of the region would be completely different. These materials have shaped peoples’ lifeways as much as their food, and, in fact, the nutritious and healthy food systems the Indigenous peoples developed were dependent in no small way on the availability of plant materials, used in every phase and aspect of food procurement and preparation. The technologies of plant material use have certainly grown in parallel with food systems, and many, like many of the foods people accessed, must have had ancient origins. Like the stone implements of the ancient archaeological record, many must have derived from the ancestors in northeastern Asia. For example, fire making – with the necessary tinder and fuel – would have been crucial for the early peoples entering the cold, icy world of Late Pleistocene North America, for warmth, for protection, and for cooking and drying food. Hunting implements – spear-throwing sticks and other projectiles – digging and prying sticks, wedges, cordage, bark trays, and bedding materials such as tree boughs were all probably part of the survival “kit” of these early peoples. People entering the New World on a coastal route along the “kelp highway” would have needed some type of watercraft, possibly of wood-frame construction covered with skins, or maybe even dug-out or burned-out logs of spruce or cottonwood, as well as paddles, poles, anchor lines, and bailers, not to mention food containers and various implements for food procurement and processing. Some of the earliest material resources that might have been available to these ancient Beringian and coastline travellers are listed in chapter 2 (see table 2-2). From those early times, over the course of 13,000 or more years, a whole suite of plant materials was adopted and adapted, such that by the time the first Europeans arrived in the area, over 150 species were being utilized in one way or another, some in many different capacities. Indigenous artists and craftspeople are still making many types of baskets, hats, and wooden boxes and bowls, but these have often tended to be used more as art pieces and less for actual berry picking or for preparing or serving food. More and more, however, these objects are regaining their rightful place in the cultural fabric of people’s contemporary lives. Anyone privileged to attend a feast, potlatch, or cultural gathering of Northwest Coast First Nations will see people wearing elegant cedar-bark or spruce-root hats and cedar-bark capes (figure 6-1), using staffs and talking sticks carved of yellow-cedar wood, or, in the big house, displaying magnificent masks carved of western redcedar, alder, or other woods with neck-rings of shredded cedar bark dyed with red alder bark, and carrying wooden rattles, drums with wooden hoops, and wooden whistles and other items, many of which have been made by contemporary carvers and artists. In the past couple of decades, too, cedar-wood canoes have made a marked comeback. In fact, since renowned Haida artist Bill Reid and other gifted carvers constructed a large, 15-metre war canoe, named Lootaas, for the 1986 World

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6-1  |  Haida celebration at the Haida Heritage Centre at Kaay Llnagaay, BC , 2008, with many people wearing traditional cedar-bark (and spruce-root) hats.

Exposition, or Expo ’86, in Vancouver, a number of large, elegant cedar-wood canoes have been constructed in various communities along the coast. The Tribal Journeys – canoe journeys occurring throughout the Pacific Northwest – have also inspired the construction of many of these canoes. In Tribal Journeys, occurring annually since 1989, people from many First Nations communities travel to host villages all along the coast, recognizing and celebrating the long ocean journeys these peoples used to make in past centuries (see Canoe and Kayak 2008; Halber Suarez 2012). Throughout the region there has been an overall renewal and strengthening of many Indigenous traditions – including food, feasting, ceremony, dance, art, and language – that involve constructing and using implements, regalia, big houses, and other aspects of peoples’ material culture, and this trend will probably continue, with increasing use of traditional materials in a variety of cultural capacities. In this chapter, I outline the diverse plant materials and objects that make up the inventory of plant technology applications in different parts of northwestern North America, with a discussion of the techniques and knowledge needed for their use and some of the ways that their application has spread and developed over time and space. Some of the same species used as food, as discussed in the previous chapter, and in medicinal use, which will be described

Plant Use in Technology  |  337

in chapter 7, are also valued for their material qualities. For example, Pacific crabapple provides food from its tart but flavourful fruit, its branches and trunk yield a hard and resilient wood for making digging sticks and tool handles, and its bark has a range of medicinal applications, all to the advantage of Northwest Coast peoples throughout its range, from Oregon to Alaska. The role of plant materials in peoples’ seasonal harvest and travel cycles (including plants as seasonal indicators), in aspects of social organization (including division of labour and resource ownership), in trade and exchange, and in resource management systems will be addressed in chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11 respectively. Plant material resources as reflected in traditional narratives and in philosophies underlying peoples’ relationships with the environment are discussed in chapters 12 and 13. Categories of Plant Materials in Indigenous Technologies Table 6-1 provides an overview, with some key examples, of the range of applications of plants and plant materials in peoples’ technologies and lifeways in the study region, including woods for construction and implement making; special fuels; fibres and fibrous bark, roots, leaves, or branches; and other uses of plants as dyes, tanning agents, coverings and linings, glues, scents, insect repellents, and cleansing agents. In the previous chapter, on plant foods, we have already seen the importance of plant-harvesting implements, baskets, and cooking and processing technologies involving special equipment, materials, and fuel. Placing the activities involved in the use of plant materials and products – fuel, tools, basketry, cordage, or nets – in the context of other tools, materials, or foods, in a particular time period, season, and place, such as a harvest site, campsite, or village, can help us to understand more clearly how each item contributes, and contributed in the past, to the overall lifeways of individuals and communities. A good example is in the wapato archaeological feature of Pitt Polder in the lower Fraser Valley, where the tips of digging sticks were found among a dense meadow of wapato near a campsite and evident food-processing site dating back some 3,500 years (see chapter 2). Together, such scenarios of plant material and tool use can help to build up the picture of how peoples’ technologies developed over time, in concert with their food production systems, and can bring us closer to these peoples of the past and their lifeways. Artifacts uncovered from the Ozette site of northwestern Washington, the Keatley Creek site of the Interior Plateau, and many of the other archaeological sites described in chapter 2 have helped to bring these past cultures into greater focus. Plant materials comprise a significant proportion of the overall materials and tools peoples in the study area used in their daily lives. Based on his analysis of

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Table 6-1  |  Examples of plant materials used in Indigenous technology in northwestern North America Name

Family

Notes

Wood and other materials as specialized fuel (out of about 25 spp.)

Puffballs (Bovista pila and other spp.)

Lycoperdaceae

Crushed, dried puffballs used as tinder

Tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius)

Polyporiaceae

Conk for tinder, smudging

Cinder conk fungus (Inonotus obliquus)

Hymenochaetaceae

Tinder for “slow match”

Peat moss (Sphagnum fuscum and other spp.)

Sphagnaceae

Fuel for smoking hides, meat

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum)

Dennstaediaceae

Tamarack, or alpine larch (Larix laricina)

Pinaceae

Fibres in rhizome used as tinder in “slow match” and for torches

Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) and ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa)

Pinaceae

Black spruce (Picea mariana)

Pinaceae

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Pinaceae

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata)

Cupressaceae Asteraceae

Green alder (Alnus viridis spp. crispa)

Betulaceae

Rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa)

Asteraceae

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera)

Betulaceae

Cottonwood (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa)

Salicaceae

Bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata)

Poaceae

Pacific willow (Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra)

Salicaceae

Antelope-brush (Purshia tridentata)

Rosaceae

Rotted wood and bark for smoking hides

Snags, branches one of main sources of firewood

Tops as firedrills; pitchwood for torches; dried needles as tinder Thick bark and wood hot-burning fuels

Wood and shredded bark as tinder, kindling, firedrills, hearths

Shredded bark as tinder and for “slow match”

Wood used for smoking meat, hides and as mosquito smudge

Papery bark as tinder for starting fires, torches, etc. Bark used as fuel for tanning hides

Wood used for firedrills and hearths; shredded bark used for tinder in starting fires; wood for tanning hides Shredded dried grass used as tinder for starting fires

Shredded bark and wood used for tinder in starting fires Wood for firedrill, hearths

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Table 6-1 | continued Name

Family

Notes

Cattail (Typha latifolia)

Typhaceae

Seed fluff used as tinder for starting fires

Wood for construction and manufacture (out of about 35 spp.)

Yellow-cedar (Chamae­ cyparis nootkatensis)

Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum)

Tamarack (Larix laricina)

Cupressaceae

Bows, canoe paddles, carving

Cupressaceae

Bows

Pinaceae

Toboggans, snowshoe frames, canoe paddles

Western larch (Larix occidentalis)

Pinaceae

White spruce (Picea glauca)

Pinaceae

Black spruce (Picea mariana)

Pinaceae

Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis)

Pinaceae

Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa)

Pinaceae

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Pinaceae

Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia)

Taxaceae

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

Cupressaceae

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)

Pinaceae

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Planks for mats, shovel blades Canoe frames and paddles, arrows, basket frames, snowshoe frames, shelters, tent frames, racks, hide stretchers

Logs for deadfall traps and snares, etc., canoe frames, drying racks, snowshoe frames Bows, wedges, blanket pins, arrows and arrow points, tongs, clubs, implement handles, ladders, drying racks, hollowedout containers, fish traps, deadfalls, shelters Dugout canoes, shovel handles and blades

Harpoon and spear shafts, dip net poles and hoops, arrow shafts, fish-barbecuing stakes Implement handles, digging sticks, clubs, mallets, wedges, bows, snowshoes, gambling disks, blanket pins, pegs, fishhooks (bent) and halibut fishing gear

Dugout canoes, house posts, planks, totem poles, boxes, pegs, fish weirs, arrow shafts and points

Knots for bentwood fishhooks; wood for harpoon shafts, fish weir stakes, arrow points, paddles

Table 6-1 | continued Name

Family

Notes

Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum)

Aceraceae

Snowshoe frames, bows, labrets

Bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum)

Aceraceae

Red alder (Alnus rubra)

Betulaceae

Canoe paddles, spindle whorls, bowls, dishes, masks, clubs

Green alder (Alnus viridis spp. crispa)

Betulaceae

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)

Rosaceae

Birches (Betula papyrifera and related spp.)

Betulaceae

Flowering dogwood (Cornus nuttallii)

Cornaceae

Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea)

Cornaceae

Black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii)

Rosaceae

Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)

Rosaceae

Osage orange (Maclura pomifera)

Moraceae

Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca)

Rosaceae

Mock-orange (Philadelphus lewisii)

Hydrangeaceae

Balsam poplar, or cottonwood (Populus balsamifera)

Salicaceae

Trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides)

Salicaceae

Bowls and trays, masks, canoe bailers, paddles, firedrills

Wood for carving pipes, bows, paddles, canes, ladles, and other items

Arrow shafts, bows, canes, sweat lodge frames, birch-bark basket rims, tepee pegs

Snowshoe frames, tent poles, toboggans, paddles, canoecarrying boards, bows, arrows, drum frames, axe handles, hide scrapers, berry mashers, hidestretching frames and sweat lodge frames; roots for hammers Implement handles, bows (not preferred)

Stems used as ribs for sprucebark canoes; sweat lodge frames, basket rims, tepee pegs Hard wood used for digging sticks, hammers, and implement handles Digging sticks, arrow shafts, projectile points, mat-making needles, fishing gear

Sweat lodge frames (eastern part of study area) Bows, digging sticks, mallets, implement handles, snowshoe frames, gambling sticks

Combs, arrows, knitting needles, bows, gambling disks, sweat lodge frames Plates, bowls, masks, dugout canoes, snow shovels

Canoe paddles, tepee poles, deadfalls, temporary snowshoe frames, bowls, etc. Plant Use in Technology  |  341

Table 6-1 | continued Name

Family

Notes

Garry oak (Quercus garryana)

Fagaceae

Mallet heads

Salicaceae

Bows, canoe ribs, emergency snowshoes, pipe stems, nails, basket rims, sweat lodge frames, matting for fish weirs and traps, snares, pithouse roofs, etc.

Willows (Salix bebbiana, S. sitchensis, and other Salix spp.)

Fibrous plant materials (out of about 45 spp.)

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana)

Algae

Tamarack (Larix laricina)

Pinaceae

White spruce (Picea glauca) and Engelmann spruce (P. engelmannii)

Pinaceae

Black spruce (Picea mariana)

Pinaceae

White pine (Pinus monticola)

Pinaceae

Yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis)

Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis)

Cupressaceae

Pinaceae

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

Cupressaceae

Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum)

Apocynaceae

Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum)

Aceraceae

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata)

Asteraceae

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera)

Betulaceae

Basket sedge, or slough sedge (Carex obnupta)

Cyperaceae

Silverberry (Elaeagnus commutata)

Elaeagnaceae

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Stipes cured for fishing line (also containers) Inner bark for baskets, mats, clothing, blankets

Roots for stitching birchbark canoes; twigs and roots for basketry

Roots for stitching birchbark canoes, baskets; for coiled baskets; bark sheets for canoes, flooring, shingles Roots for baskets, fishnets

Roots for twined basketry, fishing lines, snares, binding and tying; bark sheets for roofing Bark sheets for baskets, canoes

Branches, roots for baskets, mats, clothing, cordage Inner bark for baskets, trays, soapberry whippers

Stem fibre for cordage, fishing nets

Shreddy bark for weaving (shoes, clothing, mats, bags)

Bark sheets for canoes, containers, sleds, tepee covers, moose callers, writing or drawing materials Leaves for twining baskets

Inner bark for weaving bags, mats; string and rope; soapberry whippers

Table 6-1 | continued Name

Family

Notes

Lymegrass (Elymus arenarius)

Poaceae

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium)

Onagraceae

Leaves used for weaving mats, baskets, coiled containers; also for insulation, lining foodprocessing pits, as scrubbers, and in games

Bitter cherry (Prunus emarginata), and pin cherry (P. pensylvanica)

Rosaceae

Coastal black gooseberry (Ribes divaricatum)

Grossulariaceae

Tule, or roundstem bulrush (Schoenoplectus acutus and other spp.)

Cyperaceae

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica)

Stem fibre for thread

Bark strips used for wrapping implement joints, waterproofing, cordage, basket decoration; whistle reeds Roots for reefnets

Willows (Salix bebbiana, S. sitchensis, S. lucida, and other Salix spp.)

Salicaceae

Cattail (Typha latifolia)

Typhaceae Urticaceae

Stem fibre for cordage, nets

Beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax)

Liliaceae

Leaves for weaving twined baskets and basket imbrication

Twisted bark for rope, twine, mats, fishnets, protecting rawhide nooses Stems for weaving mats, mattresses, bags

Leaves for mats, bags, baskets

Other plant materials used in technology (out of about 60 spp.)

Tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius and related spp.)

Polyporaceae

Children’s ball, carved for jewelry and grave figures; tinder

Feather moss (Pleurozium schreberi)

Hylocomiaceae

Mosses (Sphagnum spp. and other spp.)

Bryophytes

Used along with other moss species to chink log cabins, camouflage caribou fences, line storage pits, and as dish scrubbers

Horsetails (Equisetum spp.)

Equisetaceae

Common juniper (Juniperus communis)

Cupressaceae

True firs (Abies amabilis, A. grandis, A. lasiocarpa)

Pinaceae

Used for diapers, wiping fish, stuffing mattresses

Stems as abrasives and for polishing wood and stone

Boughs for bedding, flooring, incense; pitch for glue

Berry-like cones used for brown dye

Plant Use in Technology  |  343

Table 6-1 | continued Name

Family

Notes

Spruces (Picea spp.)

Pinaceae

Pitch for sealing canoes and baskets, waterproofing, glue

Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta)

Pinaceae

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Pinaceae

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)

Pinaceae

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)

Asteraceae

Green alder (Alnus viridis ssp. crispa)

Betulaceae

Bark used for red-brown dye

Scrub birch (Betula nana) and bog birch (B. pumila)

Betulaceae

Twigs used in bundles for broom

Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea)

Cornaceae

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium)

Onagraceae

Bark to trim birch-bark baskets, and for brown dye for hides

Salal (Gaultheria shallon)

Ericaceae

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum)

Apiaceae

Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus)

Araceae

Tall Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium)

Berberidaceae

Black spruce (Picea mariana)

Pinaceae

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Boughs for bedding, carpets, girls’ dolls

Pitch for adhesive, waterproofing, protective coating Bark slabs split off standing trees and used for shelter covering, siding Boughs for lining acorn-leaching pits, reinforcing fish weirs, capturing herring eggs Stems used to string clams for drying; leaves used in lynx trap bait; burned as smudge for mosquitoes

Layer of plants as surface for cleaning fish; flowers a phenological indicator for moose fat enough to hunt; leafy stems make a children’s toy of fish hanging to dry Leafy branches used in cooking pits; used for soapberry whippers Hollow stalks used as breathing snorkels for underwater swimming; root used in bear trap bait mixture

Large waxy leaves for drying berries, wrapping food, temporary cups and containers, lining cooking pits

Inner bark of stems and roots used for yellow dye; berries used for purple dye

Table 6-1 | continued Name

Family

Notes

Beebalm (Monarda fistulosa)

Lamiaceae

Mock-orange (Philadelphus lewisii)

Hydrangeaceae

Burned as smudge against mosquitoes; used in preserving food

Balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera)

Salicaceae

Trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides)

Salicaceae

Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)

Rosaceae

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)

Rosaceae

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa)

Caprifoliaceae

Snowberry, or waxberry (Symphoricarpos albus)

Caprifoliaceae

Flowers, leaves as cleansing agent (soap); wood for combs, arrows, knitting needles

Bark carved into toy boats; roofing material, bowls; buds used in trap lures Stems for whistles, cooking sticks; ashes used in soap making, with caribou grease, and used to tan hides Boiled bark used for red dye for basketry and porcupine quills

Leaves for drying berries, as makeshift containers for berries

Pithy stems for bird arrowheads; hollowed for whistles and to inflate animal intestines as soft food containers

Branches for making brooms and “brushes” for combing huckleberries off bushes; leaves for green dye

Note: Examples are selected from a total of about 160 species, including those applied in more than one category. Sources: Compiled from Andre, Karst, and Turner (2006), Boas (1921), Friedman (2005), Griffin (2001), Hebda, Turner, et al. (1996), Hunn, Selam, and family (1990), Hunn, Turner, and French (1998), A. Jones (1983), Lepofsky (2004, citing many archaeological sources), Marles et al. (2000), D. Mathews and Dady (2008), Newcombe (1897–1916 [1901]), J.A. Ross (2011), Russell (1991a, 1991b), Russell Kari (1987), Teit (1909), Thornton (1999), Turner (1998, 2004a), Turner and HamersleyChambers (2006), Wennekens (1985), and Whelchel (2005).

the rich legacy of artifacts from the Ozette site and other wet sites where plant remains are more completely preserved than in most other archaeological contexts (see chapter 2), Croes (2003, 2012) concluded that over 90 per cent of the prehistoric cultural material in Northwest Coast settings is comprised of wood and fibre, with only around 5 to 10 per cent of artifacts being of stone, bone, antler, or shell – the more usual materials to be found by archaeologists. In other

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words, as Ames and Maschner (1999, 219) point out, “when they find stone, bone and antler objects in Northwest Coast sites, [archaeologists] are finding less than 10 percent of the material culture of the people who lived at that site.” A similar ratio of plant use in relation to overall material culture could be inferred in Interior Plateau sites, given the known importance and applications of woods and fibres, although there may be relatively more use of furs and animal products overall. There is still somewhat of a bias against plant materials, even when they are revealed in archaeological contexts. Foster and Croes (2004, 127) maintain, “Professional archaeologists ... may avoid wet or waterlogged areas in their sites. When they have to deal with wood and fiber artifacts they often give them only token mention, and focus instead on what is familiar to them.” In any case, to say that the northwestern North American cultures were essentially woodand fibre-based, and that the traditions of diverse wood and fibre use extend for thousands of years into the past, would not be an exaggeration. Finding the Best Materials

A survey of the plant materials used in various capacities within the study area shows that, in many cases, more than one type of wood or one type of fibrous material was used for a similar purpose. For example, both tule (Schoenoplectus spp.)1 stems and cattail leaves were used for mats, although as John Ross (2011) explains, these species produce somewhat different mats. Those of tule stalks are generally thinner or more light-weight but are longer2 and more durable than cattail mats. They were often preferred for covering pithouses, ramadas, summer lodges, and tipis, and they might last two or three years if properly cared for. Both tule and cattail were considered better if harvested in fall, after a “killing frost” (sxwekw’t), which caused them to turn a dark, mottled brown colour, rather than being used green (ibid.).3 Both oceanspray and mock-orange have long, straight hardwood shoots that were used for arrows and mat-making needles.4 The choice of a particular material is obviously a function, in part, of the salience of that material – including its overall distribution, abundance, and availability, whether in the vicinity or through trade (Friedman 2005). As different plant populations, along with the people, spread into northwestern North America after the melting of the Pleistocene ice sheets, new woods, fibres, and other materials would have become available, to be adopted into a given culture, sometimes replacing other materials previously utilized but perhaps less suitable. People would have constantly experimented with new materials and evaluated them, just as they would have done with potential new foods and medicines they encountered. Some of the traditional narratives recount episodes that reflect such experimentation. For example, in the Ts’msyen story “The Boy Taken by the Star,”5 a boy who made fun of the stars and rebuked them was

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taken into the sky by a strange being, who turned out to be the Chief-of-theSkies. His father went to look for him and was told to make an image of his son and many, many arrows. He was also told to pick the wood that burns the longest. His people gathered all of the different kinds of wood and burned each kind to find out which lasted the longest, and using this approach, they found it was maple (Acer glabrum), a dense wood known to this day as a long-lasting fuel.6 In another Ts’msyen story, “Narrative of a Great Chief,”7 a princess asked her husband to call his carvers and have them make her six spears from different woods so that she could choose which was best to use. They made spears of hemlock, maple, spruce, yellow-cedar, alder, and yew. After examining each, she chose the yew, saying, “This will be strong enough for the work I want to do.” Using this yew-wood spear, she landed six whales. Again, right to the present day, Pacific yew, which has the greatest bending strength of any local wood, and is also the highest in shock resistence and stiffness, is known as a prime wood for making harpoons and spear shafts (Friedman 2005; Turner 1998; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Finally, in a Haida story, “The One Abandoned for Eating the Flipper of a Hair Seal,”8 a root-digging stick made from the side branch of a yellow-cedar was chosen as the best, after “all sorts of sticks,” including western redcedar, had been rejected (Swanton 1905, 181). The archaeological record also reflects differing use and preference of materials even within the same site. At Ozette, for example, western redcedar was the obvious material of choice for many artifacts, with Pacific yew and Sitka spruce also taking important roles (Friedman 2005). Many other types of wood, however, were also used – in many cases, for the same kinds of implements. Yew is often preferred for wedges and similar tools requiring tremendous durability, but it is slow-growing and, in many places, infrequent. Possibly for this reason, the Ozette people fashioned the majority of their wedges from Sitka spruce branches, the compression wood of which is similarly tough. However, they also made wedges of yew wood, as well as a few other woods, including Pacific crabapple and false azalea (Menziesia ferruginea) (Friedman 2005). Wood used for digging sticks also shows variation. At the Lachane site in Prince Rupert Harbour, in an examination of numerous digging sticks, amabilis fir (Abies amabilis) wood seemed to have been largely preferred for digging sticks, followed by hemlock (Tsuga sp.) and western redcedar (R. Inglis 1976; Lepofsky 2004).9 In contrast, at least within the past few centuries, most digging sticks on the Northwest Coast have been made of yew wood (Turner 1998, 2004a) (figure 6-2). Often, the best or most often used material for a given purpose in a given region or language is indicated by its name. Some examples are given in chapter 3 (see table 3-3). Bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum), whose fine, hard wood is considered prime for carving paddles, is called “paddle tree/plant” in at least six Coast Salish languages.10 Oceanspray, whose hard straight wood is used for mat-making needles and similar items, is called “digging stick plant” in Sechelt

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6-2  |  Ditidaht elder and cultural specialist John Thomas holding a yew-wood rootdigging stick he carved.

and by the neighbouring Pemberton Stl’atl’imx, or Lil’wat (Turner 1998). Pacific yew has many names pertaining to the multitude of uses for its wood, with “bow tree/plant” and “wedge tree/plant” being the most widespread. Many plants are named for their edible fruit, but bitter cherry and paper birch are both named after their bark, the most salient part of these trees. These names carry the information about their use, to be passed on from generation to generation. Western redcedar has diverse sets of names in various languages that relate to its inner bark, its wood, its roots, and its strong, flexible branches. Sometimes the name for the plant and the name for the product made from it are inseparable. For example, the Straits Salish term sxwələʔ is used for both “willow” (Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra and other Salix spp.) and “reefnet,” except for the common addition of a “plant” suffix to the name for willow, sxwələʔ-íłch. Similarly, the Interior Salish use the same term for Indian-hemp (cf. Stl’atl’imx sp’áts’ən) and for its strong, flexible stem fibre, which has been used for cordage and fishnets throughout the Interior Plateau; it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether the name for the plant derived from a name for the fibre or vice versa.

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In the following sections, I discuss material, technological, and historical aspects of plants under the general use headings outlined in table 6-1. I then focus on particular topics of technological development – houses, canoes, and food production technology – and discuss the role of plants within these areas. Finally, I consider the origins and historical development of plants in technology in general as they relate to understandings of ethnobotanical patterns. Fire and Fire Making: Plants as Fuel The ability to make and keep fire is a primary human accomplishment; no other animal species has been able to control fire in the way that humans have. This ability is extremely ancient, and we can assume that the first migrants entering North America in the Late Pleistocene already knew about fire and how to kindle it, keep it burning, and use it for warmth, cooking, and possibly even food dehydration and smoking. The fuels available to these earliest settlers would have been much more limited and would probably have included more herbaceous and shrubby vegetation, as well as possibly driftwood coming from the southern unglaciated areas and various birches, willows, juniper, and northern tree species that might have been growing in stunted form in areas not covered or recently uncovered by ice.11 As demonstrated in traditional narratives such as the Ts’msyen story “The Boy Taken by the Star,” mentioned previously, people would have been continuously experimenting with fire to find the best and most efficient materials for kindling fires and keeping them going and for meeting their various purposes: pit-cooking, heating cooking rocks, drying berries, smoking fish and meat, heating houses and shelters, signalling, smudging, creating habitats, and protecting against animals. The most common way of kindling a fire was to use a manually twirled firedrill of a soft, extremely dry wood like willow (Salix spp.)12 or cottonwood (Populus balsamifera spp. trichocarpa) root or, at least from the Mid Holocene on, western redcedar. Just as important as the firedrill is the “hearth,” or base part, sometimes fashioned from a thicker piece of the same type of wood or sometimes from a different wood. Willow and cottonwood root are both known as good materials for the “hearth,” as is redcedar wood. Small pits are made in the wood along the edge of the hearth, with notches connecting them to the edge. The drill is placed in the pit, sometimes with a little dry sand, and twirled rapidly with the hands until the friction creates enough heat to cause the small fragments of wood dust and sawdust to start to glow. With the working of the drill, these fall out through the notch and into a small mass of tinder – shredded birch (Betula papyrifera) or cedar bark, cattail (Typha latifolia) seed fluff, or some other fine, dry material – and, with careful tending and blowing, this material will ignite into flame, to be fed with more material, dry kindling, and finally larger pieces of wood and logs until the fire is well started (Boas 1909; Teit 1909).

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Tinder and materials that would hold a coal and help people to keep a fire once kindled were highly valued. Of these, cinder conk fungus (Inonotus obliquus) is a prime example from the Interior Plateau. It grows on birch trees and was used as a tinder, or punk, to ignite a fire when needed.13 Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1997) described how this fungus was used as a “slow match” to carry fire from one place to another: When it is cut open it has a sort of dry brown spongy centre ... If you touch it on a lit fire it will start to smoulder and it will not go out, until the whole thing burns. The old people got freshwater clam [mussel] shells. They put this fungus inside and ignited it, then closed the shells together, wrapped the whole thing in leaves, and carried this [“slow match”] in the canoe or while travelling. And then, to start a fire, you take the fine fluff off of the birch tree and some slivers of that red pitchwood and wherever you go, you open that and blow on it and put on the kindling, and away you go, that’s your matches!14 Mary Thomas (2001) later recounted how her mother, as she travelled through the woods in the mountains around Salmon Arm, would constantly tear off the paper-like shreds of birch bark, form them into small bundles, and lodge these securely in the crotches of birch trees. When Mary asked her why she did this, she explained that someone might need them at some time if they were out in the woods in winter and needed to start a fire. Having access to these bundles of fire starter could make the difference between life and death to a person, she said. This practice was apparently very common among the old people and is a good example of the way people looked out for each other. Other types of tinder used as fire starter or to hold coals in a “slow match” include shredded western redcedar bark, shredded big sagebrush bark, dried grass, and the dried fibres of balsamroot, Indian-hemp, horsehair lichen (Bryoria spp.), and bracken fern rhizomes (Poser 2008a, 2008b; Teit 1909; Turner 1998). Pitchy wood, or punky wood, found in rotten logs or at the very centre, or heartwood, of snags of Douglas-fir or pine is also prized as fire starter (Boas 1909; Turner and Bell 1973; Turner 1998), as are chunks of pure, hardened tree pitch (Cove and MacDonald 1987; Rath 1981). Pitchwood of pine and other trees and the mature heads of cattail coated with pitch also served as effective torches, sometimes used in night fishing on Shuswap Lake, as recalled by Mary Thomas (pers. comm. 2001), or for hunting deer (Curtis 1915). After thousands of years of continuous and widespread use, firedrills and “slow matches” ceased to be used soon after the introduction of steel and flint by European traders. Another, more recent method for starting fires was to place the bark or fibre tinder, mixed with a little gunpowder, near the trigger of a flintlock musket. When the trigger was

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pulled, the sparks from the flint ignited the powder and the tinder, which was then fanned into a blaze by blowing on it (Teit 1909). Depending on the reason for the fire, it might be kept very hot with open flames or allowed to just smoulder, as for overnight banking or when creating more smoke in curing fish or tanning hides. These effects are achieved by using wood that is either wet and green or dry and dead or by using different kinds of bark, wood, tree fungus, sagebrush, or other fuel, as required. Red alder wood is widely considered an excellent fuel for cooking, and fresh alder wood is a preferred fuel for smoking salmon and other fish and meat because it doesn’t impart any bitter taste to the food. Spruce wood is also valued, both for its heat and because the smoke does not adversely flavour drying foods (Turner 2004a). On the other hand, yellow-cedar wood is generally rejected as a cooking fuel because it emits a strong, pungent odour that can taint the food.15 Every language includes many terms related to fire and fire making, and many of these pertain to plants. In the Stl’atl’imx language, for example, the word for “sagebrush kindling,” zəqwát, is derived from the Proto-Salish term for “fire (wood),” yəqw or həyqw (Kuipers 2002). A modern Ditidaht name provided by John Thomas for a particular variety of yellow-cedar is machsapt (“‘match’ plant”) (borrowed from English) because this variety was considered good for starting fires, although John was not sure what it looked like (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Some of the Coast Salish names for Douglas-fir (cf. Squamish ch’shay’) are derived from ch’sayʔ, a Proto-Coast-Salish term for “fir/cedar wood, log, stick” (Kuipers 2002), with obvious reference to the importance of this tree as a fuel. In fact, Douglas-fir bark is considered one of the all-around best fuels, burning with a hot flame, and was sometimes harvested in large pieces from standing, living trees, creating a special class of “culturally modified tree,” or CMT , indicated by notably flattened and smooth-barked sections on some Douglas-firs (D. Mathews and Dady 2008). Other names reflect a tree’s unsuitability as a fuel. For example, the Ditidaht name qw’itłqapt, for western hemlock, means “fire goes out/no fire-tree/plant” because it is considered a poor-burning wood, although it is sometimes used for banking a fire overnight because it will smoulder without putting out much heat. In the Ts’msyen, or Sm’algyax, language, some people call amabilis fir lakm baá’ləx (“ghost’s wood”) because it burns “like paper”; it doesn’t give off any heat (Turner and Thompson 2006).16 One major source of wood for fuel and other purposes is driftwood. All up and down the coast, and along the riverbanks throughout the study area, people would seek out driftwood. Logs that washed up on the beach were immediately claimed as property and were considered a valuable asset (see Drabek and Adams 2004; Lepofsky, Moss, and Lyons 2001; Moss et al. 2004; and Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Red alder driftwood was a preferred type for the Gitga’at and many

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others along the coast. Gitga’at women used to go from their seaweed camp at K’yel, on Princess Royal Island, across to a beach on Ashdown Island, where driftwood was known to accumulate. They packed large gunnysacks full of driftwood back to K’yel for their fires in order to roast their seaweed and smoke their fish and seal meat. Given its critical importance for survival, fuel availability was one of the elements of prime consideration in selecting campsites and food-processing sites, such as earth oven locations. Sometimes people created their own firewood by firing over clumps of trees in the high country or by burning patches of forest along the coast, enough to kill the trees but not destroy them, leaving snags to dry for the succeeding years (Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner 1999, 2004b). Firewood has never ceased in its importance and continues to be sought for heating and cooking in camps and settlements – especially in rural areas – throughout the entire study area. Woods and Woodworking Of all groups of plants named and used in northwestern North America, trees and large shrubs are the most salient and widely known. Virtually all species or closely related groups of species of trees and shrubs in a given region are named in the languages of that region and have particular cultural applications – sometimes many different ones – almost everywhere they are found. The high profile of trees and shrubs has a dual reason: compared with most herbaceous plants, they are large and highly visible; and because they are woody and have thick bark, they have many possibilities for utility in making implements, construction, and weaving, as well as for firewood, as noted previously, and for a host of other purposes, including food from inner bark, fruits, and seeds and many medicinal uses. It is the characteristic structure of wood and bark tissues that makes them so useful. These are tissue complexes produced by growing cells around the circumference of the tree (laterial meristems) that differentiate as they develop: wood (xylem) is added to the inside and bark to the outside.17 The wood provides the main support for the tree, and the youngest xylem cells function to transport water and minerals from the roots into the upper parts of the tree. The tracheid cells in the wood (which are dead at maturity) often have characteristic pits or thickenings that can be used to identify wood species in archaeological contexts (Friedman 1978). Also, because the xylem is produced at different rates over the season, wood has rings, which can be counted to reveal the age of the tree if the entire trunk radius is present. As well, annual variations in weather, untoward events like fire, or the harvesting of planks or strips of bark at a given time leave their marks on the wood and can be used to better understand overall patterns of climate change and large-scale human activities

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like the collection of inner bark for food or the harvesting of bark strips for material use and medicine. The growing cambium tissues and the youngest growth of secondary phloem (which transport the products of photosynthesis from the needles and leaves downward) are edible in many trees, as described in the previous chapter. After the first year, the secondary phloem cells die and are no longer able to transport nutrients; instead, they harden and change chemically and serve, along with the cork, to protect the tree. If the vascular functions of the young xylem and phloem tissues are interrupted around the entire circumference of a tree (i.e., if the tree is girdled or cut down to the wood all around), the tree will die. On the other hand, if a sufficient width of cambium is retained in harvesting bark or wood, the tree will continue to grow and may eventually heal over the harvested part. Indigenous harvesters were, and are, well aware of the vulnerability of trees when subjected to harvesting, and most are careful to keep the tree alive, recognizing it as a living being in its own right (Deur and Turner 2005; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009). The practical and philosophical aspects of this practice are discussed further in chapters 11 and 13 respectively. Each type of wood and each type of bark has its own particular characteristics, depending on the thickness of the cell walls, storage chemicals, the amounts of pitch and other materials produced, and the cell arrangements of the wood and bark. With some trees, like arbutus, the outer bark is sloughed off quite regularly, whereas with other trees, like oaks and Douglas-fir, the outer bark is pushed out, thickening and cracking as the tree grows and expands. With some species, including western redcedar, yellow-cedar, Rocky Mountain maple, willows (Salix exigua and other spp.), and silverberry (Elaeagnus commutata), the inner bark is quite tough and fibrous and can be used for cordage and weaving, whereas with paper birch and wild cherry (Prunus emarginata, P. pensylvanica), it is the outermost bark that is tough, fibrous, and most useful as a material. Furthermore, it can be easily separated from the inner bark in late spring without harming the growing parts of the tree (figure 6-3). Even within a given species or individual tree or shrub, wood and bark vary significantly in texture and strength, depending on where in the plant – trunk, branches, roots – they occur, the age and size of the tree or shrub, and the environmental conditions under which it is growing. In the case of wood, the heartwood (older wood at the centre of the tree) and the sapwood (younger wood at the outer part) are usually quite different in texture and appearance. All wood cells are dead, but as the tree ages, the cells near the centre tend to become thicker and more compact, and hence the heartwood is stronger and better for construction. Branches that are subjected to the constant leverage of the wind develop areas of “reaction wood,” with thickened and tightly growing cells that render that wood particularly tough and resilient. In conifers, reaction wood (known as “compression” wood) is made up of cellulose-rich cells on the upper side of the bend, whereas in hardwoods like maple or oak, the reaction

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6-3  |  Mary Thomas harvesting pin cherry (Prunus pensylvanica) bark for use as decoration for the rims of her birch-bark baskets.

wood (called “tension” wood) is made up of heavily lignified cells on the lower side of the bend. Tree knots – wood at the base of branches that has been surrounded by the growing and developing trunk – are particularly tough and are sometimes sought out, even from otherwise decaying trees or logs, for making fishhooks and some other implements (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Inner bark, and bark from younger trees, is generally thinner and more tender than older, outer bark and differs in its chemical constituents as well. Thus the dyes produced from red alder bark differ according to the relative age of the total bark or what proportion of inner and outer bark is used.

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Like fuels used in food preparation, woods used to create implements for food processing or serving food have to be “neutral” so they don’t taint the food. In this regard, cedar wood has been particularly important for food preparation because it is said not to flavour the food unpleasantly, according to Gitga’at elder Helen Clifton. Split cedar sticks, or woots, are carefully fashioned from cedar heartwood and used for drying racks for filleted strips of halibut and salmon. The woots are set on upright poles and can be easily moved or shifted to take advantage of the sun’s position or the degree of drying of the fish. Cedar wood is also used to make trays for drying seaweed, if there are no convenient drying rocks along the ocean, and for berry-drying racks, cooking tongs, salmon-barbecuing sticks and salmon spreaders, and a host of different sized bentwood boxes, trays, planks, or dishes used in cooking and serving food. Alder wood and maple wood are also used for dishes and spoons, as are birch and Sitka spruce (Friedman 2005; Turner 1998, 2004a). Yellow-cedar, although it is a good material for carving, is generally not selected for making dishes or implements used in food preparation because of its rank odour. Woodworking Tools

There was a noted development and proliferation of heavy woodworking tools in the Late Holocene around 3,500 years ago: stone-ground celts or adze blades, used with wooden handles and perhaps developing from antler or shell predecessors; antler and bone wedges and chisels, as well as wooden wedges; and diverse stone and wooden mauls, some of immense size (R.L. Carlson 1976; Friedman 2005). On the Northwest Coast, this time period corresponded with the arrival of western redcedar as a major element of the coastal temperate rainforest. Techniques of cutting, moulding, and bending wood using fire and steam developed along with the tools. Many tools, including those used in woodworking – wedges, mauls, and adzes – were made at least in part of different kinds of wood, although antler, bone, and stone tools were also of prime importance. The materials used in these tools often depended on availability as well as overall utility. For the Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux of the Interior Plateau, as recounted by Teit (1909), for example, large chisels for cutting trees were made of elk, caribou, or – most preferred – buck mule deer antler, and small chisels were of antler and bone. Wedges were of antler and hardwood or sometimes stone. Antler and bone were also used for adzes, knives, and daggers, and tools were hafted with antler and wood of various types. Awls and needles were of bone. Beaver-tooth knives were used for carving or incising on wood and stone, and basalt knives were used to cut and carve antler and bone, which were often soaked in water or boiled to make them easier to work. Stone and wood were also sometimes treated in this way.

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On the Northwest Coast, elk and deer antler were also used for chisel blades, as were giant California mussel shells. Ditidaht elder John Thomas (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983), who was born and raised at Clo-oose on the west coast of Vancouver Island, described how his grandfather and other carvers harvested these shells from special sites along the coast, cured them so they wouldn’t be too brittle by soaking them in fish oil, and ground them down to a sharp-edged blade by rubbing them on sandstone at the beach at Clo-oose. These shells were made into the points of a whaling harpoon, with valves of elk antler. The sharpened mussel shells were also used as chisel blades to cut the tough-trunked yew trees from a special grove up the Cheewhat River, to be carved into whaling harpoon shafts.18 The yew harpoon shafts, up to 5 metres or more long, represent a remarkable aspect of West Coast woodworking technology. They are articulated in two or three places, fitting together like a puzzle, with the joints wrapped with bittercherry bark tape and waterproofed with spruce pitch (ibid.). Yew wood – because of its strength and resilience – was also often the material of choice for making wedges, which were generally bound around the upper end by a strong rope of cedar withe to prevent them from splitting when they were hit by a maul. Stress wood of Sitka spruce branches was also used for wedges. Mauls themselves were of stone or sometimes of yew or other hardwood. Wedges are fundamentally important in woodworking because they enable wood – whether firewood or wood for planks or for implements – to be split in lengths. Wedges, together with other tools like adzes (along with the ultimate tool, fire), have the capacity to transform massive, heavy tree trunks into pieces and configurations that can be handled and moved, practically and effectively, for whatever purpose intended. Wedges were seldom used singly but usually applied in graduated sets, deriving a multiple mechanical advantage in prizing apart wood along its natural grain. Cedar wood is particularly amenable to splitting by wedges, and this is only one of many reasons why it has been a prime building material on the Northwest Coast. One might argue, however, that it was the fortuitous combination of the presence of Pacific yew and western redcedar on the Northwest Coast that allowed woodworking to flourish. The importance of wedges is reflected over and over in Northwest Coast narratives, which contain numerous episodes involving splitting trees with wedges, breaking wedges, and mending wedges. One theme in particular, which is widespread on the Northwest Coast, having evidently originated on the central coast (Boas 2002), is the testing of a cultural hero by his new or soon-to-be father-inlaw, a powerful chief living in the sky or at the bottom of the ocean. In one of a series of challenges set by this vindictive chief, the hero is sent out to assist in the splitting of a tree with wedges, presumably for firewood. He is told to climb inside the tree, after which the cunning chief intends to knock out the wedges so the tree will crash shut, entrapping and killing the young man. The hero, forewarned by a supernatural helper, is able to thwart this plan by jamming a

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hammer into the split, which holds the tree open and allows him to escape. This is one of several attempts his father-in-law makes on his life, but the hero is able to outwit him in each case and is eventually able to marry the chief ’s daughter. As well as splitting wood for firewood, wedges are applied in producing planks, sometimes with one or more wide, massive boards being split off from standing, living western redcedar trees using a series of graduated wedges, mauls, and ropes (Stewart 1984; Turner 2004a). The process for creating these planks, which leaves a legacy of cultural modification of the trees that is visible generations later, is a story of technological sophistication and expertise but, as hinted at previously, also ties into peoples’ belief systems, as described by Curtis (1915, 11; see also Turner, Ari, et al. 2009) for the Kwakwaka’wakw: “A standing tree from which boards have been split is called keto’q (‘begged from’), and it is said that, since trees are believed to have sentient life, the ancients before obtaining boards in this way would look upward to the tree and say: ‘We have come to beg a piece of you today. Please! We hope you will let us have a piece of you.’ The same request was made of a yew tree before cutting off a piece for making tools.” As noted, stone hammers or hardwood mallets were used to drive wedges into the wood in successive stages until the resistance of the wood was overcome and the split was accomplished. Kwakwaka’wakw clan chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm., 1994) recalled how his grandfather, whose name was also Kwaxsistalla, used yew for wedges in canoe building: “Yew, tł’əmq’i. They use lots of those for a wedge ... it’s like oak, I guess. It’s hard, a really hard, tough wood. And, my grandfather used lots of those branches for a wedge, to build a canoe with. It’s [the wedges are] all different shapes, and they’ve all got names ... but I can’t remember those names now. I just remember one, the one they call wixtołes. It’s bent like this [curved], and they call it wixtołes. That’s what we dig in the wood with, wedging the wood when you hollow the canoe. They used lots of that.” Adzes, knives, scrapers, celts, and abrasives were other items in the woodworking toolkits of Northwest Coast and interior artisans. Knives and scrapers were made of stone or shell, sometimes with wooden hasps. Celts were made of shell, or when it was available, of rare and coveted nephrite. Abrasives, used to smooth and polish wood and stone tools, included fine sand and dogfish skin, but one of the most widespread materials was the silicon-impregnated stems of horsetail, or scouring rush (Equisetum hyemale and related spp.). Adze blades were often made of nephrite or other stone, or of mussel shell, but usually with wooden handles. On the coast, two styles of adze, the D-adze and the elbow adze, were made with hardwood handles of yew, crabapple, or some other tough wood. In fact, one of the names for cascara (Frangula purshiana) in Nuu-chahnulth is “D-adze plant” (cf. Hesquiaht q’ay’aaxwasmapt), referring to this use.19 Elbow adzes are created from a tree branch of crabapple or other hardwood still

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attached to a section split from the trunk, with the branch forming the handle and with the angled trunk section forming the base for the blade of mussel shell or metal, which is bound and glued into place with cordage and tree pitch (Stewart 1984; Turner 1998). Steaming, Bending, and Moulding Wood

One of the key woodworking technologies for which people on the Northwest Coast became famous is the art of bending and moulding wood. This was accomplished by soaking a section of wood, and often by heating and steaming it for a period of time, until it was so soft it could be bent and reshaped into a fishhook or other item, or even, for a plank, bent at right angles along three straight grooves, or kerfs, to form the four sides of a box. Cedar wood is one of the most malleable woods and was the usual material for making these bentwood, or kerfed, boxes. Even canoes of cedar wood are steamed, heated, and moulded or shaped during construction, such that the bottom is flattened and the gunwales spread out until the width of the canoe is wider than the diameter of the log from which it is constructed (Stewart 1984). This method of canoe making, using water and red-hot rocks, was also applied to logs of cottonwood, and probably ponderosa pine, for dugout canoes in the Interior Plateau; Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994) remembered gathering large rocks for her father to heat and use for widening the canoe he was making for use on Shuswap Lake, back in the mid-1920s. John Thomas (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983), the Ditidaht cultural specialist cited previously, demonstrated how bentwood halibut hooks were made by his grandfather and other fishermen at Clo-oose. They first chose pieces of dense knot wood of western hemlock or amabilis fir trees, which they extracted from old logs in the forest whose wood had mostly rotted away, leaving only the knots, which could be readily pulled out. A knot longer than the total length of the fishhook – around 25 centimetres long – was required. They trimmed the loose wood from the knot and cut it lengthwise into thirds or quarters, depending on the size of the knot (a thicker knot would yield four lengths). Each piece was shaped by rounding it off and then slightly sharpening and flattening the ends. The pieces were inserted into a hollow bulb of bull kelp, cut off at a length of about 30 centimetres down the stipe. A little water was poured into the kelp bulb and the opening sealed with a plug of wood, carved to fit snugly. Meanwhile, they would start a hot fire on the beach, and when the bulb was ready, it would be buried, with its knot wood pieces, upright in the heated sand beside the fire and left overnight, the fire still burning. By the morning, when they dug up the kelp bulb and opened it, the lengths of tree knot had become soft and flexible. While they were still warm and moist, U-shaped wooden moulds were used to bend each one into the shape of the halibut hook, allowing it to cool

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and dry in position. These bentwood hooks were fixed with a sharp bone barb, lashed in place, and with a leader of stinging nettle fibre twine tied on to the top arm of the sideways “U”. John explained that the hooks, each with its leader of stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) twine, were used in pairs, tied to opposite ends of a stout yew-wood cross bar. This contrivance was tied onto a long kelp line that was fixed onto a float made from a sea lion’s stomach or a sealskin that was fitted with a wooden plug, and the line was let out from a canoe. The hooks were held near the bottom of the ocean by an anchor stone, which was fixed to the centre of the yewwood crosspiece on a length of line just long enough to keep the hooks suspended near the bottom without actually touching it. The hooks were usually baited with octopus, which trailed out in the current to attract halibut (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Variants of these ingenious fishhooks were made and used over much of the coast, including yew-wood versions made by Clan Chief Adam Dick (pers. comm., 2009). The hooks evidently had their early origins as selfbarbed hooks, with simple pointed ends, such as those found at the ancient fish campsite on the Hoko River (Croes 2003). John Thomas (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983) suggested that Sitka spruce knots should not be used because they would straighten out once they were immersed in the ocean, but other people did, occasionally, use spruce wood for their hooks (Friedman 2005). Bentwood boxes probably developed some time later than bentwood fishhooks but were apparently an innovation that was slightly earlier than the development of the large cedar post and plank houses, which are present, although sparse, between about 3,300 and 2,500 years ago, when they become more prevalent (Ames 1996; Ames and Maschner 1999). The bentwood boxes – like the plank houses – represented an immense advancement in terms of peoples’ capacity for food production and storage. Ames and Maschner (1999) suggest that they were part of a whole complex of advances in technology that enabled the increased social and economic complexity so inextricably associated with Northwest Coast cultures. Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistilla) grew up on the coast at Kingcome Inlet at a time when people were still using bentwood boxes routinely for cooking and food storage. He watched his own grandfather making these boxes and has made many himself, most recently using modern power tools to facilitate the trimming and exacting grooving (figure 6-4). His description of making a bentwood box and how it was used is based on first-hand knowledge (pers. comm., 1994; see also Sewid-Smith and Dick 1998): Well ... that’s that wilkw again, the [mature western red]cedar ... You split the trunk in half, then you slice it after that [into wide boards]. They use that tool called łátdayuw [a tool like a froe, for splitting cedar shakes], to slice that wood. And when it’s sliced [into boards], and you start working

Plant Use in Technology  |  359

6-4  |  Bentwood box of western redcedar wood with lid made by Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation.

on the box ... you measure it with your hands. There’s no rulers ... My grandfather used to just go like this [measure length with his hands] ... then you put a mark on it. Then you cut in [a groove] where you’re going to bend [it]. But it’s gotta’ be straight ’cause it has to be squared off. They made a wooden square, [called] n’in’amanuw’, that’s the square that they use to measure something. That comes out of that wood [cedar wood] too. They use that, to square it off [and groove it]. And then they put water on the board, or a lot of times they take it down to the river and soak it. They put heavy rocks on it to keep it under for two or three days, ’cause [when] ... the water’s soaked in it, then you bend it. But, nowadays, they use steam. They steam it now, but they don’t do that in those days. They just soak it in the river; they soften it up ... before they bend it. If it’s dry, it’ll break. It has to be soaked. [To bend it] ... they use a pole, a pole about this big [about 15 centimetres across] where they’re going to bend [at the transverse kerf, or groove]. And they put weight on it so that it will never move when you lift this [end] up, that’s after it’s soaked with water ... When you got it together, you yełtsem [tie it in place] with dəwix – those spruce branches,

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twisted. Then you drill it [along the edges of the boards where they meet together]. Then you put wooden pegs in it to hold it together, yew-wood pegs. That was our nails, ’cause it was hard. And they had it shaped like that, real sharp at the end, pointed. And then you hammer in the pegs. Well, my grandfather used the hammers you got now, but in the early days, they used a peqpelq [stone hammer]. Dad had one ... [Then they fix the bottom of the box, pegged in the same way?] Yes, everything is pegged. Just the lid is just fit right on the top. Clan Chief Adam Dick said these boxes were not painted: “There’s no paint. All the bentwood boxes that my grandmother left, there’s no paint on them.” The boxes were highly utilitarian, being used for cooking and to store the family’s supply of smoked fish for winter, dried berry cakes (t’áqa), and dried seaweed. He explained that households had all different sizes of these boxes,20 and he described their use for storing crabapples: “There’s big ones, there, for tsəlxw staʔakw, wild crabapples [preserved in water], and they fill it up ... and they seal it with the tłina [oulachen oil], about that thick [5 to 8 centimetres], and when it gets hard ... it’s something like a wax, to seal it ... in those boxes. I guess that’s why the boxes turn black, ’cause that oil gets right into that wood, sinks right into that wood.” Other woodworkers used steaming or heating as the primary process in softening the cedar boards for making bentwood boxes (Boas 1921). The steaming procedure was somewhat akin to pit-cooking, where they built a fire, heated rocks to red-hot, and then piled on wet vegetation to generate steam. Often the box makers used wet bull kelp fronds and other seaweed or eelgrass heaped over the rocks, placing the boards or other objects to be steamed overtop and covering them with more seaweed, or with mats or skunk-cabbage leaves, and then piling sand or dirt overtop and leaving it overnight, in the same way that John Thomas left the knot wood pieces for halibut hooks in the kelp bulb buried next to the fire overnight. Wooden Implements and Tools

Steaming and bending wood was also a technique employed in making snowshoes, especially in many parts of the interior. Snowshoes were often critically important for winter travel, and many different styles were made. Woods used for snowshoe frames included Pacific yew, Rocky Mountain maple and vine maple, birch (Betula spp.), elderberry, mock-orange, and Douglas-fir saplings, and the webbing was of animal sinew, rawhide, or Indian-hemp fibre (Friedman 2005; J.A. Ross 2011; Teit 1909; Turner 1998; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Emergency snowshoes were made from Douglas-fir boughs, which were tied onto the feet (J.A. Ross 2011). Stl’atl’imx elder Alec Peters (pers. comm., 1984)

Plant Use in Technology  |  361

6-5  |  Snowshoes of steamed and bent Pacific yew saplings, made by Alec Peters, Lil’wat, of Mount Currie, and strung by Nellie Wallace Peters.

of Mount Currie made snowshoes of various sizes for all of his family members, mainly with yew-wood frames (figure 6-5). To make a pair of snowshoes, he would search for two yew saplings of relatively similar length and thickness, each perhaps 1 to 2 metres long, depending on the size of snowshoe desired. He would carve the stems similarly, slightly flattening them along one side and tapering them at both ends. He would then steam the lengths over a large kettle set on the stove, until they were soft and malleable. Working with the steamed wooden lengths as a matching pair, he carefully bent each into an oval “bear paw” shape, with the ends meeting and overlapping at the back, and lashed the joints together. This could be done with twine or cedar root, although he also used wire, wound around many times. He would then tie the two frames, still moist but shaped as desired, securely together, forcing the “toes” apart a few centimetres so that they would be slightly upturned, in tandem, in the finished snowshoes. His wife, Nellie Wallace Peters, would create the webbing for the snowshoes, using rawhide strips and leaving a gap at the centre for the user’s

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boot toe to go through with each step. The boots would be lashed onto the snowshoes with twine, using a special slipknot to synch them at the toe, leaving the heel to move freely. Besides the bentwood boxes, fishhooks, snowshoes, and woodworking tools themselves that were made, in whole or in part, from wood, a host of other implements used in different capacities in and around households and out on the land were crafted from wood. The vast array of woods available to people and used for making tools and implements in different regions is summarized in table 6-2. Woodworking as a technology on the Northwest Coast may well have reached its zenith just a few hundred years ago, at a time when iron started to appear in the region through trade and in shipwrecks of vessels from Japan and elsewhere along the coast (Ames and Maschner 1999; Friedman 2005). At this time, too, some 200 to 300 years ago, the massive monumental wooden totem poles and large wooden sculptures so strongly associated with Northwest Coast art over the past 150 years may have had their origins.21 Iron was scarce until the early 1800s but soon superseded all materials in making knives, chisels, scrapers, adzes, harpoon points, fishhooks, arrowheads, and even digging sticks.22 Only a few implements, including some awls and needles, continued to be made of wood or bone. Despite the transformation of many of the tools and implements, however, wood itself continued as a material of choice for house construction, boxes, masks, canoes, and implement shafts and handles into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Fibrous Plant Materials Along with wood, plant fibre and fibrous tissues are key materials whose use has characterized both Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau cultures. More northerly interior peoples tended to rely less on plant fibres and more on animal products – furs, hides, and sinew – for their clothing and technologies but, nevertheless, also used many different types of fibrous materials and bark sheets, not the least being birch bark – so important for vessels and canoes across northern Canada – along with the accompanying stitching materials of spruce or cedar root. Many types and different parts of plants contain fibrous tissues, whose main biological function is to strengthen and support the plants and their vascular systems as they grow. Along with relatively short, thick-walled cells called sclereids, fibrous tissue (sclerenchyma) contains long, slender cells called fibres, with thick, lignified cell walls. Fibres, which are usually dead at maturity, are commonly associated with the xylem and phloem tissues of monocot and dicot stems and roots but do not usually occur in the wood of gymnosperms, or coniferous trees. Many fibrous plant materials are known from commercial and

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Table 6-2  |  Materials preferred for wooden implements and other wooden items used in northwestern North America Implements/ tools

Preferred wood material: coastal

Preferred wood material: interior

Armour and shields

Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia), vine maple (Acer circinatum), Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum), oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)

Arrow shafts

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata), vine maple, saskatoon berry, flowering dogwood (Cornus nuttallii), oceanspray, mockorange (Philadelphus lewisii), salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis), red or blue huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium, V. alaskaense, V. ovalifolium) for points (Rath 1981)

Wild rose (Rosa sp.), saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia), Indian-hemp twine for binding (Apocynum cannabinum), oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)

Bows

Boxes, bentwood Clubs

Combs

Dentalium spears Digging sticks (roots, clams)

Spruces (Picea spp.), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), western redcedar, Rocky Mountain maple, saskatoon berry, birch (Betula papyrifera and other Betula spp.), hazelnut (Corylus cornuta), oceanspray, mock-orange, wild rose (Rosa spp.)

Yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis) (including roots), Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), Pacific yew, western redcedar, vine maple, Rocky Mountain maple, flowering dogwood, oceanspray, Pacific crabapple, willow

Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum), spruces, Pacific yew, western redcedar saplings, Rocky Mountain maple, paper birch (Betula papyrifera), oceanspray, mock-orange, mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus spp.)

Sitka spruce, Pacific yew, western redcedar, bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum), oceanspray

Rocky Mountain juniper, spruces, Pacific yew, oceanspray

Western redcedar, yellow-cedar

Western hemlock, flowering dogwood, mock-orange

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), Pacific yew, western redcedar, hardhack (Spiraea douglasii) Amabilis fir (Abies amabilis), Sitka spruce, lodgepole pine, Pacific yew, western redcedar, western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), Pacific crabapple, oceanspray, mock-orange

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Rocky Mountain juniper, Rocky Mountain maple, mock-orange, wild gooseberry (Ribes inerme), birch (Teit 1909)

Spruce, Rocky Mountain maple, saskatoon berry, birch, black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii), oceanspray, mock-orange, mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus ledifolius)

Table 6-2 | continued Implements/ tools

Preferred wood material: coastal

Preferred wood material: interior

Dip net hoops

Vine maple, Rocky Mountain maple

Douglas-fir sapling wood, western redcedar, Rocky Mountain maple

Dishes, trays

Sitka spruce, western redcedar, western hemlock, Rocky Mountain maple, bigleaf maple, red alder

Spruce, paper birch

Dip net poles

Drying racks Firedrills

Fishhooks

Douglas-fir sapling wood, Sitka spruce

Western redcedar

Alder, yellow-cedar, Sitka spruce, western redcedar, black cottonwood (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa), willows

Knots of amabilis fir, grand fir, Douglas-fir, western hemlock, and Sitka spruce; Pacific yew, cottonwood, oceanspray, Pacific crabapple, hardhack

Fish traps and fish weirs

Sitka spruce, Douglas-fir, western redcedar, western hemlock, vine maple, green alder (Alnus crispa ssp. sinuata), willow (Salix sp.)

Harpoon shafts

Douglas-fir (small shafts), Pacific yew, western redcedar, western hemlock, flowering dogwood, oceanspray

Douglas-fir sapling wood, spruce, western redcedar saplings

Douglas-fir, western redcedar, saskatoon berry, trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides) Spruce, lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), black cottonwood, willows Hazelnut (Corylus cornuta), black hawthorn

Spruce, lodgepole pine, Douglasfir, Rocky Mountain maple, paper birch, hazelnut, red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea), black cottonwood, willows Douglas-fir, spruce, lodgepole pine

House planks, Sitka spruce, western redcedar house posts

Lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir

Mallets, mauls

Sitka spruce, western hemlock, Pacific yew, Pacific crabapple

Spruce, paper birch

Mat creasers

Bigleaf maple

Labrets

Masks

Needles, mat-making

Rocky Mountain maple, red alder

Rocky Mountain maple

Yellow-cedar, western redcedar, bigleaf maple, red alder, black cottonwood

Western redcedar, birch, black cottonwood

White pine (Pinus monticola), vine maple, bigleaf maple, flowering dogwood, oceanspray, mock-orange

Rocky Mountain maple, saskatoon berry, oceanspray

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Table 6-2 | continued Implements/ tools

Preferred wood material: coastal

Net shuttle

Pacific yew, bigleaf maple, oceanspray, mock-orange, salmonberry wood

Paddles

Preferred wood material: interior

Yellow-cedar, Sitka spruce, Pacific yew (steering paddles), western redcedar, bigleaf maple, red alder

Western redcedar, Rocky Mountain maple, birch

Douglas-fir, western hemlock

Lodgepole pine, Douglas-fir

Salmon spreaders

Western redcedar, oceanspray, hardhack

Skewers for clams, etc.

Western redcedar, yarrow stems (Achillea millefolium), oceanspray, salmonberry stems (Rubus spectabilis), hardhack, snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus)

Western redcedar, saskatoon berry, red-osier dogwood, chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)

Pegs

Poles

Racks, drying

Snowshoe frames Spear shafts

Sitka spruce, Pacific yew, oceanspray, Pacific crabapple, blueberry and huckleberry (Vaccinium spp.) Western redcedar, western hemlock

Pacific yew, vine maple, Rocky mountain maple

Douglas-fir sapling wood, Pacific yew, Sitka spruce, lodgepole pine, vine maple, oceanspray

Spindle whorls Bigleaf maple Spoons and ladles

Tool handles

Twisting poles

Rocky Mountain maple, saskatoon berry, red-osier dogwood, oceanspray

Spruce, western redcedar, saskatoon berry, red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea), willows

Saskatoon berry, red-osier dogwood, oceanspray

Rocky Mountain juniper, spruce, Douglas-fir sapling wood, Rocky Mountain maple, paper birch, willows Rocky Mountain juniper, pine, spruce, saskatoon berry, birch

Douglas-fir, western hemlock, western redcedar, vine maple, Rocky Mountain maple, bigleaf maple, red alder

Rocky Mountain maple, mountain alder (Alnus incana ssp. tenuifolia), paper birch, hazelnut

Western hemlock (for eelgrass)

Douglas-fir and lodgepole pine (both for black lichen)

Sitka spruce, Pacific yew, red alder, vine maple, bigleaf maple, flowering dogwood, cascara (Frangula purshiana), oceanspray, Pacific crabapple

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Rocky Mountain juniper, Pacific yew, saskatoon berry, Rocky Mountain maple, paper birch, black hawthorn

Table 6-2 | continued Implements/ tools

Preferred wood material: coastal

Preferred wood material: interior

Wedges

Sitka spruce, Pacific yew, western redcedar, western hemlock, flowering dogwood, Pacific crabapple

Saskatoon berry

Sources: Compiled from Boas (2002), Curtis (1915), Friedman (2005), Hare et al. (2004), Hilbert and Bates (1992), Hunn, Turner, and French (1998), Lepofsky (2004), Newcombe (1897–1916 [1901, 1903]), Stewart (1977, 1984), Teit (1906a, 1906b, 1909), Turner (1998), and Whelchel (2005). See also references in table 6-1, excluding for houses and canoes. For references related to applications of roots and fibrous branches, see table 6-3. For a complete analysis of tool materials from Ozette and the Northwest Coast, see Friedman (2005).

industrial use: flax (linen), hemp, jute, sisal, cotton, and raphia (a palm-stem fibre), to name just a few. Paper is also a product of plant fibres. The main native fibrous materials used in northwestern North America include fibrous bark tissues (especially inner bark, or “bast,” fibres), in the form of bark strips or sheets of bark of varying degrees of flexibility; fibrous leaves; stem fibres of herbaceous plants; fibrous branches, or withes, of woody plants; and some types of fibrous roots. Also included, yet not strictly composed of fibre tissue, is bull kelp, whose long stipes would have been used since ancient times for anchoring canoes, as fishing lines, and for other purposes. Table 6-3 provides an inventory of the various types of products made from fibrous materials of plants. Cordage, mats, bark sheets, and baskets are four major categories of fibre-based products, all critically important in Indigenous peoples’ lifeways. Bark canoes – products of bark sheets – and baskets, both of bark sheets and woven fibrous materials, are discussed more fully in later sections of this chapter. Along with the fibrous plant materials themselves, a host of different tools were developed and employed variously for harvesting, processing, and working with fibrous plant materials: knives, scrapers, bark peelers, shredders, beaters, spindles and spindle whorls, needles, awls, mat creasers, and net gauges, to name just a few. Cordage, Twine, and Rope

The ability to produce lengths of strong, flexible, and durable cordage (string or rope) is crucial in so many ways to other technologies, from house building, box making, mat making, and basketry to fishing with lines and nets. As noted in the previous section, one of the most basic rope materials, available to the earliest peoples entering North America from along the coast, is the long, tough stipe of bull kelp. The use of kelp in deep-water fishing is particularly significant.

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Table 6-3  |  Objects woven or made from fibrous plant materials used in northwestern North America Implements/ tools/artifacts

Preferred fibrous material: coastal

Preferred fibrous material: interior

Baby baskets and carriers

Western redcedar

Bags, woven

Western redcedar bark, bigleaf maple inner bark, cattail leaves (Typha latifolia), tule stems (Schoenoplectus acutus and other spp.)

Spruce bark, coiled western redcedar root, vine maple, water birch (Betula occidentalis), paper birch bark, wild rose, willows

Basket decoration and imbrication

Maidenhair fern stems (Adiantum aleuticum), reed canarygrass stems (Phalaris arundinacea and other grass spp.), bitter cherry, beargrass

Baskets, buckets, etc., made from bark sheets Baskets, woven from bark strips Baskets, woven from leaves and stems Baskets, woven from roots

Western redcedar bark

Yellow-cedar inner bark, western redcedar inner bark, Rocky Mountain maple, bigleaf maple, willow (Salix spp.)

Basket (or slough) sedge, tule stems, cattail leaves, beargrass, “three-square” (Schoenoplectus americanus) Sitka spruce, western redcedar

Baskets, woven from withes

Western redcedar, vine maple

Bow strings

Sitka willow bark (Salix sitchensis)

Blankets

Yellow-cedar inner bark (preferred), western redcedar inner bark, fireweed seed fluff, cattail seed fluff

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Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), white clematis (Clematis ligusticifolia), silverberry inner bark (Elaeagnus commutata), orange honeysuckle, willow bark, cattail leaves, tule stems Water birch, stems of giant wild rye grass and other grass spp., bitter cherry (Prunus emarginata), pin cherry (P. pensylvanica), beargrass

Grand fir (Abies grandis), subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa), paper birch, Rocky Mountain juniper, Engelmann spruce, white spruce, white pine, black cottonwood Western redcedar inner bark

Ponderosa pine needles (recent), cattail, tule Engelmann spruce, white spruce, western redcedar, mountain alder Willows (Salix exigua and other spp.) Big sagebrush bark, orange honeysuckle, cattail leaves Indian-hemp

Table 6-3 | continued Implements/ tools/artifacts

Preferred fibrous material: coastal

Preferred fibrous material: interior

Capes, cloaks, skirts, bodices, and aprons

Western redcedar inner bark, yellow-cedar inner bark

Coffins and shrouds

Western redcedar bentwood boxes, cedar-bark matting

Black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii), Indian-hemp, big sagebrush bark, white clematis, silverberry bark, orange honeysuckle, willow bark, tule, cattail leaves

Hats

Western redcedar inner bark, yellow-cedar bark, Sitka spruce root, basket (or slough) sedge, beargrass

Bracken fern fronds, reed canarygrass, cattail leaves

Mats, twined, woven, and/or sewn

Western redcedar inner bark, yellow-cedar inner bark, cattail leaves, tule stems, stinging nettle

Nets, fishing, duck, deer

Yellow-cedar inner bark, western redcedar bark, withes, and roots, maple bark, black cottonwood inner bark, willow bark, stinging nettle fibre

Indian-hemp, big sagebrush, silverberry bark, orange honeysuckle, reed grass (Phragmites australis), willow bark, tule stems, cattail leaves

Cordage and fishing line

Leggings

Sandals Snares Socks

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana), yellow-cedar inner bark, Sitka spruce branches and roots, western redcedar inner bark, western hemlock roots, fireweed, gooseberry roots, Nootka rose roots (Rosa nutkana), willow bark, branches, and roots, stinging nettle

Fireweed, stinging nettle fibre

Tule matting, cattail matting (usually older mats)

Spruce roots, lodgepole pine roots, western redcedar roots, Indian-hemp and spreading dogbane (Apocynum androsaemifolium), milkweed (Asclepias speciosa), fireweed, hazelnut withes, silverberry bark, orange honeysuckle, willow (especially Salix exigua)

Indian-hemp, big sagebrush bark, silverberry bark

Indian-hemp fibre, silverberry bark, willow bark (Salix exigua)

Sagebrush bark, tule stems

Indian-hemp fibre, orange honeysuckle, willow

Black tree lichen, sagebrush bark, timbergrass leaves (Calamagrostis rubescens)

Plant Use in Technology  |  369

Table 6-3 | continued Implements/ tools/artifacts

Preferred fibrous material: coastal

Preferred fibrous material: interior

Weirs and traps, fishing

Sitka spruce, western redcedar, western hemlock, vine maple, red alder, willow branches (Salix spp.)

Willow branches, inner bark (Salix spp., especially S. exigua, S. sitchensis), grand fir boughs, silverberry bark

Whippers, soapberry

Salal leaves (Gaultheria shallon), thimbleberry leaves (Rubus parviflorus)

Bigleaf maple bark, Rocky Mountain maple bark and wood, silverberry bark and wood

Sources: Based on Friedman (2005), Stevens and Anderson (2006), Stewart (1977, 1984), Teit (1909), and Turner (1998, 2004a).

Although it has its limitations as a material out of water,23 when it is wet or saturated with fish oil it is strong and durable. Ditidaht cultural specialist John Thomas described how people prepared bull kelp fishing lines (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). To make the very best line, the kelp stipes were cut at low tide by specially trained divers from places along the coast known for producing very long and strong kelps. Once harvested, the stipes were specially cured by alternately soaking them in fresh and salt water and then drying and rubbing them along the entire length with dogfish oil or some other fish oil, the process being repeated over and over until the tissue was completely saturated with oil. After each application of oil, the lines were stretched out in the sun, such as along the rooftop of the house, to dry. A proper curing could take up to a year. Then, before they were actually used, the lines were resoaked in water to make them less brittle. Sections of the cured kelp stems were joined together with fisherman’s knots to produce lines long enough for trolling and deep-sea fishing for halibut and other bottom fish (Stewart 1977; Turner 1998). For halibut fishing, the kelp line was attached to a yew-wood crosspiece on which bentwood halibut fishing hooks and an anchor line were fixed, as described previously. Bull kelp fishing lines, if properly treated and stored, can be used over several years. People who used them said they were much easier on the hands than modern hemp or nylon line (Turner 1998). Sometimes kelp lines were traded, even to parts of the interior such as the Chilcotin region, where they were used on inland lakes and rivers (Linda Smith, pers. comm., 1986). Kelp was also used, all up and down the coast, to make ropes, anchor lines, harpoon lines, fishing nets, conduits, and storage vessels. Some people used hollow bull kelp stipes as channels to add water for steam generation in pit-cooking.24 Sometimes, too, they created special sound effects with kelp. For example, during the Kwakwaka’wakw winter dance performances,

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a length of kelp might be buried in the floor of the big house, running from the centre of the fireplace under the house wall. People outside the house could then project their voices – calling, chanting, or singing – into the centre of the fire, with dramatic results for those observing who did not know what was happening (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2008). Kelp bulbs and lengths of hollow stipe, cured with oil in a way similar to the curing of kelp fishing line, were used as containers for oulachen grease, seal oil, and later, even molasses. The cured tubes, filled with liquid, could be tied off at the end, coiled loosely, and hung up for storage or laid in the canoe (Curtis 1915; Turner 1998). One rather unusual application of kelp was by the Koskimo (Gusgimukw), from Quatsino, to bind the heads of their infants, giving their heads an elongated shape, which was said to be a sign of importance (U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton 1998). Two plant species whose strong stem fibres were critically important sources of cordage are stinging nettle and Indian-hemp (figure 6-6). The former was used mostly on the coast and the latter mostly in the Interior Plateau, southward to California. The stems of both were harvested at maturity, and the fibres were extracted and then twisted into a strong two-ply or multi-ply twine, used for fishing lines, fishnets, and many other purposes. In the interior, from Tsilhqot’in territory northward, people sometimes used the smaller relative of Indian-hemp, spreading dogbane (Apocynum androsaemifolium), for its tough fibre. The stems are shorter and therefore the lengths of fibre obtainable were not as long, but they were nonetheless highly valued. As recorded by archaeologist Harlan I. Smith, they were used to make cordage for snares and dip nets, some of these quite large. One of Leslie Main Johnson’s (pers. comm., 2011) consultants used to call it “nylon plant” because of the strength of its fibres.25 On the northern coast, the Haida, Ts’msyen, and Gitxsan made twine from fireweed stem fibres, as well as from stinging nettle (Johnson 1997; Turner 2004a). These species are all rhizomatous herbaceous perennials that often form dense patches. People tended productive patches of stinging nettle and Indian-hemp near village sites, harvesting the stems in the fall after the leaves began to die back. Some people say the best time to harvest stinging nettle is when the first snow of winter hits the mountains, around the end of September or early October; others say it should be harvested in August before it becomes “too hard” (Luke Fowler, cited in H.I. Smith 1997). Indian-hemp leaves turn golden yellow and start to droop when the stalks are at the optimal harvesting stage. If the stems of either are left too late in the season, their fibre starts to deteriorate and the twine made from them will not be strong enough. Stinging nettle, because of its stinging properties, must be handled with care, but after the leaves are removed, the stinging hairs on the stems can be flattened and eliminated by rubbing the stems with some rough material. The process of preparing the fibre is similar for both nettle and Indian-hemp, except that stinging nettle has thicker nodes along the stem (where the leaves emerge),

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6-6 | Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), a major fibre plant of the Interior Plateau.

which have to be scraped off and worked more carefully as the fibre is separated from the brittle inner part of the stalks. Usually the stems are cut or broken at the base and then split in half lengthwise and allowed to dry slightly on a rack or by hanging up in bundles. Then, after a few days, the remaining leaves are removed and the fibrous outer tissues are pulled away from the central, pithy, and

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brittle part of the stalk, which is broken away and discarded. The fibrous lengths can then be dried, to be further cleaned and processed later. Sometimes the fibres were soaked in water for a time to help separate out any remaining pieces of pithy stem and skin tissue and then gently pounded or beaten to soften and purify the fibres, which can be twisted or spun into twine. As the twine is spun, new lengths of fibre can be spliced in at intervals to make an infinitely long, strong, and durable cordage, to be used for sewing mats, stitching clothing, or making fishing lines and nets. Sometimes two-ply strings were spun together to produce a stronger, more durable four-ply string (Teit 1909). Threads of stinging nettle or Indian-hemp were usually spun on the naked thigh using the flat of one’s hand (Teit 1909; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). An experienced spinner can create 2 to 3 centimetres of fine rolled twine with every thrust of the hand.26 On the Northwest Coast these fibres might also be spun like dog wool or goat hair, using a wooden spindle and spindle whorl, a round disk of bigleaf maple or other wood, or even whalebone, carved with special designs.27 Balls of nettle twine and Indian-hemp fibre and twine were high-value trade commodities. Indian-hemp twine, which is mainly a product of the interior, was sometimes brought down to the coast and was even traded over to Vancouver Island. For both nettle and Indian-hemp, the quantities of fibre produced – and the numbers of stalks required even for a length of cordage a few metres long, let alone a full fishing net – were immense (M.K. Anderson 2005; see also chapter 11). As noted previously, cordage and rope were also made from inner bark fibres of western redcedar, yellow-cedar, cottonwood, various types of willows, silverberry, and Rocky Mountain maple, as well as the outer bark fibre of bitter cherry. The famous Chilkat mountain goat wool blankets of the Chilkat tribe of Alaska Tlingit,28 said to have originated with the Ts’msyen of the Skeena River, are woven with a core of yellow-cedar inner bark in the warp and a weft of mountain goat wool, some of it dyed with minerals and plant dyes (Stewart 1984). Ditidaht and possibly other peoples sometimes wove cottonwood bast fibre in with yellow-cedar bark for rope (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). As well, entire young branches, or withes, of western redcedar, Sitka spruce, willows, and hazelnut, as well as vines like orange honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa) and clematis (Clematis spp.) where available, were twisted, wood, bark, and all, to make ropes of various thickness for lashing house rafters, constructing suspension bridges and rafts, anchoring canoes, making fishnets, and multiple other purposes. Redcedar withes make a particularly strong rope. Stl’atl’imx elder Alec Peters (pers. comm., 1984) of Mount Currie described how his father used cedar-withe rope to tie up fence railings, which outlasted his neighbour’s barbed wire fence by far. The Mount Currie Lil’wat (Stl’atl’imx) also made ropes from hazelnut sucker shoots. These branches, both cedar and hazelnut, were twisted over and over while still attached to the tree or bush, until all the longitudinal fibres

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6-7  |  Sam Mitchell, Stl’atl’imx plant expert, of Xaxl’ep, demonstrates the twisting of “rope willow” (Salix exigua) for making rope.

were separated, and then used for tying, with or without the bark still attached. Sandbar willow (Salix exigua) stems were used by the Fraser River Stl’atl’imx in the same way, being twisted while still growing and then cut at the base,29 as demonstrated by Sam Mitchell (pers. comm., 1984), who noted that this willow is called “rope plant” (nəxwtín-az’) in the Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc language (figure 6-7). Roots of western redcedar, spruce, and other species were also used for cordage, as well as for basketry and bark canoe construction (table 6-3). Fibrous animal products, including sinew from the backs of whales, deer, elk, and other animals and strips of animal skin, were used for tying and binding, as well as for bowstrings and snowshoe webbing. Wool of mountain goats and specially bred dogs (Crockford 1997) were other types of fibrous material, as were duck feathers and down, which were sometimes spun with other fibres in making “yarn” for blankets, as was the fluffy seed pappus, or “down,” of cattails and fireweed (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 2011).

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Mats and Matting

Aside from cordage, mats are among the most basic and possibly among the oldest woven or sewn items. Mats served many purposes and were an essential part of almost any household. Layers of grasses, leaves, sheets of bark, fern fronds, or evergreen boughs were probably the most common early type of underlay for sitting on, lying on, or laying and drying food on, to be simply discarded after use. Skunk-cabbage, maple, and thimbleberry leaves have often been used in such a capacity, right up to the present day. Vegetative matting has sometimes been found in archaeological contexts, as in the multiple cache pits of various ages in the floor of the McGregor Cave site near the mouth of the Palouse River in southeastern Washington, some of which were still partially lined with bundles of grass and sedge, sagebrush bark, wood, and flat stones, as well as woven matting, along with the remains of fish and meat (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Hemlock-bough matting and lining has also been found in abundance, such as in the acorn-processing pits of the Sunken Village site on Sauvie Island (Croes et al. 2007). Interior Plateau peoples, including the Tsilhqot’in, often used an underlay of “timbergrass,” or pinegrass (Calamagrostis rubescens), as a surface for drying soapberries.30 More intact, transportable mats have obvious advantages over loose layers of plant material and tended to be more permanent and reusable. Throughout the study area, people used different fibrous materials – leaves and stems of herbaceous species and strips of bark of various trees and shrubs – to create such mats (Teit 1909; Turner 1998; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Bielawski (2007) suggests that the earliest peoples entering Alaska from Beringia at the end of the Pleistocene may have used beach grass mats (of Leymus mollis and other spp.) in their houses of driftwood and mammoth bone, pointing out that the Alutiiq and Unangan (Aleut) peoples still make these mats. Grass stems, or culms, of common reed (Phragmites australis) or giant wildrye (Leymus cinereus) were twined together with string or bark fibre for berry-drying mats (figure 6-8), as were willow withes and other slender twigs. For much of the central and southern coast and the Interior Plateau (as well as the Great Basin and California), however, the most common mat-making materials were leaves of cattail and stems of tule, or roundstem bulrush. Both of these materials, being from aquatic plants, are relatively strong and fibrous but have spongy pith tissues in the leaves (cattail) and stalks (tule), making the resulting mats strong yet soft and lightweight. Another advantage of these materials is that these plants (like the stinging nettle, fireweed, and Indian-hemp harvested for their fibre) are herbaceous perennials and can therefore be harvested from the same location sustainably over long periods of time since harvesting is done in the late summer or early fall after the plants have reached maturity and just before they start to die back for the winter.31 This means that an almost limitless

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6-8  |  Mabel Joe, Nlaka’pamux of Shulus, with a berry-drying mat she made of common reed grass (Phragmites australis) from Nicola Lake, BC .

supply of cattails or tules – capable of producing tens of thousands of leaves or stalks – is available from a good patch, and some of these patches would have been accessed repeatedly over generations. Some of the tule stalks and cattail leaves from these prime sites can grow very tall – 2 to 2.5 metres is not uncommon – and this meant that mats of a substantial width could be made.32 Once harvested, the cattail leaves or tule stems were tied in large bundles, with care taken not to bend them. These bundles would be carried by canoe or by foot to another location for processing. Separated and spread out to dry for several days, they could then be stored for winter work or soaked for immediate use. The soaked elements were laid out lengthwise, alternating top and bottom to create an even mat. The mats were made either by twining or sewing, or by a combination of these, and were sometimes made of double thickness. Using string – often made from the lower edge fibres of the cattail leaves or from a different material like nettle fibre, Indian-hemp, or the inner bark of willow – the leaves or stems would be bound together by sewing or twining at intervals, starting at one end or at the middle depending on the style of mat being made. For sewing mats, a long, flattened, slightly triangular-shaped wooden needle was used, made of a hard, straight wood – generally from the sucker shoots of oceanspray, mock-orange, or saskatoon berry – with the “eye” of the needle at its tip. The needle is inserted edge to edge through the cattail leaves or through the widest part of the tule stems, one after another, until many are threaded onto the needle – to make up the width of the mat. Then a special grooved implement called a “mat creaser” is used to crimp the leaves or stems over the needle in order to prevent them from splitting when threaded.33 At this point a length of twine is inserted into the eye at the tip of the needle, and the needle is drawn back through the same channel it made with its insertion, drawing the twine with it. This process is repeated at intervals along the length of the mat. These sewn mats are very smooth and clean-looking because the twine is hidden inside the leaf or stem tissues. The ends are finished by combinations of twining and plaiting or braiding and might be repaired, as required, with other materials at a later time. Mats were also made by simply twining the elements together at intervals with two-ply string, keeping the leaves or stems tightly aligned, a process also used in making large harvesting baskets and storage bags from cattail or tule. Cattail and tule mats, because they are aligned longitudinally, can be rolled up and carried, as well as easily stored. They had a multitude of applications: for drying berries, covering cooking pits, and containing food in earth ovens (older mats), for mattresses and for sitting on in the home or canoe, as room dividers and insulation for outer walls of houses, and as the walls and roofing for lodges, smokehouses, and temporary summer and camping shelters (Teit 1909; Turner 1998).

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6-9  |  Cattail basket for wapato, made by Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas, in the style of her grandmothers. About 40 cm deep, 40 cm across, and 50 cm long.

Many people were making and using these mats up into the 1920s and 1930s. Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2002) watched her grandmothers making cattail mats and baskets, as well as making “skirts” of cattail leaves, twined along the top with the bark of green willow (Salix glauca and other spp.), for the walls of small structures used in smoking and drying salmon. Her grandmothers also twined large cattail bags for carrying wapato tubers (figure 6-9) and woven trays of cattail leaves or the inner bark of maple to contain black tree lichen and other foods being pit-cooked in order to protect them from dirt and debris.34 Ditidaht elder John Thomas (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983) (not related to Mary) remembered sleeping in a house at Clo-oose on the west coast of Vancouver Island in a room with walls lined with his grandmother’s cattail and tule mats.35 Saanich elder Elsie Claxton (pers. comm., 1994) also recalled cattail and tule mats being made and used extensively in her family. Instead

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of Indian-hemp or stinging nettle string, the Saanich mat makers of her childhood used cotton strings from the hop fields of the Fraser Valley or the Yakima area, where they went to pick hops, as the thread in sewing or twining their tule mats.36 Because of their soft tissues and relative fragility, few of these mats remain, except in museum collections. More durable woven mats made with strips of the inner bark of cedar were, and are, used all along the Northwest Coast. Maple bark (especially Acer glabrum) and other types of bark were also used for mats in some places. These bark mats were created with various types of checkerboard weaving, and sometimes twining, and featured decorative elements introduced by coloured strands, dyed red with red alder bark or black by various means.37 Different styles of weaving also introduced decorative patterns. (Cedar bark as a material will be described further under basketry.) Bark Sheets

Many types of trees have strong yet somewhat flexible bark, which can be removed in rectangular sheets from freshly felled trees or from the trunks of standing, living trees. In the latter case, people were usually careful to remove bark from only part of the tree’s circumference or to peel off only the outermost layer of bark so that they would not kill the tree, unless they intended to use the wood for fuel or some other purpose. Makeshift bark baskets, berry containers, and cache pit liners were often crafted from bark sheets as needed, right on site. For example, at the Indian Heaven huckleberry site in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington, thousands of scarred western redcedar trees from which people peeled bark for improvised berry baskets date back up to three centuries (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). The Secwepemc and other Interior Plateau peoples also made vessels for cooking and storage from western redcedar bark. A piece of bark about 1.3 metres long was cut off of the tree, folded, and tied around the top with a twisted “red willow” (red-osier dogwood) branch, and then the joining edges were stitched together with cedar or spruce root. These vessels were used for boiling fish and other foods. Cedar bark was also used for lining the bottom of canoes and the insides of food storage caches. Additionally, whole slabs of cedar bark were used for roofing – both for old-style pithouses and for temporary shelters and cabins – as well as for siding. The Haida were particularly well known for the quality of their cedar bark sheets or panels, which were cut from large, standing western redcedar trees. The panels were skewered transversely with straight salmonberry sticks to flatten them and then dried and stacked, to be used as roofing on permanent houses, as siding, and as covering for temporary shelters. Cedar-bark pieces were also used to make boxes, such as for herring eggs, and temporary buckets, as well as canoe bailers (Rath 1981; Newcombe 1897–1916; Stewart 1984). Chief

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Weah (Willie Matthews), of Massett, described how the Haida harvested and prepared redcedar bark for roofing in the traditional way: They go to cedar trees about two feet [60 centimetres] in diameter near Naden Harbour. They cut all around the base of the tree with a chisel. Then they cut down a young cedar tree and, using the branches as a ladder, they climb up about seven feet [over 2 metres] above the first cut and cut around. Then they make a cut from top to bottom straight down and peel the bark off in a large sheet, about four feet [1.3 metres] by seven feet. They bundle about three together and carry them down to the canoe. The bundles are real heavy. To make them flat, they thread salmonberry sticks through the inner bark in several places, pile the bark up, and weigh it down with stones. These sheets are used for roofing or for covering things in canoes. (Cited in Turner 2004a, 84) Cedar-bark roofing was formerly traded to the Ts’msyen and the Nisga’a of the Nass River at a price of one blanket per two sheets of bark, according to John Sky (cited in Swanton 1905, 127; see also Turner and Wilson 2008). In the case of birch bark, only the outer layer of bark is removed so that, with care, lengths can be peeled off around the entire trunk without killing the tree since the inner bark remains to protect the growing cambium and vascular tissues. Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994; see also Turner 2008) explained the process from a Secwepemc perspective: “When it’s ready, all you have to do is cut – and you just touch it a little and it just pops right off ... And you have to be very careful that you don’t cut through that thin pulp that covers the tree – if you cut right through the sap will start to come out of it and you deprive the tree of the sap ... Once the bark is taken off it will not grow back but that pulp will turn into a hard surface and that protects the tree; the pulp, the juice will still go up and make leaves and it keeps the tree alive.” Birch-bark sheets, which are tough yet flexible, are used not only for making canoes, storage and cooking baskets, trays, baby cradles, quivers, and other sewn or stitched containers but also as flattened sheets, for food preparation and storage, and for lining cache pits, a practice known from birch-bark remains in archaeological contexts (Croft and Mathewes forthcoming; Lepofsky 2004; Nicholas, Bonneau, and Westfall forthcoming; Wollstonecroft and Baptiste forthcoming). Since birch bark tends to curl when removed from the tree, it has to be flattened as soon as it is harvested, usually by rolling it crosswise to the grain and tying it in this position until it dries. Then, to work on it, for making baskets or other items, it can be soaked in water and will regain its flexibility. The Secwepemc and other Interior Plateau peoples also made large, temporary baskets of cottonwood, white pine, and white and Engelmann spruce bark, which they used frequently for cooking berries, soaking skins, and other purposes. These vessels were barrel- or funnel-shaped, with the smooth side of the 380 | part two – development

bark turned in – or sometimes “inside out” – and stitched together with spruce root, using needles and awls (Teit 1909). Very few of these containers remain; most were not intended to last but rather to be quickly fashioned and discarded at the end of the season. Ladles, bailers, quivers, and spoons were also made from bark sheets, folded and shaped as needed. People also used sheets of bark to make canoes and more permanent and carefully constructed containers and vessels, as discussed later in this chapter. Other Plant Materials A host of other less easily categorized materials have played a significant role in plant technologies in northwestern North America. Tree Pitch

Tree pitch, sometimes referred to as oleoresin, is a complex mixture of resins, gums, and essential oils, which are sticky and aromatic and often have antibiotic properties.38 The biological function of resins, gums, and the pitch they form is to seal wounds on a tree and protect it from disease or insect attacks. Coniferous trees, especially those in the pine family such as pines, spruces, hemlock, true firs, and Douglas-fir, tend to produce large quantities of pitch, particularly when cut, burned, or injured in some way. Their pitch is usually quite aromatic due to traces of essential or volatile oils. People have used pitch as waterproofing and caulking and as glue, as well as in some medicinal preparations since it tends to have antibiotic properties. Pitch is also chewed for pleasure as “gum,” sometimes being used afterward for waterproofing. John Thomas recalled as a boy going out to harvest Sitka spruce pitch with his family. The children chewed the pitch for some time until it was soft, and then his father collected the chewed pitch for sealing baskets or canoes (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983; see also Turner 2004a). There are many traditional narratives about pitch and its use for chewing or waterproofing, some depicting pitch as a human being, Pitch Man (or in some cases, Pitch Boy), who was vulnerable to melting in the hot sun (see chapter 12). Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm., 1994), whose grandfather used spruce pitch to waterproof the cedar canoes that he made, described how the pitch was collected: My grandfather goes in the woods and looks for [a] good-sized spruce tree, and put a notch in it. So they put a bark in it [at the notch]. That pitch will drip onto the bark, [or] on a leaf. In the summer they use the skunk-cabbage leaves. And that’s the “waxed paper,” the old people use. It doesn’t stick on there [on the leaf], ’cause there’s some kind of a wax in it, I guess ... And when they think they got enough [pitch] ... they roll it in a ball. If it is put in a crack on a canoe, they roll it until it softens up. Plant Use in Technology  |  381

And that wood has to be dry. And they fill up the [crack] ... push it right down in with ... a stick. And after that, they go get the ends of the spruce branches, and they twist it. And they drill a hole and put it through there and tie a knot. And they put a yew-wood wedge there, to close it up when that pitch is in there, to tighten it up. Spruce pitch was also used to glue and waterproof the wrapping of cherry (Prunus emarginata) bark around the joints of Ditidaht, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Makah whaling harpoons as well as other kinds of implement joints. Adam Dick also used heated spruce pitch to coat the lashings around the joints of a berry-drying rack he made with redcedar splints. Harvesting pitch from living trees usually leaves distinctive scars – punctures or cuts in the bark of varying depth depending on the method of harvesting – many of which are reopened year after year. Some individual trees are kept as pitch sources for generations. Sometimes the trees are burned under the pitch wound to help melt the pitch and make it easier to collect; these trees may be identified by the burned bark around a pitch-covered cut in the trunk, usually at about shoulder height. Plants for Cleansing, Cosmetics, and Other Miscellaneous Uses

Various plants were used in many practical applications, such as for wiping the slime off of fish, covering food, stuffing pillows, chinking houses, and so forth. Bigleaf maple leaves, for example, were sometimes used to line pits for curing salmon eggs, and thimbleberry leaves were fashioned into little berry “cups” and cornucopias to hold juicy berries (including thimbleberries themselves). Mary Thomas (2001) recalled that Secwepemc women used to prepare the large, soft leaves of coltsfoot (Petasites frigidus var. sagittatus) for sanitary napkins by first drying them and then stripping out the larger veins, leaving the softer, cottony leaf tissue.39 Ida Jones, of the Ditidaht Nation, used to assist her grandfather, who was an Indian doctor, in his practice. She recalled that he always had her rub her hands with leaves and tops of pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) to soften her skin when she was touching his patients (cited in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Sphagnum moss was prized for baby diapers (Johnson Gottesfeld and Vitt 1996), as was cattail seed fluff.40 A number of plant materials are used to remove pitch or as a soap or detergent in washing. The Secwepemc, for example, used a mixture of birch leaves, children’s urine, and a kind of clay or washing soda obtained from certain lakes as soap (Teit 1909). The Nlaka’pamux used the inner bark of cottonwood for a similar purpose (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). The Spokan used many different cleansing plants, including the leaves of mock-orange and sticky geranium (Geranium viscossissimum), snowberries (Symphoricarpos albus) and their branches, buckbrush (Ceanothus sanguineus), and blue clematis (Clematis columbiana) (J.A. Ross 2011). 382 | part two – development

It is difficult in some cases to separate material applications from medicinal and spiritual uses of plants. This is especially true for many aromatic plants, including conifer boughs, such as subalpine fir, which were, and still are, used for spiritual and medicinal cleansing. The plants are rubbed on the skin and used in bathing solutions, which is said to protect against wild animals by masking human scent. A number of aromatic plants are also said to bring luck in fishing and hunting, presumably by masking the human odour when rubbed on the skin or when used to wash fishing gear, spears, or guns (Turner 2009; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Devil’s-club and the very poisonous false hellebore are other examples of plants used in this way for cleansing the body as well as purifying hunting and fishing gear. Secwepemc hunters sometimes washed their dogs’ noses with a solution of trapper’s tea to make them more sensitive to the scent of game (R.E. Ignace and Ignace forthcoming). In a converse situation, one narrative recounts how a young woman of high standing washed herself in a devil’s-club solution to hide her scent from a dog (M.L. Beck 1989). Fishers and hunters, as well as women going out berry picking, were careful to wash themselves well with such plant materials, and this was said to keep them safe, both physically and spiritually. The role of aromatic plants in purification and medicinal cleansing is discussed further in the next chapter. Aromatic plants and plant substances were also used as insect repellents, either rubbed directly on the skin, used as a wash for the skin, hair, or bedding, or burned as a smudge against mosquitoes and biting flies. Yarrow, big sagebrush, junipers, and wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) are all examples of plants used in this way. More recently, some of these same plants have been used to wash sheep and other livestock in order to get rid of ticks and other pests (Turner 1998, 2009; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Gilbert Solomon (pers. comm., 2004) of the Tsilhqot’in Nation noted that when horses see and smell smoke from burning juniper boughs, they all come over because they know there will be no mosquitoes or horseflies in the vicinity. Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1997) remembered her grandmother preparing a tin can with holes in it, hung from a wire handle, which she filled with sagebrush, wild bergamot, or yarrow and set alight, like an incense burner. She used to hang it where she was working to keep mosquitoes at bay. Mary and her family also used to rub a mixture of animal fat and subalpine fir pitch on their skin as a mosquito repellent when they were up in the mountains. Plants with hollow stems, or lengths that were easily hollowed out, were used for conduits and other purposes. The use of bull kelp stipes as containers for storing grease and other liquids and as a “pipe” for water in pit-cooking has already been mentioned. The stipes were also used for blowing under water to attract seals from their rookeries (Bouchard and Kennedy 1977a). People are said to have used the hollow stems of reed grasses or of horsetail (Equisetum hyemale) for breathing under water when hiding from enemies. Cow-parsnip and angelica (Angelica genuflexa) stalks and hollowed-out elderberry stems41 were Plant Use in Technology  |  383

sometimes used as plugs for sealskin floats, whistles,42 elk-calls, peashooters, and in various other ways (Friedman 2005; Teit 1909). Mary Thomas (2001) described an unusual application for cow-parsnip and the related angelica stalks: “I can remember when we were little, we used to go with our grandparents up on the mountainside and there was a stream with brook trout in it. We didn’t have any bait, and our grandpa used to go to these tubular plants and split it [the stalk] down the middle and you’ll find a little white grub in there ... almost like a wood worm. And he used to gather that for bait to fish for the brook trout.” Children’s Games and Toys with Plants

Like the peashooters of hollowed-out elderberry stems (used with “ammunition” of kelp plugs or little seeds), many plants provided entertainment for children. For example, Margaret Siwallace remembered back to the early 1900s, when she and the other Nuxalk children would go down to the flats at the Bella Coola River estuary to play. They would form themselves into two teams, and one of the teams would pick a paintbrush (Castilleja unalaschcensis) flower from the tidal marsh. Waving it around in front of the other team while making funny gestures and grimaces, they would try to make any member of the opposite team laugh or even smile. As they waved the flower around, they sang a little song: “Ay, ya’a, tsayamuus! Ay, ya, tsayamuus!” (cited in Turner 1973, 210).43 There are all kinds of throwing contests, like those children everywhere play, with different kinds of balls – made from tree fungus, giant puffballs, pinecones, skunk-cabbage leaves that are rolled up and tied, or wrapped-up cattail leaves or tule stalks. Spears fashioned from grass stalks, salmonberry sticks, or fireweed stems also featured in games. “Targets” were the flower heads of cow-parsnip, sticks, rocks, or kelp bulbs fixed in the sand. Children up and down the coast played many different games with seaweeds. Dried stipes of the short, tough-stemmed kelps like Lessoniopsis littoralis became sticks in a favourite beach-hockey game played along the fine whitesand beaches of the west coast of Vancouver Island by Ditidaht and Nuu-chahnulth children. The “puck” was a ball carved from the dense holdfast of the kelp. Children also like to play with the small, inflated bladders of giant kelp and sea wrack (Fucus spp.), which will pop if stepped on or thrown into a fire. The waterfilled sacs of Halosaccion become squirt guns (the Haida name means “nipple”), and bull kelp bulbs were also used for a variety of games and toys, from whips to musical instruments (Turner 1998, 2004a; Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Children enjoyed flowers and plants of many kinds. They sucked the sweet nectar from salmonberry and paintbrush flowers, imitating bees and hummingbirds, and they sometimes picked flowers to bring indoors. The fleshy leaves of rattlesnake plantain orchid, called kan-páwa (balloon) and other variants by

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Lil’wat (Stl’atl’imx) children, were carefully rubbed between the thumb and finger until the top and bottom layers separated, allowing one to blow into the stem end and inflate the leaf into a balloon – a practice also used in preparing the leaf as a medicinal poultice (see chapter 7). Tsilhqot’in elder Mabel Solomon (pers. comm., 2004) demonstrated how to make a perfect loon’s head from a blue lupine (Lupinus arcticus) flower by peeling away the wing and banner petals. She also described how Tsilhqot’in children would make small replicas of dried salmon hanging over a stick by taking a fireweed stalk and bending the tapered leaves so they would hang down like the hanging fish; from these, they fashioned toy salmon-drying racks to play with. Like the fireweed salmon-drying racks, many children’s toys were actually just smaller versions of the regular materials and implements that grownups made and used. Child-sized bows and arrows, small berry baskets, little spoons, and miniature canoes and paddles are all toys recalled by elders from their childhoods. Ditidaht elder John Thomas remembered travelling by canoe with his family from Clo-oose to Victoria along southwestern Vancouver Island and stopping to camp at Whiffen Spit, at the entrance to Sooke Harbour, where he and the other boys held races with their toy cedar canoes in the quiet waters inside the spit. Clan Chief Adam Dick’s (pers. comm., 2011) grandfather made him a special toy canoe, which Adam as a child pulled around the shallow water of the bay with a long stick, sometimes filling the canoe with clams as the passengers. Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) remembered being given a tiny woven basket, which she filled up with bright red bunchberries (Cornus canadensis). Mary Thomas’s (pers. comm., 2001) grandmother, in Secwepemc country, always made her and her sister little berry baskets to fill up and then give away to their parents or another relative, teaching the girls generosity from an early age. Every year, too, their grandmother made them little dolls of bundled strips of willow (Salix glauca and other spp.) bark, with tied-off head, arms, and legs, dressed in buckskin dresses. Toy bows have been found in archaeological sites from Yakutat to Ozette (Crowell, Steffian, and Pullar 2001; de Laguna et al. 1964; Friedman 2005; Moss et al. 2004; Whelchel 2005), but other children’s toys might be more difficult to identify in archaeological contexts. Dyes, Pigments, and Stains

People used colours for a variety of purposes, partially to achieve decorative effects in mats, baskets, and other cultural items but also for camouflaging fishing nets and to aid in preserving materials by treating them with tannincontaining substances. The most common plant dye, both on the coast and for interior peoples, was alder bark. On the coast, mainly red alder (Alnus rubra) was used, and in the interior, mountain alder and its relatives (A. viridis, A. incana).

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Alder bark, depending on its age, thickness, moisture content, and other variables, turns bright orange when it is cut and exposed to air. When boiled and allowed to steep in water for a day or more, it produces a dye coloured deep rust, bright orange-red, or dark brown. Whatever people want to colour, such as redcedar inner bark, cherry bark, or stinging nettle fibre, they soak in this solution, sometimes with a mordant of urine. The Secwepemc and other Interior Plateau peoples used alderbark for dyeing gambling sticks, quills, hair, feathers, and grasses for basketry, as well as for colouring dressed skins and buckskin clothes (Teit 1909). Wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina and related spp.), a brilliant greenish-yellow lichen commonly growing on ponderosa pine and other conifer species in the interior, imparts a bright yellow colour to basketry materials and other substances and is perhaps best known for producing the yellow colour in the famous Chilkat blankets of yellow-cedar bark and mountain goat wool. Wolf lichen was, and still is, used to colour feathers, porcupine quills, wool, and horsehair,44 sometimes strengthened with the bright yellow colouring from the inner bark of tall Oregon-grape. This latter material is also used on its own to dye wool and basketry materials, such as beargrass leaves, by Quileute and some other basket weavers (Turner 1998). A few other plant dyes, such as the barks of western hemlock and flowering dogwood, were used to produce dark brown or black for colouring fishnets or other purposes. Berry juices, from salal, Oregon-grape, blueberries (Vaccinium spp.), and the inedible black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata), were used to stain basketry materials and wood as well as for face painting and buckskin decoration. Flowers like delphinium (Delphinium nuttallianum) in the Okanagan area were also sometimes used for stains but tended to fade quickly. Interior peoples used the bright scarlet seed heads of strawberry blite (Chenopodium capitatum) as a face paint and to colour buckskin, but this colour, too, fades rapidly. Decoration for coiled cedar-root baskets and the rims of birch-bark baskets was achieved by overlaying or weaving in strips of wild cherry (Prunus pensylvanica, P. emarginata) bark and/or split-open grass stems to form geometric or symbolic patterns. The grass stems (e.g., of reed canarygrass, Phalaris arundinacea) were cut while still immature,45 tied in bundles, cured by boiling or smoking over a fire, and then hung in the sun. For use, they were cut into lengths, soaked, split, and turned inside out so that the lustrous white insides of the stems were exposed on the baskets. Cherry bark, harvested from the trunk and branches of the tree in horizontal sheets in a similar manner to birch bark, can be scraped with the edge of a knife on the outside to enhance the shiny reddish-varnished colour. To provide contrast, basket makers dyed some of the bark black.46 For birch-bark baskets, women sometimes etched designs onto the outside surface, which is smooth and light brown; the white outer bark of the tree usually forms the inside of the basket.

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Pigments – powdered coloured materials that were mixed with a medium such as salmon or herring eggs, the resin of cottonwood buds, or a mixture of oil and pitch to make paint – were mostly of mineral origin, the best known being iron oxide earth, or red ochre, which occurs only in some places and was widely traded. Many of the ancient petroglyphs, or rock paintings, seen around the study region were created with this type of paint. Copper earth or clay produced a turquoise pigment, as seen particularly in Heiltsuk totem poles, and white earth, or limestone, was also used as a pigment in face and body paints and for decorating wood and other objects. Indian paint fungus (Echinodontium tinctorium),47 which grows on hemlock and some other conifers and has a reddish cortex, was roasted until dry and then powdered to make a red pigment for face painting as well as wood and rock painting. Charcoal is another important pigment, used to make black paint for the face or for rock or wood. Two plants in particular – devil’s-club and black hawthorn – were used to make charcoal for a special spiritual face paint used in ceremonial contexts, said to provide protection for anyone wearing it (see chapter 11). Charcoal made from old, burned cattail mats was mixed with herring eggs to make a protective paint for coating the insides of canoes, as well as other wooden objects (see Boas 1966). Buckskins and other animal skins were, and are, tanned in various ways. Sometimes certain types of tree fungus or rotten wood were used, being soaked with and rubbed into the hides as they were stretched and scraped. Smoking hides in a slow smudge of rotten wood, cones of pine and other coniferous trees, or other plant materials was a widespread technique, and probably very old, but hides, like plant materials, do not preserve well in most archaeological contexts. Plant Materials and Technological Development Houses and Shelters

Having a place of shelter from cold, rainy, snowy, stormy, or excessively hot weather is one of the fundamental needs that the earliest peoples would have faced. Caves and rockshelters, and small-scale structures of driftwood, willow withe, or mammoth bone, would probably have served as the original shelters of early peoples in the northern region of entry into North America.48 In any ice-free forested regions, and with the return of coniferous trees and forests to the deglaciated landscape, local trees and tree branches would soon have been adopted as a main component of shelters and houses. In northwestern North America one of the earliest documented built structures was a windbreak at the Paulina Lake site in central Oregon, with support posts that date to the Early Holocene, about 11,000 years ago (Ames and Maschner 1999). Along the Columbia River in north-central Washington, rings of cobbles represent remains of conical or domelike shelters or structures, most

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around 5,000 to 4,000 years old, but one, at a site north of Chelan, is as old as 7,500 years.49 Semi-subterranean houses, or pithouses, which were dug into the ground and had a wood-framed roof structure covered with boughs or mats and earth, were possibly the earliest form of permanent dwelling in North America since they are known to have been in widespread use in ancient times both on this continent and in northeastern Asia (Ames and Maschner 1999).50 Pithouses – which show up archaeologically as house pit depressions with associated features and artifacts – occur in a few very early sites in the study region, and furthermore, even where there are large numbers, it appears in most cases that only one or two were occupied together at any one time in the Early and Mid Holocene periods (Ames and Maschner 1999). Pithouse dwellings appear more commonly in the Interior Plateau region between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago, and people were living in pithouse villages – some very large – throughout the this region right up until – and well after – Europeans arrived in northwestern North America.51 These pithouse settlements of the Interior Plateau indicate the start of a semisedentary way of life, termed the Plateau Pithouse Tradition, with a definite terrestrial orientation for Plateau peoples (Ames and Maschner 1999). There are many good archaeological and ethnographic descriptions of pithouses (Ames and Maschner 1999; Hayden 1997; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Lepofsky 2002; Matson and Magne 2007). These structures were built in round, square, or rectangular configurations, and some were dug in as deep as about 2 metres and were often 8 to 10 metres across. The vertical walls were earthen or lined with benches or matting, and a superstructure of poles converged at the apex, which was roofed over with smaller poles, brush, bark, or mats and was often topped with sod or earth. The roof poles were often supported with a circle of posts extending from the floor inside the house. Some indigenous elders living into the twenty-first century resided in pithouses as children. These were sophisticated architectural endeavours, each one reflecting strong communal effort and careful design for a structurally sound and safe dwelling.52 People would have resided in the pithouses mostly as extended families over the winter months, from about November until early March, when they would have ventured out to their fishing camps and harvest sites around their territories, where they lived in more temporary shelters such as lean-tos of poles, mats, and boughs (see chapter 8). The usual entryway to the pithouse was through an opening in the centre of the roof, via a notched log or ladder, but according to Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001), there was usually also an entrance at the side, to be used by women for access and for bringing hot rocks into the house to heat it in the winter. Some pithouses show evidence of successive occupation, and many pithouse villages, while occupied over millennia, had a whole series of houses, some built overtop of earlier ones, with only some occupied simultaneously (Hayden 1997).

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Pithouse village sites at Moses Lake and Priest Rapids on the Columbia River, for example, had from twenty to over thirty house depressions in one location, but probably not all of these were used at any one time. Many pithouse sites are rich in artifacts, with features like hearths and cache pits for food storage, showing evidence of long-ago activities: food preparation; basket, mat, and cordage making; and tool making and repairing. Items such as pendants of marine shell and dentalium at places like Alpowa pithouse village in southeastern Washington (near Clarkston) show evidence of vibrant trade networks connecting to the coast thousands of years ago (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). North of the Interior Plateau, among the Dene (Athabaskans), people constructed a different type of log dwelling. In some cases, as in parts of Tsilhqot’in territory, these may have been used simultaneously with pithouses, but they probably represent a later influx of Dene peoples into previously Salishan-speaking areas of the Interior Plateau (Matson and Magne 2007). For the Northwest Coast region, the oldest structure documented is at Hatzic Rock53 on the lower Fraser River above the location of the city of Vancouver. This structure, dating to about 5,000 years ago, features postholes, a gravel bench, and several hearth features. Other, similar structures from about this time have been documented nearby in the lower Fraser region. As noted, pithouses were likely the first type of permanent dwellings on the Northwest Coast. The rectangular plank houses so characteristic of the Northwest Coast in the Late Holocene represent an evident shift from the earlier semi-subterranean pithouse-type dwellings, mirroring similar shifts in the American Southwest and elsewhere. Ames and Maschner (1999) suggest that some of the earlier shell middens from coastal sites may have been left by people living in pithouses rather than cedar houses (see also Lepofsky, Schaepe, et al. 2009). Plank and post houses of western redcedar start to appear in the archaeological record, although sparsely, between about 3,300 and 2,500 years ago, after which they become more predominant.54 Like the pithouses, these cedar houses also often included an excavated interior portion, but their superstructure was constructed of vertical posts holding massive horizontal beams and rafters, with the walls and roof planked in various configurations. Large rectangular sheets of western redcedar bark were probably used in a similar way to wooden planks for roofs and siding. The house planks were usually fixed in a temporary way so that they could be shifted according to the weather or removed altogether and transported to seasonal camps for use in more temporary shelters. Settlements of cedar post and plank houses from around 3,000 years ago were probably similar to those of the contemporary interior pithouse clusters, apparently representing two or three houses with ten to thirty occupants in total, located near winter stores and food-processing sites. Woodworking of all kinds flourished over this period, beginning in part with the creation of bentwood, or kerfed, cedar boxes some 3,500 years ago or earlier, which apparently marginally

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preceded rectangular plank house construction (Ames and Maschner 1999). In fact, the proliferation of plank houses and villages from around three millennia ago seems to parallel a notable expansion in monumental western redcedars along the coast. The developing technologies for plank making, increasingly sophisticated box making and basketry, and the manufacture of large, oceangoing dugout canoes are a part of this trend, as is an expanded capacity for processing and storing food and the increasingly complex social structures and institutions that characterize Northwest Coast lifeways of recent times. Ames and Maschner (1999) suggest that the rectangular plank house configuration gave the advantage of a greater capacity and efficiency of space. They argue that, in some respects, these houses imitate the slightly earlier innovation of the bentwood box. The houses are, essentially, “big boxes” that can efficiently house not only more people but also the many smaller boxes of stored food needed for a more sedentary existence (Ames 1996, 2005). Over the past five millennia at least, the major permanent houses throughout the study region were pithouses (and other log lodges of Athabaskan style) and then, on the coast, cedar-wood plank houses. However, throughout this period (especially on the coast from Vancouver Island southward and in the Interior Plateau), people also constructed woodframe lodges, both permanent and temporary, covered with large cattail or tule mats or with sheets of spruce or other kinds of bark, both described earlier in this chapter. These lodges were of different shapes, sizes, and styles. The most common kind for the southern Sec­ wepemc, Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan, and others of the drier regions of the Interior Plateau were circular lodges covered with tule mats. Some, to be used in colder weather, were banked up with earth and covered with a double layer of mats (Teit 1909). Bark-covered lodges were more common in the high country and over the more forested northern and eastern Interior Plateau. They were generally square or oblong in shape, allowing the strips of bark to fit more readily than on a conical lodge. Species whose bark was used for covering shelters include lodgepole pine, Engelmann spruce, subalpine fir, white pine, and western redcedar – whichever was most readily available. Rectangular pieces of bark were aligned, slightly overlapping each other and with the sap side out, over a lashed frame of poles, and any gaps or spaces were filled with smaller pieces of bark or brush. The ends of the lodges were filled with brush or more bark sheets as required. Some of these mat and bark lodges were sizable,55 big enough to accommodate large numbers of people, especially at fishing camps or mountain hunting and harvesting camps. Sometimes long, double lodges with rounded ends were built. On the other hand, for just a few people – a small family or a couple of hunters – the lodges could be made more as lean-tos, readily constructed from poles of lodgepole pine or other smaller trees, which once cut, might be left leaning

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against a tree until the next time they were needed. The more permanent lodges could be remarkably weather-tight. With their insulating qualities, and their ability to swell when wet (in the case of the mats), which tended to seal off any gaps or cracks, they were a practical, flexible, and reasonably comfortable residence. Flooring of grass, tree boughs, matting, or furs added comfort. The mats could be rolled up from the edges, partially or fully, in hot summer weather or sealed around the bottom in cooler weather, and the bark sheets could be added or shifted as needed. These lodges, like other dwellings, represented sites of tremendous activity.56 As well as the more permanent and large-scale living structures, people have made a wide range of special-purpose structures from various plant materials. For camping out, small tents or lean-tos might be constructed.57 Sweat lodges were another type of structure of plant materials. Used for ceremonial cleansing and healing, these lodges were usually conical in shape and situated near water. A common design was of long wands of “red willow” (red-osier dogwood), willow, hazelnut, or other flexible woody stems, bent over and lashed in place to make a half-dome frame, which was then covered with mats, boughs, or hides. A fire was lit inside to heat stones, and then certain types of vegetation (e.g., fir boughs, juniper, sagebrush, and other fragrant plants) and water were added to create clouds of aromatic steam, considered both purifying and health-giving to those who entered the lodge. People still make and use sweat lodges today in ways that show strong continuity with the past. Sweat lodges tend to be associated with Interior Plateau peoples, but coastal peoples also constructed them, at least within recent times.58 Girls in seclusion at puberty and during menstruation were often isolated for a period of time in specially constructed shelters. According to Teit (1909), Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux girls’ lodges were always conical and generally made of Douglas-fir boughs but were sometimes covered with bark or mats. Women giving birth often also used a separate lodge, carpeted with dried Sphagnum moss or grass (Teit 1906a). Women’s lodges, at least in summertime, were small shelters of mats or tents, which were open at one side. Shamans and young men as initiates also sometimes resided in small lodges separate from the village, and these were often constructed of spruce or fir boughs (see Boas 1966). Sometimes people sought protection from the weather inside of large, hollow trees or logs, and these were said by some to have strong spiritual powers. As well as houses, people used similar technologies of construction to create rafts, suspension bridges, fishing platforms, drying racks, and smokehouses, in almost all cases using lengths of wood and fibrous materials, vines, or cordage for lashing and binding the joints together. Some of the suspension bridges created in this way extended across precipitous canyons of the Fraser and Skeena Rivers and their tributaries, for example, and were very long and ingenious (Mackin 2004).

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Canoes and Watercraft

The general consensus, from those who study the ancient peoples of the Americas, is that the first migrants crossing Beringia to North America (and certainly those peoples who might have entered via the “kelp highway”) must have used and depended on watercraft of some type, whether ancient dugouts or framed boats of bark or skin covering (Ames and Maschner 1999; Burroughs 2005; Dillehay et al. 2008; Erlandson and Fitzpatrick 2006; Erlandson et al. 2007; Kirk and Daugherty 2007). At least over the past three or four millennia, dugout canoes of various styles and sizes, most made from western redcedar logs, have been the major mode of water transportation on the Northwest Coast. Some other species, such as yellow-cedar, Sitka spruce, and Douglas-fir, have also been used on occasion for making dugouts (Turner 1998, 2004a). Possibly the original dugout canoe wood was cottonwood, or balsam poplar, which may have been available in places in the north and in refugia along the coast even during the Pleistocene. Cottonwood is still the main wood for dugouts on lakes and rivers throughout the Interior Plateau and northern interior (see Teit 1906b), as well as being used on some of the coastal rivers. Sometimes the river canoes are pushed and guided with long poles as well as being paddled.59 In any case, when cedar started to become common on the coast, its use resulted in a tremendous and rapid expansion of canoe-making and woodworking technologies in general. As noted previously, canoe makers often employed fire to help hollow out the inside of the canoes, and using red-hot rocks and water to generate steam, they softened the wood in order to mould it, to widen the gunwales, and to flatten the bottom. They used a range of woodworking tools – wedges and mauls, chisels and adzes, and drills – to determine the thickness of the wood and ensure evenness. If the shaping wasn’t done properly, the canoe would be less stable in the water and not as seaworthy. Canoes of both western redcedar and cottonwood are still being made and used in some places into the twenty-first century. Canoe making is a skilled profession, and all up and down the coast and in the interior, there were, and are, individuals known for their artisanship in making canoes. The Carpenter family of Bella Bella, for example, are descendants of a famous Heiltsuk canoe builder and woodworker, Captain Carpenter (M. Black 1989). “Master Canoe-Builder” was the name of a supernatural Haida being (Swanton 1905). The Haida, like the Heiltsuk, were well known as superb canoe builders, and their canoes were widely sought by their neighbours and famous all along the coast for their ability to travel from Haida Gwaii to Victoria, and even south to California. In his journals, George Dawson noted, “The Haidas great Canoe-makers. At this season [21 August 1877] many occupied roughing them out in the woods on the Masset lakes & rivers here & there ... They frequently take canoes over from here [Haida

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Gwaii] to Ft. Simpson for Sale, getting ... oulachen grease, & other things in exchange” (in Cole and Lockner 1989, vol. 2, 507). Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York (pers. comm., 1975) said that Haida in several of their large canoes had even ascended the Fraser River as far as just below Yale but were dissuaded from attacking the village there through negotiations by the Nlaka’pamux chief. The art and science of canoe making was experienced by Kwakwaka’wakw clan chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) of the Tsawataineuk, who as a boy helped his grandfather Kwaxsistalla (Adam inherited his name, which belonged to a long line of clan chiefs) to make five dugout canoes at Kingcome Inlet. The cedar trees for the canoes were carefully selected. Often canoe makers had to travel long distances to find a suitable tree, and travellers would often keep an eye out for potential canoe trees. Trees somewhat distant from saltwater are said by some to be better; those growing right along the shoreline tend to be brittle. Adam Dick (pers. comm., 2006) recalled the last canoe his grandfather made in the late 1930s, when Adam was twelve or thirteen years old: Last one, mouth of Belle Isle Sound, quite a ways up the mountain. Took him all day [to get there]. We walked up. He knew that big cedar was there. Huge. He said, “You go bring the saw, the jack. Go back and bring the tent and some grub there.” We put the tent up and the next morning, then he made some tea ... When he chopped the big cedar, undercutting that big cedar, it took him all day. Stopped and had tea. The next day, we’re going to fall. He had a seven-foot bucking board. I was on a springboard, he was on the other side. He said, “Hold it. It’s too heavy.” He got a little sapling, chopped it and drove it down in the ground and tied my end on the tree. It made it easier to pull the saw ... When we felled the tree, it hit a big boulder and it stopped. He said, “We’ll work on it tomorrow.” So we had something to eat. Biscuit. And we packed everything down ... Another day to cut the top. He cut it at an angle. He cut right through and it slid off the rock and then down to the beach. It was half finished when we towed it up to Kingcome. Adam Dick later described the process of using fire to hollow out the canoe and a drill to help gauge the thickness: Put a fire in it. Use poles on the edge so it doesn’t burn it. You keep moving that little fire ’til the canoe gets hollowed, and keep scraping it and scraping it with the scraper, ’til you get it thick enough. My grandfather went with his thumb [to measure]; the bottom of the canoe should be three fingers thick, and the sides two fingers thick ... They have a deer bone [as a drill], and they drill with two hands. When you start scraping,

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you look for the drill hole, and you stop scraping. You put a mark on the bone to tell you how thick to make it. Watch that when you’re drilling, ’til you get to the mark and then you keep moving. Spruce pitch was used to seal any small cracks in the canoe, and it was finished off by scorching away any slivers, smoothing rough parts with horsetail stalks or dogfish skin, and sometimes by painting the inside with a mixture of herring eggs and charcoal to protect it. The outside was then carved or painted with special designs and symbols. Canoes were usually protected from the sun when not in use by being covered with mats, but sometimes they still cracked or sustained damage from use. Adam Dick (pers. comm., 1994) recalled how his grandfather used spruce branches to close a large split right in the bottom of his canoe: “they go get the ends of the spruce branches, the dəwix, and they twist it. And with a drill they drill holes on both sides of the split, all along the split. Then they take the tip of the spruce branch and push it up from the bottom and put a knot in the top to hold it in place. And they put a yew-wood wedge there, to close it up when that [spruce] pitch is in there, to tighten it up.” Certain places were known for their prime cedar trees, ideal for canoe making. On Haida Gwaii, the Yakoun Valley is known for the quality of its canoe cedars and was said to be “the canoe manufacturing centre of the Northwest Coast” (Council of the Haida Nation 1990, 35). Hansen Island, in Kwakwaka’wakw territory, is also a location for excellent canoe cedars (Garrick 1998). In Ditidaht territory, in the vicinity of Nitinat Lake on the west coast of Vancouver Island, canoe makers travelled northward from the village of Whyac at Nitinat Narrows to the shores of Tsusiat Lake, which was situated well above the saltwater and drained into the ocean over a long waterfall. The canoe makers felled the cedars and partially shaped them up along the lakeshore. Then, using tough ropes of twisted cedar branches, they lowered the logs down the waterfall, before paddling them back to the beach at Whyac to finish them off. These canoes were well known for their high quality (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Teit (1909, 531) noted that for Interior Plateau peoples, dugouts from cottonwood logs were built “in a rather rough manner” and were similar in shape to the cedar-wood river canoes used by the tribes lower down the Fraser River. Originally, people tended to use dugouts for river travel, and on the lakes they tended to use bark-covered canoes (Bouchard and Kennedy 1979). However, Teit reported, “after the introduction of iron tools, dug-outs were more frequently made, and at the present day [as of the early 1900s] are in universal use.” To make the cottonwood canoes, a large tree is selected, usually right beside a lake or river, and felled. The side that is underneath when the tree falls forms the bottom of the canoe. The canoe is hewn to the right shape and length, and after it is hollowed out, it is shaped using water and hot rocks, and then thwarts are

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inserted to help maintain the canoe’s shape when it dries (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1997; Bouchard and Kennedy 1979, 144). The designs of canoes, as well as size, varied considerably from group to group and depending on the purpose of the canoe. Oceangoing canoes, for example, were fitted with high prows to help negotiate waves. The largest cedar canoes could carry as many as fifty or sixty people and many boxes of freight. Of course, trading goods and travelling to potlatches and other cultural events were important uses of these large canoes, which were also used for warfare. Other canoes were “family-sized” and were used to transport smaller groups of people to summer fishing camps or berry-picking locations within their territories. Whaling canoes, used by the Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Makah, were relatively small but strong and manoeuvrable, usually holding a crew of eight: six paddlers, a steersman, and a harpooner, who also served as boat captain. Small canoes were often built and left at the edges of lakes, to be used by anyone wishing to fish or travel across to berry-picking or hunting sites. Canoes were also used along rivers, for gillnet and fish trap fishing, and for travel to upriver harvesting sites. Sometimes women, going to harvest seaweed, clams, or berries, were the ones handling the canoes. In the fur trade era, Nuu-chah-nulth seal hunters used to take their own small personal dugouts onboard the sealing schooners, travelling as far as the Aleutians, to hunt the fur seals and other marine mammals (George 2003). Virtually all people living along the coast and major lakes and riverways would have been skilled and adept at using canoes; they were an integral part of everyone’s life. In the early fur-trading days, people from the central and northern coast would travel all the way to Victoria in large canoes that held thirty or forty people. By 1916, however, when the McKenna-McBride Commission was in process, people were already making the transformation from dugout canoes to boats, as noted in the following discussion between J.A.J. McKenna and Commissioner McDowall with George Robinson on 5 April 1916, concerning Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) land requirements: “McDowall asked about cedar for canoes: ‘Is there sufficient cedar there for the Indians to use in making their canoes?’ ‘No, in order to get sufficient cedar for that purpose they would probably have to go 100 miles, and not only that, but the day of the canoes is passing if it has not already passed – they all use boats now’” (McKenna-McBride Commission 1913–16). First rowboats and then smaller boats driven by engines – “one-lungers” – were used by families and small groups of water travellers. Canoes and boats were also fixed with sails of cedar-bark matting, and later of canvas, both for coastal travel and for travelling up and down rivers, such as between the village of Gwa’yii and the root gardens at the estuary of the Kingcome River at the time of Adam Dick’s youth. Large wooden seiners and trawlers, and then aluminum

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fishing boats, skiffs, and speedboats, became the watercraft most commonly used by the middle and end of the twentieth century. Birch bark is the best known material for making bark canoes, but several other trees provided bark for these vessels, which were widely used on lakes in the interior regions. Dene (Athabaskan) peoples tended to use mainly birch bark, whereas the Secwepemc and other Interior Salish peoples, and the Ktunaxa and others, also made canoes from sheets of bark of white pine, Engelmann spruce, or even western redcedar. The Nuxalk of the central coast evidently learned how to construct birchbark canoes from their Dakelh Ulkatcho neighbours, and used them occasionally, although they did not profess to have as much skill as the Ulkatcho, who could reportedly construct canoes that could be folded for portaging.60 The Secwepemc, who had many large lakes within their territory, made a great many bark canoes, which they even used on the Fraser and Thompson Rivers (Teit 1909, 531). The Secwepemc did not usually make birchbark canoes because large birch trees were scarce, whereas “large spruce and [white] pine were plentiful, and considered quite as good” (Teit 1909, 532). The canoes were constructed from large sheets of bark taken off in one piece from mature trees.61 The bark was fixed onto a frame of “red willow” (Cornus sericea) or true willow using split spruce or pine root for the finer sewing and split willow wands and Indian-hemp twine for most of the sewing and fastening. Fir pitch or other resin was used to seal the joints, cracks, and knotholes (Dawson 1892; Teit 1909). The bark was “turned inside out” so that the outside of the bark became the inside of the canoe. The inside was strengthened with wooden ribs and thwarts, lashed into place with cedar or spruce roots: Inside were placed, a few inches apart, pliable slats or rods – one set running longitudinally, and another set transversely. The bottom was covered with loose strips of bark of the birch, cedar, and spruce, or with brush or long light poles. The flooring was covered with fir-twigs or dried swamp-grass, which were used as seats. Three or more cross-bars, like “canoe-seats” or thwarts, between the gunwales, kept the canoe stiff and well stretched. The gunwales were strengthened with slats sewed on the full length of the canoe, both outside and inside as in some birch bark baskets – and each end was provided with two slats in the same way. The ends were caulked with moss and pitch. Knot-holes were caulked by slitting their edges and inserting thin shavings of wood to fit the hole. The whole was then covered with a liberal coat of gum. (Teit 1909, 531) Like dugout canoes, bark canoes were vulnerable to cracking and on occasion had to be mended, as described by Teit (1909, 532): “When a bark canoe sprang a small leak, it was mended in the same way as the knot-holes were filled. Large

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leaks were patched with strong pieces of bark, which were cut larger than the hole and sewed on, generally with cat-stitching. The edges of the patch were caulked. The wood used was preferably that of a high bush called yuatê’tLp [possibly Alnus incana], which grows in some parts of the mountains, and is said to resemble alder. These canoes were very light, and when loaded were very steady.” The bark canoes were indeed, according to Dawson (1892, 14–15), “very swift, and for their size, when properly ballasted, remarkably seaworthy.” Most were big enough to hold two or more people. Whereas Dakelh and other Dene birchbark canoes – and quite a few Secwepemc canoes – were made with the bow and stern curving upward, most of the bark canoes made by Interior Plateau peoples were of the “sturgeon-nose” type, so called because their pointed ends at the waterline resemble the front of a sturgeon. These were made from bark of spruce, birch, subalpine fir, or white pine, were stitched with cedar or spruce root, with the seams sealed with pitch, and were lined with loose grass mats or woven willow-withe mats (J.A. Ross 2011). Both Alexander Mackenzie in 1793 and Simon Fraser in 1808 mentioned seeing these canoes on the Fraser River. By 1909 the Secwepemc were making very few canoes, with just some dugouts used on the rivers and a few bark canoes to be seen on certain lakes and in the eastern part of the country (Teit 1909). Paddles and bailers were basic but essential equipment for canoe use, and their design and development must have paralleled that of the canoes themselves. Certain woods, like bigleaf maple (which is called “paddle tree” in some Coast Salish languages) and yellow-cedar, were especially known as good for paddles (Friedman 2005). Western redcedar was also a common paddle wood because of its even grain and light weight. Yew wood was used to make steering paddles, which might be subjected to significant force. Paddles were of many styles, some with separate handgrips and some being of one piece. Some, required for steering or for silent paddling by hunters, had pointed blades. Canoe bailers, too, were of many types. A common style on the coast was made with a rectangle of cedar bark, pleated at the ends and tied onto a transverse handle so that the bark formed a long “scoop.” Other bailers were in the form of woven baskets or wooden bowls of alder or maple. Some interior bailers were roughly sewn of various kinds of bark (Teit 1909). Rafts of tule stems were also made and used occasionally by Interior Plateau peoples, but tule boats were much more commonly used by the Paiute and other Great Basin peoples of the vast marshes farther south, like Stillwater Marsh in Nevada (Fowler 1992). Nevertheless, Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2000) recalled that tule boats were made by the Secwepemc; she told a story about a girl who was kidnapped by Sekani raiders and managed to make her way home by crafting a tule boat to cross a lake (see also Teit 1909, 532). Teit (1930, 108) also described two different types of watercraft made from tule by the Spokan and Sanpoil

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(Okanagan), including a “well-made raft [that] resembled a canoe ... almost as good as one,” made of rolled-up old mats. John Ross (2011, 451) describes the second type, a bundle boat, made “with two pontoon-like bundles, each with 50–80 dead tules ... bound with Indian-hemp. These boats, topped with willow-withe mats, were made freshly each spring, and lasted until the fall.” Plants and Food Production Technologies Not only have plants provided a wide range of food products, but they have also been key materials in the diverse technologies of food production. From fishing gear and hunting implements to digging sticks, baskets, and other storage vessels, plants have been indispensable in virtually all aspects of food harvesting, processing, and storage. Fishing

Plant materials employed in fishing technologies include wood for fish traps and weirs, lures, fishhooks, herring rakes, spear and harpoon shafts and prongs, fish-drying racks, barbecuing sticks, salmon spreaders, and canoes and paddles; tree boughs and giant kelp fronds for harvesting herring eggs; fibrous materials for nets and fishing lines of many different styles and sizes and for binding and wrapping; pitch as glue and for waterproofing; and dyes like alder bark to colour, preserve, and camouflage fishnets (Stewart 1977).62 The archaeological record, as well as peoples’ oral histories, are replete with references to these different materials and implements, and evidence points to increasing sophistication in fishing technologies and fish-processing implements over the Mid and Late Holocene (see Ames and Maschner 1999; Boas 2002, 489; Cove and MacDonald 1987; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 89; Maud 1978a, 1978c; Swanton 1905; and Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Even in sites where plant materials have not been preserved well, stone net weights, anchor stones, and antler points serve as proxies for their use. Use of fishnets, for example, dates back at least 5,000 years on the Northwest Coast (Croes 2003). An important marine “plant” (alga) featured in fishing was bull kelp. Used to make fishing line, its strong flexible stipes were carefully cured with fish oil before use – a process that could take a year or more. People knew the best localities to obtain the longest, toughest kelp lines, and they sent specially trained divers down to cut them from their holdfasts (Stewart 1984; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Using special knots, the fishers tied lengths of kelp line together, enabling them to reach to the depths for halibut and other bottom fish, as described previously (Bernick 1998a; Turner 1998). Likely, as noted in chapter 2, the use of kelp lines is ancient.63 The first migrants entering the New World via

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the “kelp highway” would have relied on this alga for anchoring canoes and providing protection from storms. The Straits Salish reefnet fishery, based on the suspension of large purse nets of willow bark (Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra) and other plant materials between two canoes (which are of a unique, flat-transomed design) (Easton 1990), provides an excellent example of the complexity of plant use in fishing technology. These nets were said to have been introduced by Xals, the Creator, and are named after the Saanich term for “willow” (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994; Stewart 1977; Turner and Hebda 2012). Archaeologically, the reefnet technology is probably at least 1,500 to 1,000 years old (Ames and Maschner 1999, 145; see also Easton 1990). The reefnet fishers cut passages through kelp beds to “steer” the salmon runs into the net. Also, to trick the salmon into thinking they were swimming along the ocean floor, they tied bunches of dunegrass (Leymus mollis) along the lines leading to the net. Constructing these reefnets, and other nets as well, required tremendous skill and immense quantities of plant materials. A few contemporary elders still know how to make fishing nets. Kwakwaka’wakw clan chief Adam Dick, for example, can make nets of stinging nettle fibre using a special net gauge of salmonberry wood and a net shuttle that holds the twine and helps to thread it through. In the Interior Plateau, fishing lines and fishnets were generally made from Indian-hemp fibre. Perhaps the best known type is the dip net – a long, tapering net fixed onto a circular hoop, with a handle of Douglas-fir wood. Dip nets were, and still are, used along the fast-flowing Fraser and Columbia Rivers and their tributaries, mainly to capture salmon attempting to swim upriver through rapids or to ascend falls (Kennedy and Bouchard 1992). Interior peoples also made fish weirs from willow stems (Dawson 1892) and lined the bottoms of creeks with peeled willow sticks to make the fish more visible. They also crafted a variety of basket traps for trout and other species and made floats or buoys from dry willow sticks with a stone attached, just heavy enough to keep the sticks upright. Net floats and fishing line floats were also made of dried tule stems, which were wound into small balls and attached in the same manner as the sinkers on hand lines (Teit 1909; Turner 1998). Many other implements were employed in traditional fisheries. People used digging sticks of yew or other tough wood to harvest clams, and they used stout hooked sticks to catch octopus (Ellis and Swan 1981; Ellis and Wilson 1981). On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Nuu-chah-nulth invented an ingenious implement for entrapping dentalium – the famous tubular “money shells” that were an ancient currency, traded as far east as the Great Lakes. The dentalium spear, made from a long Douglas-fir pole with a broom-like cluster of hardhack (Spiraea douglasii) branches tied to the end, was thrust into the mud of the ocean floor. The hardhack twigs ensnared the dentalium, and then a device weighted

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with stones slid down along the handle and settled over the branches to tighten their grip on the shells, which could then be pulled up and extracted (Drucker 1951; Snively and Corsiglia 2001). At least one plant, chocolate-tips (Lomatium dissectum), was used as a fish poison by the Okanagan and other Interior Plateau peoples.64 Its root, considered edible by some when young, was macerated and placed in creeks, where it temporarily poisoned trout and other small fish, allowing people to scoop them out of the water. After the poisonous material became diluted, the fish not captured would revive and swim away (see Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; and Meilleur, Hunn, and Cox 1990). This plant use probably helped people to sustain themselves at times when salmon and other foods were not available. Hunting

Plant materials have also played, since time immemorial, a prominent role in hunting. Archaeological evidence of this is sparse, especially from the earliest times and in comparison to the more durable and far better documented stone, bone, shell, and antler hunting implements. These can, however, serve as proxies for plant materials since spear points and arrowheads would have been bound to wooden shafts, knifeblades and scrapers to hafts, and so forth. These early tools would have required tree pitch or other glue to cement the parts in place and fibrous materials to bind them. In addition, wood and other plant fuels would have been used from earliest times to cook, smoke, and dry meat, to render animal fats, and to tan hides. Drying and smoking racks for meat also would have been constructed from various types of wood. An exception to the dearth of plant remains from ancient hunting sites in the vicinity of the study area is in Southern Tutchone territory in the high alpine of southern Yukon, where, as early as around 9,000 years ago, hunters were pursuing caribou and other game. Along with dozens of antler, bone, and stone artifacts were wooden shafts of atlatls (spear or dart throwers) made from birch, willow, maple, and spruce. Then, around 1,200 years ago at this site, the atlatls were quite abruptly replaced by wooden bows and arrows (Hare et al. 2004). Bows and arrows started to be used in North America at least 2,000 years ago. People apparently invented them independently in the Old and New Worlds, but in both cases yew (Taxus spp.) and juniper (Juniper spp.) woods have been preferred for bows. In northwestern North America, the woods of birch and of bigleaf and Rocky Mountain maples have also been used for bows (Boas 1918; Friedman 2005; Hare et al. 2004; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Teit 1909; Turner 1998). Different styles of bows have been developed – from long, flat, horizonally held bows to short, vertically held bows – for use in both hunting and warfare (Teit 1909, 519). Yew wood for bows was sometimes traded to areas in the southern interior where yew was not common (Teit 1909).

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Making good, straight arrows is as exacting as making a good bow. Strong, straight three- or four-year-old sucker shoots of saskatoon berry, wild rose, mock-orange, and oceanspray were all valued materials for arrow making. These bushes were likely coppiced or burned back on occasion to produce straighter shoots, not only for arrows but also for mat needles and spear shafts. Many arrows had grooves running the length of the shaft; others had detachable foreshafts. Some arrows were set into a groove of fire-heated stone and then smoothed between grooved sandstone abraders to polish and straighten the shaft (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Teit 1909), and sometimes they were even chewed to straighten the grain. People also cut staves for arrows from the trunks of trees like birch, spruce, and pine, as the ancient hunters in the Yukon alpine did (Hare et al. 2004). On the Northwest Coast, straight, split lengths of western redcedar were a major arrow material. Arrowheads of hardened wood, stone, beaver teeth, bone, or horn – or later, iron – were fixed onto the shaft with sinew or cherry-bark wrapping and glued in place. The arrows were fletched with feathers, attached to the shaft with fine sinew smeared with pitch, the resin of cottonwood buds, or some other glue. Practice arrows were used without points, and arrows to be used for birds often had a thick blunt point or a piece of pithy elderberry wood at the tip. Boys in training to be hunters or warriors were often given small practice bows with blunted arrows. Hunting gear of all kinds – harpoons, nets, traps, snares, and deadfalls – requires the right combinations of materials, technologies, and knowhow, and almost all involve plant materials in their manufacture. For example, a Ditidaht spear for hunting fur seal had a main shaft of Douglas-fir wood, an upper, longer prong of Sitka spruce (a lightweight wood), and a shorter, lower prong of heavier Pacific yew. The balance of these woods is important when the spear is thrown. The prongs were bound with bitter cherry bark and the joints sealed with spruce pitch. The detachable points were of elk antler – or more recently, metal – and were attached to the main shaft by short lines of cured bull kelp. The entire spear was attached to a long line of kelp, with a loop at the end, which was kept coiled until the spear was thrown. A similar spear, somewhat shorter and less flexible, was used to spear salmon (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). This kind of sophisticated technology, matched by the implements used for hunting a wide range of terrestrial and marine game, was evidently developed and perfected by groups of people for acquiring more – and more diverse – resources over the Late Holocene. Paralleling adaptations for processing and storing food, including developing basketry techniques, this plant-based technology helped to feed the growing populations throughout the entire region (Ames and Maschner 1999; Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Nets of stinging nettle and Indian-hemp fibre, described earlier, were also used to entrap ducks and other waterfowl, as well as deer and other game. Some of these were very long and elaborate. For example, a duck net was stretched

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across Nitinat Narrows at the mouth of Nitinat Lake in Ditidaht territory on the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island, where “black ducks” (white-winged scoters) were chased out toward the ocean from Nitinat Lake and then entrapped in the nets by the people living at Whyac.65 Wood and fibrous materials of various kinds were used to construct a wide range of deadfalls, traps, and snares, as well as game fences to direct deer and other game toward hunters. Fire was also sometimes used to drive game, to clear away brush in order to make game more visible, and to create good browsing places for game (Turner 1999). Botanical Materials in Plant Food Production

Technologies that relate to plant food production have been described in previous chapters, especially chapter 5. Digging sticks, baskets and boxes for transport, cooking, and storage, stone grinders, and earth ovens and their associated charcoal and fire-cracked rock are all archaeological indicators of and proxies for the historical harvesting and use of root vegetables, berries, and other plant foods, as well as of clams and various animal foods. Root-digging sticks, for example, were one of the fundamental plantharvesting tools. Dating back in the study area at least to the Mid Holocene, they were used throughout the area and had various styles and designs, depending on the region and on the roots being harvested. As noted previously, digging sticks were found in the Monte Verde site in southern Chile, dated at 14,600 calendar years old (Dillehay et al. 2008), and likely, in some form, they predate people’s entry into the New World. They are found in one style or another the world over, from the Americas to Africa and Australia. Shovels and pitchforks are probably more recent evolutions from digging stick antecedents. Many digging sticks – and digging stick handles – have been recovered from archaeological contexts, both wet and dry (Croes 1989; R. Inglis 1976; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Lepofsky 2004).66 Transverse handles for digging sticks, providing an easier grip, were apparently a later elaboration. The earliest known digging stick handle, about 2,400 years old and made of antler, is from the Interior Plateau at a Keatley Creek pithouse site (Lepofsky 2004). Such digging stick handles of elk and deer antler would have been part of every woman’s toolkit from around 2,000 years ago. Until about 500 years ago, these handles were often beautifully decorated. They have been found in burials of women (and some men), in cache pits (safe places for hiding and storing objects), and in village sites, sometimes near root-cooking earth ovens (Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 67). The handle decorations are mostly geometric (e.g., parallel zigzag lines or dots) and zoomorphic, and they may represent common symbols of Interior Plateau women.67 Digging sticks were – and still are – generally made of hardwood, such as Pacific yew, oceanspray (called “digging stick plant” in the Stl’atl’imx language),

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saskatoon berry, mock-orange, black hawthorn, juniper, red-osier dogwood, birch, or crabapple, as well as of elk, caribou, or mule deer antler or mountain goat horn (J.A. Ross 2011; Teit 1909).68 At least recently, the coastal style of digging stick has had a rounded knob on the top for the person digging to push down upon. The interior style generally has a short crosspiece – made of elk or deer antler, mountain goat or mountain sheep horn, or wood like saskatoon berry or birch – at the top, usually with a hole drilled near the centre, allowing it to slip over the pointed tip of the stick. Often, the handle was removable, and the stick reversible, so that if it became dull on one end, it could be turned end for end and the handle reinserted on the top. The ends could also be sharpened as required. John Ross (2011) describes how a digging stick could be shaped by soaking the wood in water and bending it with strips of rawhide or wrapping it in rawhide with a rock in the centre to help bend it and then drying it in the shade or by burying it in fire-warmed sand. It was carefully fire-hardened by baking it in hot coals for several hours, being turned frequently to prevent burning. This process was specific to the Spokan, but probably others used similar methods. Some Dene (Athabaskan) (e.g., Tsilhqot’in) and Interior Salish digging sticks were made from a single piece of deer, elk, or caribou antler, fashioned so that the longest tyne formed the sharp end of the digger, with the branch of the antler from which it arose being cut to form a short handle (J.A. Ross 2011; Teit 1909). Within the past century, digging sticks of iron have been common, sometimes fashioned from a crowbar or the tyne of an old-fashioned harrow and then fitted with a wooden crossbar handle of saskatoon berry wood or sometimes oak or hickory. Digging sticks range in length from around 30 centimetres (usually of antler), used to dig relatively shallow roots such as mountain potatoes and nodding onions, up to 1 metre or more, for prying up the deeper-growing roots such as yellow glacier lily and balsamroot in the interior or silverweed and camas on the coast.69 The height of the woman digging the roots was also factored in by her husband or whomever was making her digging stick (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Digging sticks are simple but ingenious tools, operating through a combination of pushing down to penetrate the substrate and prying back to bring a mechanical advantage through leverage. At their most efficient, they can be used to overturn entire clumps or clusters of roots by pushing the stick in systematically at several points around a small patch of ground and then prying up the entire upper layer in one deep “thrust and pry” to reveal the bulbs or roots, either attached to the overturned sod or remaining in the uncovered soil beneath. Using this technique, the digger can readily select for the size of bulbs or roots, leaving those considered too small or too large to continue to grow and reproduce. Since most root vegetables are harvested at their dormant stage, the remaining propagules in the soil are usually unharmed; in fact, their growth in

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the following year can be enhanced by the extra disturbance, tilling, and aeration of the soil that accompanies such harvesting (Beckwith 2004; Lloyd 2011; Loewen 1998; Turner and Peacock 2005). Both in the estuarine root gardens of the coast and in the upland glacier lily and mountain potato grounds of the interior, it was a common practice to dig over an entire parcel of ground in a season, possibly leaving it fallow in the next couple of years, digging up adjacent parcels, and returning to dig the next “crop” of roots from the original patch after that. In some cases, women – who were the main root harvesters – dug long trenches in their root-harvesting beds (Teit 1909). Digging sticks were also used for weeding root-digging grounds, for digging clams, and for excavating house pits or roasting pits. They were very personal implements; a woman would sometimes talk to her digging stick, and at her death, her digging stick might be used to mark her grave (J.A. Ross 2011). Baskets and Other Vessels

Basketry is an ancient craft, older than the first pottery on the North American continent and critically important in food production. People have probably been making and using baskets or plant-based containers of one sort or another as long as they have lived in the New World. Baskets had diverse and multiple functions: holding and transporting harvested goods; capturing fish; carrying drinking water and other liquids; boiling and steaming foods; and storing dried roots, berries, fish, and meat, as well as clothing, household items, hunting and fishing equipment, and ceremonial regalia. Baskets have been the premier containers for transporting, processing, and storing diverse food products (fish and clams, roots and berries) that are individually small, soft, and moist, and development of diverse baskets and bags reflects a history of increasing reliance on food transport and storage, along with increasing populations, especially during the Late Holocene. The actual antiquity of basketry is difficult to prove because of its relative fragility. Twined sandals of sagebrush bark and tule from the Interior Plateau at Fort Rock Cave and nearby sites in south-central Oregon represent the earliest known basketry from the entire general region, dating back more than 10,000 years. Twining was virtually the exclusive method of weaving baskets, mats, capes, skirts, caps, and sandals in the Great Basin and southern Columbia Plateau throughout the Holocene (Connolly and Barker 2004). Significantly, organic residue on one volcanic point from an Olcott site of the CowlitzStillaguamish drainage indicated that people were working with cedar there in some form around 10,000 years ago (Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 86), even though western redcedar – perhaps the best known material in Northwest Coast basketry and other technology – was evidently not common on much of the coast

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until around 4,000 years ago. On the North Coast, pieces of spruce-root basket dating back about 6,270 to 6,000 years were found in the intertidal mud at the Thorne River Basket site on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska (Moss, Peteet, and Whitlock 2007). Fragments of ancient basketry from around the same time period on the southern tip of Baranoff Island, Alaska, were made of hemlock roots and branches and were of a design and style different from more recent southeastern Alaskan baskets. These findings echo some of the myth-time narratives, including the Tlingit “Legend of the Origin of Basketry,” about the first twined root baskets from a Yakutat woman who married the Sun (Paul 1991, 9). In the Interior Plateau, birch bark was found in association with a projectile point at a Kamloops site, apparently from around 6,000 to 4,500 years ago, giving considerable antiquity to birch-bark use and setting the stage for its critical role in the transport, cooking, processing, and storage of food in the Interior Plateau, parallel to the role of cedar bark on the Northwest Coast (Nicholas, Wollstonecroft, and Baptiste 1997). Baskets are best known from the Late Holocene onward, in large part due to the enhanced recovery of plant materials from wet sites, especially in the Coast Salish and south Wakashan regions of the Northwest Coast. Some of the best and most intricately woven baskets of the entire continent, dating from over 4,000 to around 500 years ago, come from wet contexts on the lower British Columbia mainland and in northwestern Washington (Bernick 1998c; Bernick 2003; Croes 1997, 2003; Foster and Croes 2004). In some, such as the Musqueam Northeast site in the Fraser Delta, basketry accounts for up to 40 per cent of the perishable vegetal artifacts. Over 180 basketry samples, dating to around 3,000 years ago, were found here in the context of cordage, knot-topped hats, bentwood fishhooks, and yew-wood wedges with their bands or reinforcing grommets intact (Ames and Maschner 1999; Bernick 1998b, 1998c). The earliest record for basketry in British Columbia is from the Glenrose Cannery site along the lower Fraser River, with the oldest layers of basket materials dating to about 4,300 years ago. Wood splints of fir (Abies sp.) and bark strips of bitter cherry and maple (Acer sp.) predominated as weaving and wrapping elements in these samples; one collection was openwork basketry with cherryor maple-bark wrapping, and another was from a checker-plaited basket made entirely from strips of cherry or maple bark. Only five samples of cedar bark were found.70 The earliest basketry of cedar bark dates to about 3,900 years ago (Bernick 1998c; Matson and Coupland 1995). As well as determining that western redcedar was a rare component of the earliest documented baskets, Bernick (1998c) has also identified a notable absence of coiled basketry from the archaeological record, although coiled baskets of cedar root, decorated with cherry bark and grass stems, are common from the historic period (Turner and Kus 2002).

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Another important Northwest Coast basketry site is the Qwu?gwes site in southern Puget Sound at Mud Bay, where diverse baskets were recovered: cedar-bark checker-weave matting, open-twined small to large “pack” baskets of cedar splints (roots or withes), and fine twill and checker-plaited ornamental basketry. The Qwu?gwes baskets were similar to those found in two other recent (less than 1,000 years old) wet sites in Lushootseed territory to the north (Foster and Croes 2004). Two other wet sites where basketry was featured are the Hoko River and Ozette sites, described in chapter 2. At the 3,000-year-old Hoko River wet site, nearly three-quarters of the basket remains were open-wrapped pack baskets, probably most useful at a prehistoric fishing camp like Hoko River but not as common in winter villages. Large storage baskets were also common, probably for keeping dried halibut produced there. Hats were also found, some with knobbed tops, indicating possible differentiation in status, with commoners wearing hats with rounded tops and nobility wearing those with knobbed tops (Croes 2003). Food storage baskets were the most common type at the Ozette site, which dates back just a few centuries. In fact, 19 per cent of all Ozette baskets were intermediate to large-sized with twill-plaited bases, sides woven of split cedar boughs, and handles of two-ply cordage. One complete basket, beside a cooking hearth, had been used to hold twelve boiling stones (Croes 2003). Basketry such as the Ozette cooking basket with boiling stones, found in the context of related activities and applications – for carrying, for storage, or in manufacture – has particular value. Another example is a birch-bark roll from an Interior Plateau site near Keatley Creek, where saskatoon berries were found compressed between matting and seeds were recovered from a birch-bark basket (Dana Lepofsky, pers. comm., 1995). This discovery seems almost to reflect a real version of the Nlaka’pamux “Old-One” story, recounted in chapter 5, where Old-One rolled a plant in birch bark and gave it to the woman he had created, and each time she put her hand into it, she pulled out a different kind of bulb or seed. Then, “when the plants had all been distributed, Old-One made the roll of bark into a basket” (Teit 1912, 326–7). The geographical context of basketry is also significant. For example, a cedar-withe pack basket fragment around 3,000 years old, of a style that endured in south Wakashan technologies into the twentieth century, was found in a melting snowbank near Obstruction Point at over 1,800 metres in Olympic National Park, providing evidence that people – likely women berry pickers – accessed and used these montane environments millennia ago. The open-weave pack baskets from the Qwu?gwes site were obviously constructed to haul heavy loads, having specially woven handles. Foster and Croes (2004) note that most clam baskets were built to hold at least 50 pounds (over 22 kilograms), and stout handles were required for the constant lifting and moving of the harvest during clam digging. The sturdy withe-wood baskets, such as those found at Musqueam Northeast, were probably used for storage. A good

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example is a basket from this site, about 3,000 years old, woven from split withes of western redcedar in an open-wrapped-twining technique with a twill-plaited base, illustrated by Bernick (1998c, 86). Stylistic diversity in the Late Holocene basketry of the central Northwest Coast is particularly notable. The early period basketry, such as that from Glenrose Cannery and Musqueam Northeast, shows a predominance of wrapped weaves, with twill plaiting and twining infrequent. In the later collections, with few exceptions, wrapped weaves have not been found, and open-plain twining and checker plaiting predominate. Twined weaves, mainly open-plain twining from split withes, appear as a major basketry technique in this region only from 2,400 to 600 years ago. Furthermore, whereas basketry older than 1,500 years commonly displays evidence of decoration (e.g., contrasting weaving techniques, coloured horizontal or vertical stripes, and geometric-patterned twill plaiting), the later baskets tend to be plainer. Bernick (1998c) describes a seemingly unique basket, about 900 years old, found in 1993 eroding from the Fraser River beach at the Mary Hill Road site in Port Coquitlam. Entirely woven in close cross-stitch wrapping, it has technological analogues in present-day Puget Sound basketry and may represent the original source of this weaving technique. Interior peoples did not usually make openwork baskets like those made by some coastal peoples (Teit 1909, 489). The main containers were vessels of birch bark and other types of bark and, in the Interior Plateau, a range of coiled baskets of various shapes (Teit 1909): large, flaring, rectangular pack baskets, smaller cooking baskets, rounded baskets, and even baskets specially for whipping soapberries in. The Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc and Nlaka’pamux peoples were particularly adept at making these coiled cedar-root baskets, having access to prime cedar along the river bottoms and lakeshores of the Coast and Cascade Mountains, especially around Mount Currie and Spuzzum. The women from these communities traded their baskets widely, both to the coast and farther inland. The Secwepemc and Okanagan also made coiled baskets, especially those within the Interior Cedar-Hemlock Zone aligning with the mountainous region west of the Rocky Mountains. In places where cedar roots were unavailable, the Secwepemc and Tsilhqot’in made coiled baskets from spruce roots (Teit 1909; Turner 1998, 2004b; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). The coiled baskets were generally decorated with geometric designs created by overlay or imbrication of natural and black-dyed cherry bark and inside-out stems of grasses, as described previously. Each group had its own particular traditions of basket designs and styles, perhaps the best known being the large flaring pack baskets of the Stl’atl’imx, in which about one-third of the overall cedar stitching was covered with grass-stem overlay. Bernick (1998c) notes that coiled baskets are rare or absent in early archaeological assemblages from the coast,

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despite their prevalence in the more recent Coast Salish collections, as well as in the Ozette basketry assemblage. Historically, some Coast Salish women have said that they learned to make coiled baskets from interior women (Kennedy and Bouchard 1983). All of the northern Interior Salish peoples were adept at birch-bark basketry, as were the Tsilhqot’in, Dakelh, and other Dene (Athabaskan) peoples to the north. Of the Salishan peoples, the Alkali Lake Secwepemc women were reputed to have made the best quality birch-bark basketry, but the Secwepemc in general were known for the “great quantity and good quality of their birch bark manufactures” (Teit 1909, 477). The overlapping seams of birch-bark baskets, cradles, cups, and trays were stitched with split cedar or spruce roots, and the rims – reinforced with a flexible withe or rod of saskatoon berry, western birch (Betula occidentalis), or some other wood – were stitched with roots in the same way. Roots for basketry were sometimes pulled up in long, straight pieces from rotten logs lying on the forest floor. The roots were peeled and split right after harvesting, the strips being drawn over the edge of a knife blade or other sharp surface to squeeze out any excess sap (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001). The rims of the baskets, as well as being stitched with roots, might be ornamented with bird or porcupine quills, strips of cherry bark, or more recently, dyed horsehair. Designs were also incised on the sides of many of these baskets (Teit 1909). A relatively small number of basic basketry techniques have been used in northwestern North America: twining, plaiting, coiling, sewing and folding, imbrication, and false embroidery (Croes 1989, 1995; Laforet 1992). When these techniques are expressed in different materials, container sizes and styles, and combinations, the resulting permutations are countless, including tightly twined baskets of spruce root;71 plaited baskets of cedar-bark strips; sturdy openwork baskets of branches or withes of cedar and other woods; coiled pack baskets of split cedar root or spruce root sewn around splints or bundles of split roots; woven bags of cattail, tule, Indian-hemp, silverberry bark, willow, maple bark, and other fibrous materials; small, intricate trinket baskets, mostly with tightly fitting lids, of split leaves of tall basket sedge (Carex obnupta) or beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax) twined around a foundation of “three-square” (Schoenoplectus americanus) (see T.L. Ryan 2000); and bucket-style containers of birch bark, spruce bark, cedar bark, and other types of bark. Not only baskets and containers but also hats, food-dish covers, mats, clothing, and even toys were, and still are, made using these techniques. Over forty different species of native plants are, or have been, used in basketry in northwestern North America. Some of these are common and widespread; others are restricted in their range and habitat (Turner 1998). Methods for harvesting and preparing the basketry materials are as diverse as the baskets themselves, their styles of construction, and their applications. Western redcedar, one of the most important sources of basketry materials,

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provides an example. The inner bark of cedar was, and still is, used for weaving mats, hats, cloaks, and baskets, as well as for cordage, tinder, and other purposes. At one time it was made into ropes, fishing lines, and fishnets (Dawson 1880; Newcombe 1897–1916; Swanton 1905), as well as ceremonial neck and head rings. Newcombe (1897–1916 [1902]) described inner bark collecting at Kasaan: “In May and June, when the sap is running, several women and girls go out early in the morning to gather cedar bark. They select young cedar trees about 12 inches [30 centimetres] in diameter, with few lower branches. A knife is used to cut the bark at breast height and to separate it from the wood at the bottom. The bark is then pulled outwards, and as the strip comes off the tree, a song is sung to a lively tune.” The words of this tune (in the Alaska Haida dialect) were “q’ahsgad-łaa, q’ahsgad-łaa” (strike the ground), “háayaas-ł q’íiwii, háayaas-ł q’íiwii” (fall hard). Haayaas is a Chinook Jargon word, according to linguist John Enrico (cited in Turner 2004a; see also Enrico 1991; and Enrico and Stuart 1996), meaning “hard/loud.” Newcombe translated the words as, “We want a long strip, go up high, go up high!” (cited in Turner 2004a, 84). The bark harvester pulled the strip up as far as it would go, sometimes 7 to 10 metres. She separated the dry outer bark from the inner bark, discarded it, and then bundled up the inner bark. The women would return from bark harvesting around midday, each carrying about thirty bundles strapped to her back. The inner bark strips were separated once again into two layers, which were cut in strips and hung in the sun to dry. The dried lengths, still somewhat flexible, were then folded into long bundles for storage. Cedar-bark mats were generally woven on a wooden frame. The mats, baskets, and hats of cedar bark might be decorated by weaving elements of bark dyed black with rusty nails or by being buried in the ground (Enrico and Stuart 1996; Turner 2004a). Haida and Tlingit weavers are still famous for their finely twined basketry and hats of Sitka spruce root. Harvesting and preparing the roots require as much knowledge and skill as for cedar-bark harvesting. Sitka spruce trees growing well spaced in sandy soil are sought in spring and summer. The harvester digs down around the tree until she finds a root, and then she follows it, carefully digging and pulling, until she has as long a piece as possible. She takes only a few roots from each tree so as not to harm it. She then bundles the roots and briefly heats them in a fire, not long enough to char the woody inner part. She then pulls the cooked roots through an upright split stake to remove the bark. Larger roots are split along a vertical plane, and the outer rounds are split off as well. Smaller roots are left intact. The peeled roots are bundled and dried, to be soaked and used for weaving later. Decorative patterns are introduced through variations in twining or with black-coloured elements. The tall, bucket-like spruce-root baskets are so tightly woven that they can be used for cooking (Turner 2004a). Renowned Massett Haida basket weaver Florence Davidson recalled the work invested in basketry by her mother, Isabella Edenshaw: “My

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mother used to weave baskets and hats all winter long ... She’d get up early in the morning and cook and, after everyone was finished eating, she’d go to work splitting the roots again and weaving them into a hat or basket. She worked all day long, day after day, from the time she finished picking and putting up berries till the spring” (cited in Blackman 1982, 85–6). In the Interior Plateau and on the southern Northwest Coast, western redcedar roots are a major basketry material, especially for the famous coiled baskets, described earlier, in which split root strips are wrapped around bundles of cedar roots, split withes, or sapwood splints.72 Cedar roots, once dug, were carefully bundled, taken home, peeled, split into several lengths, and then tied in bundles with their own peelings, to be dried and stored (Hill-Tout [1910]; Kennedy and Bouchard 1983; Turner 1992a). Other basket materials required equally sophisticated knowledge for harvesting and processing. For example, the leaves of slough sedge (Carex obnupta), used by the Nuu-chah-nulth and Coast Salish for wrapped twined “trinket” baskets, are harvested at the end of summer and early fall when fully mature. Only the “female” (nonflowering or fruiting) plants are used, the “male” fruiting plants having more brittle leaves, unsuitable for weaving (Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner 1996). The best sedge leaves are obtained from areas where plants have been harvested in the past; cutting them back is said to make them more productive. Croes (2003) discusses the storage capacity of baskets as reflected in those recovered from the Ozette site. Ozette baskets ranged from less than 1 litre in capacity to nearly 40 litres. “This significant size variation probably reflects their use to store a wide range of foods, including dried berry cakes, shellfish, fish (halibut, salmon, and others), and mammal meats (deer, elk, and others)” (ibid., 64). Projecting that as many as forty storage baskets were owned by one of the Ozette houses (#1), Croes estimates they provided up to 800 litres (cubic decimetres) of storage potential. With twelve stacked, dried salmon fillets estimated to occupy 28 litres in volume, the house would have had the capacity to store over 600 kilograms of salmon, which he calculates would have been enough to feed the entire household for about two months. People also had sea mammal oil stored in bladders, skins, and boxes, dried shellfish, and other food products hanging on the rafters, as well as various kinds of berries and berry cakes. Basketry is a major part of people’s cultural identity today as much as in the past, as witnessed by the success of organizations such as the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association and the Northwest Native American Basketweavers’ Association (CIBA 2009; NNABA 2009). The basketry documented in the archaeological record shows, in many cases, strong continuity between the present and the past, thus strengthening peoples’ ties with their ancestors. As Foster and Croes (2004, 135) note regarding the Qwu?gwes site, “Few of us can point to specific evidence of at least 3,000 years of our cultural identity. Now, with well-preserved wet site archaeology, several major Northwest Coast ethnic

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groups, including the Squaxin Island Tribe, whose oral history documents this, can point to scientific proof of at least 3,000 years of their identity through basketry styles, to further complement their histories.” Croes (2003) points out that basic storage baskets of cedar-limb splints, like those so common at Ozette, are seldom seen in museum collections, which tend to favour the more finely finished and decorated types of baskets.73 Clothing

As well as basketry and matting in all of their forms and materials, fibrous materials were also used to make a range of clothing, as well as soft woven bags. On the Northwest Coast, capes, skirts, bodices, back protectors, and aprons were made of finely twined cedar bark – preferably yellow-cedar bark, which was considered finer and softer than that of western redcedar and was also sought for blankets and babies’ clothing. Twined hats of redcedar bark, yellow-cedar bark, spruce roots, and “grasses,” providing protection from the sun and rain, were worn up and down the coast, in various styles distinctive to certain areas.74 Although Interior Plateau and Dene peoples preferred ponchos, capes, and other clothing made of furs or tanned hides, especially in the wintertime, the Interior Salish sometimes wore capes, leggings, caps, and even socks of plant materials, such as woven sagebrush or silverberry bark twined with Indian-hemp. Sometimes people stuffed their hide moccasins with dry grass, such as “timbergrass” (Calamagrostis rubescens), and some made shoes, leggings, and capes of black tree lichen, although these were generally used only by poorer people (Teit 1909). In the southern Interior Plateau, people made sagebrush-bark sandals, similar in style to those of the Great Basin, as described earlier. Conclusions The development of plant technologies since the first entry of peoples into the Americas in the Late Pleistocene has been a story of increasing diversification and complexity – in the species used, the implements devised, and the social and cultural contexts of their application. Paralleling other aspects of peoples’ lifeways, especially their food systems, the use of plant materials has been shaped by both environmental and cultural factors. The quantity, quality, and accessibility of different material species have been fundamentally outcomes of climatic and vegetation dynamics but have also been influenced and modulated by human actions such as burning, tending, pruning, transplanting, and other forms of management, as well as through social networks of trade and exchange, both in terms of species and products involved and in terms of technical knowledge and understanding. Reflecting both the historical depth of their use and the strength and intensity of their cultural value, key species and

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plant materials used in technology (e.g., western redcedar, stinging nettle, Indian-hemp, and spruce pitch) and the products made from them (e.g., fuels and tinder, canoes, spears, bows and arrows, wedges, nets, and baskets) are featured time and again in traditional narratives and beliefs from across the entire area. They are so intimately engrained with people’s everyday lives that one cannot be separated from the other. The species that might have been available in ancient times to migrants entering North America from the northwestern region, either by land or by sea, include alders, birches, willows, and pines for firewood, sagebrush for tinder and insect repellent, fireweed and stinging nettle for fibre, and dunegrass and bracken fern for basketry and matting. Many other species known for their technological importance in more recent times, such as bigleaf maple, Douglasfir, western redcedar and yellow-cedar, Indian-hemp, and beargrass, were evidently unknown to most of northwestern North America until much later, apparently disseminating from areas to the south untouched by the continental glaciers. As these species diffused northward and westward in the Early and Mid Holocene, people were also spreading across the landscape, in some cases bringing knowledge of these species with them and in others encountering them as new entities and discovering their utility through experimentation and transference of existing knowledge and practices. In many places, and in many time periods and cultures, technologies already known must have fused and blended with newly acquired skills and expertise, creating more complex and convoluted patterns of species use and knowledge. These dynamics are seen more clearly from the Late Holocene to the period of European contact, but they must have been happening since ancient times. For example, increased sedentism, innovations in food production and enhanced storage capabilities, and more complex social systems may be directly related to the availability of cedar. It was western redcedar, sometimes called “the cornerstone of Northwest Coast technology” (British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations 1994, 18; see also Stewart 1984) that allowed people to build large canoes and houses, large wooden boxes for storage and cooking, sturdy woven baskets for transporting and storing food, and large plank houses with enough room (such as on scaffolding around the ceiling) to store the boxes and baskets for ready access. These large buildings sheltered extended family groups who could participate in food gathering and other activities, not to mention that they accommodated large and elaborate social events like potlatches and winter dances. Having these boxes, baskets, and shelters that permitted large-scale storage allowed year-round use of many critically important food resources – fish, seafood, oil and fat, berries, seaweed, and root vegetables – that supported family well-being and growth (see also chapter 5).

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Most activities that relate to plant technology reflect a fairly consistent division of labour. Usually – but not always – men have been the hunters and fishers, the makers and users of spears and fishing gear, and the hewers of wood; and women have been the berry pickers, the root and beach food harvesters, the users of digging sticks and bark scrapers, the main collectors of fibrous materials, the weavers of baskets, mats, and bags, and the ones who put the finished products to use in transport, cooking, and storage. Therefore, evidence of these items in archaeological contexts throughout the study region, for example, can provide a window into men’s and women’s differing lives, occupations, skills, and knowledge systems. In particular, women’s work starts to show its profile. We also know that some of the knowledge and practices around woodworking, basket making, and other technological pursuits involve extraordinary skill, innovation, and expertise, with these technologies as they have developed representing increasing specialization and division of labour, which, it could be argued, led to the varying status of individuals and families and more complex social organization. Food storage technologies, too, allowed for accumulation of considerable material wealth in some cases, contributing not only to more social inequity and interpersonal conflict but also to greater occupational specialization, including the development of sophisticated artistic practices and of complex narratives, songs, and ritual practices, with increasingly elaborate ceremonial life (Moss et al. 2004). Furthermore, from artifacts found in household archaeological contexts (such as the knob-topped hats at the Hoko River and Ozette sites) and in burials (such as the decorated digging stick handles found in women’s burials in the Interior Plateau), as well as from the relative size and positioning of houses and living spaces within dwellings, there are indications of differential social organization or social stratification. On the Northwest Coast, at least, and possibly in the Interior Plateau in places like Keatley Creek, the ultimate development was an elite or nobility class of higher status, with more elaborate knowledge and more prestigious possessions than the “commoners.” At the lowest position, there were slaves, who were themselves considered possessions and who undertook whatever role and whatever labour their “owners” required (Ames and Maschner 1999). At the same time, the chiefs and other nobility had a responsibility to use the resources they owned for the benefit of the entire community, as well as to ensure proper management and care of the lands and resources under their control (Deur and Turner 2005; Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005). The materials and species from which plant-based objects are created, and the sites and times at which they are collected, offer more clues to the types of habitats and geographical regions frequented by people in their daily lives and seasonal rounds in a given time period and region. Woodwork, tools, basketry, mats, and other plant-based objects also show linkages across cultural groups.

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Enhanced and extended ties between communities would have involved not only transference of materials and artifacts but also continued exchange of techniques, ideas, stories, and even people (including marriage partners and in some cases slaves). Hence expanded production capabilities and acquisition of rare goods from distant places – leading to shifts in household dynamics, changes in village social organization, and increased social stratification – would have paralleled the development and diversification of plant-based technologies. Since the coming of the Europeans and the introduction of a profusion of new materials and manufactured objects – matches, guns, wooden rowboats and aluminum skiffs, cars and trucks, gunnysacks, porcelain crocks, ice cream buckets, glass jars and zipper-topped plastic bags – so much has changed in the way people use their local plant resources. These new items have replaced or transformed the function of many Indigenous plant technologies; some original objects are no longer made at all, and knowledge of their construction and use has faded away. Others, like woven baskets and hats, canoes, and wooden boxes, are still being created by artists across the region, but their role has shifted; they tend to be used mainly on special occasions, if at all. Still highly valued, many are mostly displayed as art, although some have regained their role as functional items for everyday use. In any case, examples of virtually the entire range of tools and other objects made from traditional plant materials can be seen in museums throughout the region and in national and international museums as well. More important, the knowledge, skills, and creativity that produced these objects lives on in an entire new generation of Indigenous craftspeople and artists who are determined to maintain and renew their cultural traditions in a contemporary context.

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7 Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions

Some years ago a young Nlaka’pamux man near Merritt, British Columbia, was sharpening his hunting knife. He carefully ground it down to a razor-sharp edge, and then, pulling his hair braid around to the front, he called to his mother for a demonstration of how sharp his knife was. He intended to whisk away the little handful of hair at the end of his braid, but he misjudged the cut. Instead, the severed tip of his thumb flew across the room. His mother ran over and grabbed it. Putting it back in place over her son’s cut, she then went outside and pulled up some yarrow leaves (called qwoqwm’xn-ún’peʔ, “little chipmunk-tail”; Achillea millefolium), chewed them up with some tobacco from her cigarette, plastered the mixture over his entire thumb, and bound it all up with bandaging. After a few days, the thumb, though still sore, had grown back.

Introduction The mother of the young man told me this story (pers. comm., 1985) as an illustration of the effectiveness of yarrow in healing wounds (see also Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 167), and I told her how it was used by the ancient Greeks for the same purpose. As well as using qwoqwm’xn-ún’peʔ (“little chipmunk-tail”) for treating wounds, Nlaka’pamux healers boiled the entire plant or infused it in cold water to make a tonic for a general “out-of-sorts” feeling. They also used this solution as a wash for sore eyes, chapped hands, pimples, skin rashes, insect bites, and snakebites. They dried and powdered the leaves and stems and then dusted them on sores and skin eruptions (Steedman 1930; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Hilda Austin, a Nlaka’pamux elder from Lytton, described how a yarrow solution could be prepared for diarrhoea and bad stomach cramps: four

7-1 | Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), the quintessential medicinal herb.

roots, or roots together with the tops, are washed and then about 250 millilitres of boiling water is poured over them. The mixture is covered and allowed to steep from half an hour to an hour, and then the solution is cooled, strained, and drunk. This “tea” can also be taken for colds, and some people used a solution of the root to treat venereal disease. If a person was suffering from a toothache, the roots or leaves were held in the mouth over the tooth. The chewed leaves were also plastered on broken bones. Nlaka’pamux elder Julia Kilroy explained, “If your tooth aches, bite it [yarrow] ... it’s like peppermint, warm. After, you get better. It kills anything ... in your teeth” (cited in Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 165). Yarrow was infused in a bath for sick people and for those suffering from rheumatism (Turner and Bell 1973; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990), and the aromatic leaves were boiled to release a vapour, used as a scent in the room of a sick infant. These are just an initial list of the healing applications of yarrow (figure 7-1),1 sometimes used in combination with other plants, like the tobacco used in treating the injured thumb (Turner and Bell 1973; Turner, Thompson, et al.

416 | part two – development

1990). Yarrow leaves and stems were also placed on hot coals of a fire or used as a smudge to repel mosquitoes, and a shampoo was made from yarrow mixed with other plants (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Yarrow has a reputation for being “quite strong.” Although it was considered a good medicine, elders note that it should be used with caution. It is known to have some phototoxic properties, and some people recall that if it was handled too much, one would get white spots on their skin, “like ringworm” (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Yarrow is a highly variable and highly adaptable species, with at least four botanical varieties identified from British Columbia alone (Klinkenberg 2013). The plant is common and widespread throughout the study region, from shorelines to mountain meadows, from Alaska and the Yukon south to California and into Mexico.2 The species is circumpolar, occurring throughout the northern hemisphere, and given its prevalence even in harsh northern environments, it is likely to have been one of the original medicines of the New World, familiar to the very earliest peoples entering this land. In northwestern North America, yarrow ranks in the “top 25” species in terms of the number of languages and major dialects in which it is named (see chapter 3, table 3-8). Yarrow is, in fact, one of the most widely used medicinal herbs in the world (Chandler, Hooper, and Harvey 1982). Moerman’s (2003) database of Native American ethnobotany contains over 350 specific medicinal applications of Achillea by North American First Peoples alone.3 It is as common in Chinese traditional medicine and as widespread in European herbals as it is in North American Indigenous and other pharmacopoeias. Its chemistry is complex, with well over 100 identified pharmacologically active compounds, exhibiting 840 distinct pharmacological activities (Duke 2009). Among its components are several notable constituents, including achilleine (known as a hemostatic, for stopping bleeding), azulene (which is anti-inflammatory), and the well-known aromatics menthol, camphor, and thujone, the latter occurring in trace amounts and having neurotoxic properties that should be regarded with caution (Turner and von Aderkas 2009). Yarrow is a good example of a medicinal plant that could be called a panacea – used in treating an immense array of ailments. Many other medicinal species are similarly well known. In fact, of the “top 25” plants of table 3-8, at least twenty-three have known medicinal applications. Notably, twenty-one of these are also used in some way as food, and in fact, most are better known as food than as medicine. For example, saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia) bark and twigs are used in medicinal preparations, but the shrub is best known for its sweet edible fruits and for its tough wood, used for arrows, digging sticks, and as rim reinforcement for birch-bark baskets. Another of the “top 25,” kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), is probably equally recognized for its medicinal properties and for its edible fruits, as well as the leaves being smoked as a tobacco. Medicinally, the leaves are used widely as a tea for urinary tract problems

Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions  |  417

and for a range of other ailments. Labrador tea and trapper’s tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum, R. neoglandulosum), also in the “top 25” list, are used both as a beverage tea and as a medicine for colds, flu, and general sickness. In all, of the twenty-five most widely named species, only two – yarrow and devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus) – are used predominantly as medicines rather than as foods or for technological purposes. Medicinal Plants and Health

Ubiquitous, widely named, highly aromatic, and versatile as a medicine, yar­ row – along with these other high-profile medicinal plants – provides an excellent entrée into a broader consideration of medicinal plants and healing practices of Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America. They exemplify many of the topics at issue in deliberations on the acquisition of knowledge about medicinal plants and on how this knowledge has been disseminated and adapted over time and space. These subjects include how people select their medicines, factors influencing the historical development of medicinal practices and the efficacy of medicines, the chemical properties of different parts and different populations of medicinal plants, the different modes of application and treatment used for plant medicines, and the role of medicinal plants in belief systems. Of course, medicinal plants are part of a broader knowledge system and only one component of many in considering the overall health and well-being of a people (see J.A. Ross 2011). Good nutrition, warmth and shelter, emotional and spiritual health, and community and environmental health are all important aspects of total health in a society. Plants feature in each of these areas, and since all of these are interconnected, it is impossible to treat medicinal plants as an isolated entity. Ethnographic accounts point to generally healthy Indigenous populations in northwestern North America before the arrival of Europeans. For example, Teit (1909, 618) noted, “The Shuswap agree with the Thompson Indians in saying that formerly they were, on the whole a larger, stronger, and healthier race than they are now. Very few children died, sickness was not common, and many lived to an extreme old age.” Archaeological evidence generally confirms this conclusion. For the Northwest Coast, Ames and Maschner (1999, 56) suggest that, “In general, people on the coast appear to have been as healthy as most pre-modern humans, and healthier than some.” Nevertheless, they note, both tuberculosis and nonvenereal syphilis were evidently present on the Northwest Coast before European entry. As well, skeletal remains show that some people suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and from anaemia and iron deficiency. Another indicator of people’s health is the condition of their teeth. Before the introduction of molasses, sugar, and other refined carbohydrates, there was

418 | part two – development

a near absence of tooth decay in Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau, although there were higher levels of tooth wear (probably from chewing dried food, from high levels of grit in people’s food, and from using teeth for basketry and other technological purposes). The frequency of dental caries was slightly higher in the Interior Plateau than on the Northwest Coast, possibly reflecting a higher use of carbohydrate-rich root vegetables in the interior. The highest frequency of caries is among populations in areas where dependence on plant resources such as camas (Camassia spp.), a known source of fructose, appears to have been greatest (Cybulski 2006). Waves of diseases transmitted by European newcomers were devastating in their impact since Indigenous people had no genetic immunity to many of them, most notably smallpox, measles, whooping cough, influenza, venereal diseases, and some strains of tuberculosis. Sweeping epidemics reduced some populations by 90 per cent, or even more, wiping out entire villages. Despite efforts to treat these diseases, the best Indigenous medical treatments were inadequate in the face of these new pestilences (Boyd 1990, 1999a; Edwards 1980). Added to the immense destruction caused by disease were a plethora of other factors, from the introduction of alcoholic beverages to the distribution of firearms, that impacted people’s health and well-being and fuelled the massive population losses that took place, especially in the nineteenth century (Boyd 1999a). Other changes (see chapter 4) were in lifestyles and diet, and some of these, mirroring changes in urbanizing and industrializing populations generally, have resulted in another type of health epidemic, reflected in high rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease – part of a global “nutrition transition” (Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009; Kuhnlein and Receveur 1996; Turner and Turner 2008). People have always faced times when, as individuals and communities, their health and well-being were threatened, and, everywhere, people have turned to plants as healing agents. Some of these, like yarrow – which is common and widespread and signals its potential as a medicine through its aromatic properties – have obvious ancient origins, but we still have much to learn about how ancestral peoples selected and developed their entire medical pharmacopeias (Johns 1996; Leonti, Sticher, and Heinrich 2003). The variations in medicinal plant use are as interesting as the commonalities. Origin and Historical Development of Plant Medicines Summary of Medicinal Plants of Northwestern North America

In all, about 200 plant species are used, or have been used, medicinally in some way. Table 7-1 summarizes plant medicines used by Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America under various categories of treatments. Many plants,

Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions  |  419

Table 7-1  |  Examples of medicinal plants used by Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America

General tonics (out of about 35 spp.)

Grand fir (Abies grandis; Pinaceae)

Decoction of bark drunk as tea

Western larch (Larix occidentalis; Pinaceae)

Infusion of boughs and bark drunk for poor appetite and any general illness

Common juniper (Juniperus communis; Cupressaceae)

White spruce (Picea glauca; Pinaceae)

Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta; Pinaceae)

Berry-like cone eaten as “cure-all” medicine; infusion of branches drunk for many purposes

Gum chewed and tea from pitch drunk to maintain good health

Infusion of boughs drunk as tonic (not for pregnant women); pitch used as poultice for boils, swellings, sores

Red alder (Alnus rubra; Betulaceae)

Decoction of bark drunk as tea

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium; Onagraceae)

Tea from leaves drunk for good health and as blood tonic

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uvaursi; Ericaceae)

Cascara (Frangula purshiana; Rhamnaceae)

Decoction of leaves drunk as general blood tonic, especially in “changing of the blood” (Okanagan)

Infusion of bark drunk as general tonic

Black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata; Caprifoliaceae)

Decoction of twigs and inner bark drunk as tonic

Yellow pond-lily (Nuphar lutea ssp. polysepala; Nymphaeaceae)

Infusion or decoction of rhizomes drunk as tonic

Tall Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium; Berberidaceae)

Infusion or decoction of bark drunk as blood tonic

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus; Araliaceae)

Infusion or decoction of stems, inner bark, and roots drunk as tonic and blood purifier

Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum; Ericaceae)

Tea from leaves and stems drunk daily for good health

Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana; Rosaceae)

Black currant (Ribes hudsonianum; Grossulariaceae) Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis; Elaeagnaceae) False hellebore (Veratrum viride; Liliaceae)

Decoction of bark drunk as blood tonic and for “changing of the blood” (Okanagan)

Tea from leaves drunk in winter for general good health

Berry whip eaten as “health food”; decoction or infusion of branches and leaves drunk as tonic Some take very weak solution of root as tonic (potentially extremely toxic)

Purgatives, laxatives, and emetics (out of about 20 spp.)

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa; Pinaceae)

420 | part two – development

Decoction of bark drunk as purgative

Table 7-1 | continued

Common juniper (Juniperus communis; Cupressaceae)

Tea from branches and roots drunk as laxative

Goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus; Rosaceae)

Decoction of stems, leaves, roots drunk as laxative

Baneberry (Actaea rubra; Ranunculaceae)

Cascara (Frangula purshiana; Rhamnaceae)

Infusion or decoction of roots taken with extreme caution as emetic and purgative for general sickness (also to treat arthritis, bronchitis, syphilis, rheumatism, snakebites); said to make patient very sick initially (toxic)

Infusion of bark drunk as laxative

Tall Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium; Berberidaceae)

Infusion or decoction of bark drunk as purgative

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa; Caprifoliaceae)

Infusion of bark and roots drunk as purgative and emetic (contains cyanogenic glycosides)

Lowbush cranberry, or lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea; Ericaceae)

Berries eaten to help “clean out your stomach” in spring

Water-parsley (Oenanthe sarmentosa; Apiaceae)

Tuberous roots used as purgative

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis; Elaeagnaceae)

decoction or infusion of branches and leaves drunk as purgative and laxative; purgative properties used in ritual purification by hunters and young men at puberty

False hellebore (Veratrum viride; Liliaceae) Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule; Caprifoliaceae)

Some take very weak solution of root as laxative and emetic for internal cleansing (potentially extremely toxic) Tea from berries drunk for constipation

Salves, poultices, and washes for skin ailments (out of about 60 spp.)

Sea wrack (Fucus gardneri; Phaeophyta)

Mucilage in receptacles applied as poultice for burns

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa; Pinaceae)

Liquid pitch from bark blisters applied externally for sores, bruises, and sprains; pulverized needles as baby powder and skin salve

Old man’s beard lichen (Usnea longissima; Usneaceae)

Junipers (Juniperus maritima, J. occidentalis, J. scopulorum; Cupressaceae)

Applied as poultice to wounds and sores

Decoction of boughs used as external wash for bites, stings, itching, and insect bites

Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions  |  421

Table 7-1 | continued

Spruce (Picea spp.; Pinaceae) Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta; Pinaceae)

Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa; Pinaceae) Yarrow (Achillea millefolium; Asteraceae)

Red alder (Alnus rubra; Betulaceae) Pacific anemone (Anemone multifida; Ranunculaceae) Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uvaursi; Ericaceae)

Wormwoods (Artemisia ludoviciana and other Artemisia spp.; Asteraceae)

Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata; Asteraceae) Birches (Betula spp.; Betulaceae) Snowbrush (Ceanothus velutinus; Rhamnaceae)

False yarrow (Chaenactis douglasii; Asteraceae) Scouring rush (Equisetum hyemale; Equisetaceae)

Pitch applied to wounds or slivers as salve; tea from inner bark applied to rashes, eczema, and sores Pitch used as poultice for boils, swellings, and sores Pitch used as salve for burns and sores

Leaves and roots used to treat toothaches, cuts, sores, and swellings; used as external poultice or wash

Infusion or decoction of bark used as washing solution for skin ailments, rashes, and infections

Fresh leaves used as counter-irritant poultice for sores, swellings, bruises, and arthritis Decoction or infusion of leaves and stems used as wash for burns

Decoction of leaves and stems used as wash for swellings, bruises, itches, sores, and broken bones

Pitch from root bark and powdered, dried leaves used as medicinal salve for skin ailments (e.g., poison ivy rash)

Inner bark, ashes, leaves, buds, and wood used to treat burns, bites, boils, and wounds Powdered leaves used to make salve for burns and sores

Decoction of plants used as wash or poultice for skin ailments, burns, wounds, and spider and insect bites; also drunk for swellings Ashes from stalks used as powder for burns

Salal (Gaultheria shallon; Ericaceae)

Leaves mashed or bruised and applied to burns

Alumroot (Heuchera cylindrica; Saxifragaceae)

Root applied to boils and sores, especially mouth sores

Rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera oblongifolia; Orchidaceae)

Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi; Apiaceae)

Chocolate tips (Lomatiurn dissectum; Apiaceae) Black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata; Caprifoliaceae)

422 | part two – development

Leaves used as poultice for cuts, burns, blisters, boils, and rheumatic pains

Root used as poultice for cuts and burns

Infusion or poultice of root used to treat dandruff, lice, sores, and boils

Twigs and leaves used as wash and poultice for sores

Table 7-1 | continued

Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus; Araceae)

Leaves bruised and used to treat burns

Broad-leaved plantain (Plantago major; Plantaginaceae)

Leaves bruised and used as poultice for burns, stings, sores, and skin infections

Wild lily-of-the-valley (Maianthemum dilatatum; Liliaceae)

Leaves (and roots) bruised and used to treat burns, cuts, and insect bites

Black cottonwood (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa; Salicaceae)

Bud resin used to make salve for cuts, sores, baby teething, and toothache; leaves applied to draw out infection

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis; Rosaceae) Willows (Salix spp.; Salicaceae)

Blue elderberry (Sambucus nigra ssp. cerulea; Caprifoliaceae) Goldenrod (Solidago canadensis; Asteraceae) Mountain valerian (Valeriana sitchensis; Valerianaceae)

Bark used as a poultice for sores and burns

Leaves, shoots, and bark used as poultice for cuts, wounds, and sores

Bark applied as poultice for boils and carbuncles Freshly mashed leaves placed on open wounds to stop bleeding

Mashed roots and leaves, powdered dried roots, or decoction of roots applied externally for swellings, sores, and wounds

Medicines for colds, coughs, tuberculosis, and other respiratory ailments (out of about 70 spp.)

Licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhiza; Polypodiaceae)

Whole rhizomes chewed or drunk as infusion or decoction for coughs, colds, sore throats, and whooping cough

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa; Pinaceae)

Liquid pitch eaten or taken mixed in hot water for coughs, colds, influenza, and tuberculosis

Tree junipers (Juniperus maritima, J. occidentalis, J. scopulorum; Cupressaceae)

Infusion of boughs drunk for colds, coughs, sore throats, influenza, and other ailments

Common juniper (Juniperus communis; Cupressaceae)

Infusion or decoction of boughs drunk for colds, tuberculosis, fevers, and pneumonia

Western larch (Larix occidentalis; Pinaceae)

Infusion of boughs and bark drunk for tuberculosis, laryngitis, and other ailments

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla; Pinaceae)

Infusion of bark drunk for colds

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata; Cupressaceae)

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium; Asteraceae)

Infusion of boughs drunk for colds; also used as inhalant for coughs and colds

Leaves, roots, and whole plants drunk as solution or chewed to treat colds, coughs, and sore throats; used as inhalant for congestion

Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions  |  423

Table 7-1 | continued

Red alder (Alnus rubra; Betulaceae)

Infusion of bark drunk for tuberculosis

Wormwood or sage (Artemisia ludoviciana; Asteraceae)

Infusion of leaves drunk for coughs and tuberculosis

Northern wormwood (Artemisia frigida; Asteraceae)

Tilesius’ wormwood, or caribou weed (Artemisia tilesii; Asteraceae)

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata; Asteraceae) Birches (Betula spp.; Betulaceae) Snowbrush (Ceanothus velutinus; Rhamnaceae) White frasera (Frasera montana; Gentianaceae)

Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi; Apiaceae)

Chocolate tips (Lomatium dissectum; Apiaceae) “Wild celery,” or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule; Apiaceae)

Infusion or decoction of leaves and stems drunk for colds and respiratory problems

Infusion of plant drunk for colds and sore throats; used as inhalant for congestion

Infusion of leafy branches drunk or used as external wash or inhaled for colds, laryngitis, and other ailments (some say it is too strong to use internally)

Infusion of inner bark and sap taken for coughs, colds, and asthma Infusion of branches drunk for colds (as well as for fever, influenza, dull pains, weight loss, diarrhea, or general illness)

General tonic for flu, headaches, and respiratory difficulties Root chewed for colds, sore throat, fevers, and tuberculosis

Infusion of root drunk for colds, sore throat, and fevers (said to be very strong) Whole seeds chewed and juice swallowed for colds, coughs, sore throats, and tuberculosis; infusion or decoction of seeds taken for same purpose

False Solomon’s-seal (Maianthemum racemosum; Liliaceae)

Decoction of rhizomes drunk for colds, sore throat, and other ailments

Field mint (Mentha arvensis; Lamiaceae)

Infusion of plants drunk for colds, coughs, fever, and influenza

Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca; Rosaceae)

Yellow pond-lily (Nuphar spp.; Nymphaeaceae)

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus; Araliaceae)

Infusion or decoction of bark drunk for colds and coughs

Infusion of rhizomes drunk for colds and coughs Infusion or decoction of stems, inner bark, and wood drunk for tuberculosis

False box (Paxistima myrsinites)

Infusion drunk for colds and flu

Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum; Ericaceae)

Infusion or decoction from leaves and stems drunk gargled or used as inhalant for colds and congestion

Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana; Rosaceae)

424 | part two – development

Infusion or decoction of bark or fruits drunk for colds and coughs

Table 7-1 | continued

Smooth sumac (Rhus glabra; Anacardiaceae) Willows (Salix spp.; Salicaceae) Waxberry, or snowberry (Symphor­ icarpos albus; Caprifoliaceae) Mountain valerian (Valeriana sitchensis; Valerianaceae)

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule; Caprifoliaceae)

Infusion of root as eye wash or drunk for venereal disease, tuberculosis, and kidney problems

Infusion of leaves and bark drunk for coughs and colds Infusion of branches drunk for tuberculosis

Roots chewed or drunk as a decoction for colds, coughs, tuberculosis, and respiratory ailments Tea of branches used as gargle for sore throat; berries boiled for cough medicine

Aids for internal ailments (digestive tract and internal injuries) (out of about 50 spp.)

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa; Pinaceae)

Infusion or decoction of bark and pitch drunk for internal injuries and ulcers

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla; Pinaceae)

Infusion or decoction of bark drunk for ulcers and internal injuries

Western larch (Larix occidentalis; Pinaceae)

Red alder (Alnus rubra; Betulaceae) Green alder (Alnus viridis; Betulaceae)

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uvaursi; Ericaceae) Crowberry (Empetrum nigrum; Empetraceae)

Alumroot (Heuchera cylindrica; Saxifragaceae)

Chocolate tips (Lomatium dissectum; Apiaceae)

False Solomon’s-seal (Maianthemum racemosum; Liliaceae) Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus; Araliaceae)

Infusion of boughs and bark drunk for ulcers, poor appetite, or general illness (also for breast cancer)

Infusion or decoction of bark drunk for ulcers and internal bleeding Decoction of bark drunk for stomach and urinary tract problems Decoction of leaves drunk for kidney and urinary tract problems

Tea from berries, stems, and roots drunk for stomach ache and diarrhoea (and bad colds)

Infusion of root drunk for stomach ache and diarrhea

Infusion of root drunk as emetic (considered very strong)

Decoction of rhizomes drunk for colds, sore throat, lack of appetite, digestive tract and gynaecological ailments, and internal injuries; decoction of leaves drunk for rheumatism Decoction or infusion of stems drunk for indigestion and type 2 diabetes (as well as for many other purposes: arthritis, influenza, tuberculosis, general illness, postpartum medicine, and as tonic and blood purifier)

Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions  |  425

Table 7-1 | continued

Red currant (Ribes triste; Grossulariaceae)

Tea from whole plant drunk for stomach ailments

Lowbush cranberry, or lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea; Ericaceae)

Decoction of whole plant for urinary tract problems; berry juice drunk for kidney problems

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis; Elaeagnaceae)

Mountain valerian (Valeriana sitchensis; Valerianaceae)

Berry whip eaten as “health food” and for digestive tract ailments; infusion or decoction from stems and roots drunk for stomach ache, as laxative, and for diarrhoea

Decoction of roots drunk for digestive tract ailments such as diarrhea

Gynaecological medicines (out of about 30 spp.)

Horsetail, or scouring rush (Equisetum hyemale; Equisetaceae) Common juniper (Juniperus communis; Cupressaceae)

Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum; Cupressaceae) Yarrow (Achillea millefolium; Asteraceae)

Birches (Betula spp.; Betulaceae)

Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea; Cornaceae)

Decoction of stems drunk as postpartum medicine (also for urinary ailments and venereal disease) Decoction or infusion drunk at the onset of labour in childbirth

Infusion of boughs drunk at the onset of labour in childbirth Leaves and roots drunk as infusion by mothers in childbirth and to treat infertility, menstrual problems, and other gynaecological disorders Inner bark chewed for menstrual cramps Decoction of twigs and bark drunk after childbirth

Rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera oblongifolia; Orchidaceae)

Leaves chewed as childbirth medicine and to determine sex of the fetus

Water-parsley (Oenanthe sarmentosa; Apiaceae)

Rootstocks eaten to speed up labour during childbirth (also used as purgative)

False Solomon’s-seal (Maianthemum racemosum; Liliaceae)

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus; Araliaceae)

Gooseberry (Ribes oxyacanthoides; Grossulariaceae) Wild raspberry (Rubus idaeus; Rosaceae)

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa; Caprifoliaceae)

426 | part two – development

Decoction of rhizomes drunk for gynaecological ailments (and various other ailments)

Decoction of stems drunk as postpartum medicine (and for many other purposes)

Infusion from stems drunk by mothers after childbirth to stop excessive bleeding; root infusion drunk for delayed menstrual period

Tea from leaves drunk by pregnant women and women during childbirth for strength Infusion of bark drunk to hasten childbirth during prolonged labour (strongly purgative; contains cyanogenic glycosides)

Table 7-1 | continued

Rheumatism and arthritis (sore joints and aching muscles) (out of about 30 spp.)

Common juniper (Juniperus communis; Cupressaceae) Junipers (Juniperus maritima, J. occidentalis, J. scopulorum; Cupressaceae)

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata; Asteraceae) Snowbrush (Ceanothus velutinus; Rhamnaceae) Showy aster (Eurybia conspicua; Asteraceae)

Chocolate tips (Lomatium dissectum; Apiaceae) Yellow pond-lily (Nuphar spp.; Nymphaeaceae)

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus; Araliaceae) False Solomon’s-seal (Maianthemum racemosum; Liliaceae)

Tea from berry-like cones drunk to ease back pain; infusion of branches drunk for aching muscles

Decoction of boughs used as external wash for rheumatism Infusion of branches drunk or used as external wash for arthritis (some say it is too strong for internal use)

Decoction of branches used as wash or in steam bath for rheumatism, arthritis, and broken bones (also for gonorrhea) Root applied as poultice for arthritis; said to be very strong

Roots cooked, mashed, and applied to rheumatic joints Rhizome slices chewed, grated, or made into a tea and drunk to treat arthritic pain or used to bathe affected joints; applied directly on sore joints Decoction or infusion of inner bark drunk for arthritis and rheumatism; also used as a salve for arthritic and muscular sores Decoction of leaves drunk for rheumatism

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis; Elaeagnaceae)

Tea from leaves and stems used as wash to treat aching limbs or joints, such as with arthritis

False hellebore (Veratrum viride; Liliaceae)

Roots solution for bathing and as external poultice for arthritis, rheumatism, bruises, and muscular aches and pains (not used over open sores or cuts)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica; Urticaceae)

Leafy stems used as counter-irritant for rheumatic pain, arthritis, backache, and paralysis; used in sweathouse

Miscellaneous other medicines (out of about 40 spp.)

Red laver seaweed (Pyropia sp., syn. Porphyra sp.; Rhodophyta) Conehead liverwort (Conocephalum conicum; Hepaticeae)

Used by Alutiiq and others to treat goitre Used as eye medicine

Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions  |  427

Table 7-1 | continued

Scouring rush (Equisetum hyemale; Equisetaceae)

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa; Pinaceae)

Spruces (Picea spp.; Pinaceae) Common juniper (Juniperus communis; Cupressaceae) Junipers (Juniperus maritima, J. occidentalis, J. scopulorum; Cupressaceae) Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii; Pinaceae)

Decoction of stems, or liquid from stem segments, used as eye medicine

Decoction of bark used as eyewash and drunk for gonorrhea or as purgative; decoction of branches used as wash or drink for ritual purification in sweathouse; boughs used as protective scent for young women at puberty

Tips boiled in the house and branches used on floor to keep sickness away and as disinfectant Infusion of branches used as eye wash and protective wash for hunters and others requiring purification

Boughs burned or steamed as purifying incense; infusion used as protective wash for hunters, bereaved people, and those seeking luck; used in sweathouse purification rites Decoction drank in sweathouse for purification

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium; Asteraceae)

Infusion of leaves and roots used to treat sore eyes, toothaches, and for many other purposes

Wormwoods (Artemisia ludoviciana and other Artemisia spp.; Asteraceae)

Used for purification in sweathouse; infusion drunk for many illnesses; used as purifying “disinfectant” in house or sweathouse against illness, death, and harmful influences

Green alder (Alnus incana; Betulaceae)

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata; Asteraceae) Paper birch (Betula papyrifera; Betulaceae) Wild larkspur (Delphinium glaucum; Ranunculaceae)

twigs dipped in water and used for rubbing the body when sweat bathing

Used in house and sweathouse as purifying and protective incense; infusion used as eye medicine

Bark used to make cast for broken limbs; roots and buds used to treat snow blindness; bark given to teething babies to chew on Decoction of plant used as head wash for lice

Field mint (Mentha arvensis; Lamiaceae)

Infusion used as eye wash

Gray currant, or stink currant (Ribes bracteosum; Grossulariaceae)

Decoction of bark used for eye problems

Brown’s peony (Paeonia brownii; Ranunculaceae)

Wild raspberry (Rubus idaeus; Rosaceae)

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Infusion of root top used as eye wash; root chewed or decoction drunk for worms, fever, and tuberculosis

Decoction of roots used as eye drops for snow blindness

Table 7-1 | continued

Willows (Salix spp.; Salicaceae) Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis; Elaeagnaceae) Waxberry, or snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus; Caprifoliaceae)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica; Urticaceae) Bog blueberry (Vaccinium uliginosum; Ericaceae)

Tea from bark drunk as pain reliever and for headaches

Purgative properties used in ritual purification by hunters and young men at puberty Berries used as eye medicine and to remove warts; infusion of branches used as eyewash; infusion drunk for bedwetting

Branches used for striking and rubbing the body when sweat bathing and for ritual cleansing Tea from berries or whole plant used to treat diabetes; root boiled to make decoction taken for headaches

Notes: The safety and/or efficacy of these medicines have, in many cases, not been verified through clinical testing or phytochemical analysis. Examples are selected from a total of about 200 species, including those applied in more than one category. Sources: Andre and Fehr (2000), Compton (1993b), Garibaldi (1999), L.M.J. Gottesfeld (1992a), L.M. Gottesfeld and Anderson (1988), Hunn, Turner, and French (1998), Johnson (1997), Marles et al. (2000), McCutcheon (1996), McCutcheon et al. (1992), Moerman (2003), Ritch-Krc et al. (1996), J.A. Ross (2011), J. Ryan et al. (1994), H.I. Smith (1928), Turner (1984, 1988a, 2004a), Turner and Bell (1971, 1973), Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy (1980), Turner and Efrat (1982), Turner and Hebda (1990, 2012), Turner, Thomas, et al. (1983), Turner, Thompson, et al. (1990).

like yarrow, are used for multiple purposes, treating a plethora of ailments and injuries and being applied more broadly in health maintenance. Some species (including yarrow) assumed to be among the earliest of medicines for Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America are listed in table 2-2 (chapter 2), along with presumably ancient plant materials. The medicinal species in the table are known to have pharmaceutical properties, are known to occur in palaeoecological contexts and especially in colder climates, and in some cases, are known to have been used medicinally in areas of northeastern Asia, such as Kamchatka. Perhaps not surprisingly, the food and medicinal species listed in tables 2-1 and 2-2 show significant overlap. Medicine-Food Congruence

The simultaneous use of plants as both food and medicine is a well-known phenomenon (Etkin 2006; Johns 1996; Moerman 1996, 2009).4 Many Indigenous people say, “Our food is our medicine” (Turner and Ommer 2004) – another indication of the inseparability of food and medicine. Obviously, good nutrition is essential for good health. There are also certain foods that are particularly

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7-2  |  Balsamroot, or spring sunflower (Balsamorhiza sagittata).

recognized as “health foods,” as well as no small number of plants that people use for both food and medicine.5 Moerman (1996) documents this food-medicine congruence for plant species and families of plants used by North American Indigenous peoples, noting a substantial overlapping of medicinal and food floras, in a broadly based continent-wide ethnobotanical survey. He also found some interesting differences, however, in that applications for food and medicine tend to involve different plant parts, different modes of preparation, or different lifecycle stages. A good example from the Interior Plateau is balsamroot, or spring sunflower (Balsamorhiza sagittata) (figure 7-2), a well-known food plant whose young shoots, budstalks, seeds, and roots are all edible (Bannister and Thomas forthcoming; Chambers et al. 2002; Peacock 1998; Turner 1998; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). However, this plant also produces an aromatic resinous pitch, especially from its large, mature taproots, and this pitch is used medicinally as a salve or wash, as explained by Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001): “This is a plant [called tséts’elq] that’s so precious to us ... When we talk about the food of our people ... this plant is, the smaller one [i.e., with carrot-sized roots] is the edible

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one, and the bigger plants were used as medicine for open sores. You might have impetigo, or ulcer sores, or maybe poison ivy affected you. What our people would do is dig the big root, [of] the big plant, the covering on the root. Or they pick the leaves and dry them and put it away.” Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) explained that the pitch from the root covering of tséts’elq is collected and applied directly to sores or skin infections, or the cooled pitchy water from boiling the roots is used to soak or wash the affected area. The pitch can also be mixed with mashed plantain (Plantago major) leaves to make a healing salve, and the dried, powdered leaves of balsamroot can be sprinkled over sores, such as a poison ivy rash, that will not heal. Phytochemical research on tséts’elq undertaken by Bannister (2000; see also Bannister and Peacock 1998; and Bannister and Thomas forthcoming), in collaboration with Mary Thomas and other Secwepemc elders, revealed important elements that relate to its dual use as food and medicine. One of the main compounds previously isolated from this plant is an antibacterial compound called thiophene E. Using in vitro assays, Bannister demonstrated that, even after exposure to boiling temperatures, balsamroot pitch retains its antibacterial and antifungal activity, as does the cooled pitchy water used as a soaking solution for wounds. Furthermore, she showed conclusively that thiophene E is both present and active in the pitch, along with other (as yet unidentified) antimicrobial compounds, and that it is concentrated in the rough outer bark of balsamroot – “the covering on the root” – as Mary Thomas (2001) suggested for the medicinal component familiar to her.6 Bannister’s research indicates clearly that the selection of different parts of the plant is important and that the processing of balsamroot in different ways affects its phytochemical composition and biological activity. Pit-cooking (described in chapter 5) breaks down the complex sugar in balsamroot, inulin, into more palatable and digestible fructose through a process that applies a combination of heat, moisture, and acid (from vegetation accompanying the food being pit-cooked). The inner root thus becomes a major source of calories and other nutrients – reputedly delicious when properly prepared (Peacock 1998). The root “bark” of balsamroot, where thiophene E and other antibiotic compounds are concentrated, provides an apparently effective topical medicine for dermatological problems. Both of these applications – for consumption and for medicine – are apparently safe and efficacious when the products are prepared following traditional methods. The question is how the cultural knowledge reflected in these sophisticated processing techniques came about. Mary Thomas learned about balsamroot as food and medicine from her grandmothers, and presumably they learned it from their elders, but how far back did this knowledge extend, and how did it develop? Johns (1996) suggests that people’s ancient sensory experimentation helped them to select for food and medicine simultaneously. Taste and smell are

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important factors. Most plant food products are mild-tasting and lack strongly bitter flavours or intense odours in their edible state, whereas many plants that are pharmacologically active (like the balsamroot outer skin) contain bittertasting or highly aromatic compounds such as alkaloids or essential oils that make them unpleasant to consume except in small quantities or in diluted form. Early humans must have sampled virtually every plant in their environments, smelling and tasting not only the leaves but other parts as well, digging up the roots, peeling stems, selecting tender young shoots, and relegating plants and parts of plants with tastes or smells too strong for eating to possible medicinal use. Always, too, people would have been guided by their existing knowledge of similar species or species with similar flavours or odours. They would also have observed animals and their choices of food, using this information to guide their own experimentation. Indeed, humans and animals share many of the same foods, although the physiological and digestive capacities of animals may be quite different from those of humans. Therefore, it would have been important to know not only what plants animals were eating (or medicating themselves with) but also what differences existed between animals’ foods and those consumable for humans (Turner 1997b). Heating potential food or medicine by various methods, as well as other types of preparation – soaking, pounding, wilting, drying, chewing, or even allowing to freeze – would have been a part of people’s experimental trials, as would any beneficial or injurious effects from touching, chewing, or swallowing. In this way, people were constantly extending their knowledge – continually probing the frontiers of discovery. Over time, an immense compendium of information and experiences was built up about foods and medicines and how their characteristics varied with plant populations, harvesting times, parts of the plant used, modes of preparation, amounts consumed, and even the age and condition of the person using them. Part of this complex knowledge would have included the potentially toxic or harmful elements of plants. Occasionally, the effects of consuming these plant materials would have been deadly. A very few types of plants and mushrooms in northwestern North America (e.g., water-hemlock, Cicuta spp.) are so toxic that they can be fatal even in small amounts (Turner and von Aderkas 2009). Most of the time, however, physiologically active or poisonous plants would have caused nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, rashes, or other unpleasant effects but without lasting or fatal outcomes. In any case, knowledge of plants that were harmful would have spread quickly and widely. Medicine, Food, and Poisonous Plants

There is a significant overlap not only between food and medicine species but also between medicinal and poisonous plants, as well as between food plants

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and poisonous species. Thus a three-way congruence, or a “food-medicinepoison” triangle, is evident across these three classes of plants (Turner 2014). Balsamroot, described in the previous section, is representative of a host of such plants, being situated within this triangle, serving important roles as both food and medicine, and having, simultaneously, potentially harmful properties that must be addressed through the way it is prepared. The varying effects of balsamroot and other species within the “triangle” are thus mediated by traditional knowledge and practice. In the quest for food and medicine, knowing how to distinguish less poisonous from more poisonous varieties and species and knowing how and when to harvest and process potentially toxic species for safe consumption or less risky but efficacious medicinal use are critical components of any group’s Traditional Ecological Knowledge system. In the case of balsamroot, given the potential toxicity of the bark pitch, with its substantial concentrations of thiophene E and other physiologically active substances, pit-cooking and peeling the roots may be considered forms of detoxification (Bannister 2000). Avoiding the mature leaves and flowers, and eating only the very young, pre-emergent leaves and peeled stalks of the flowerhead buds, is another strategy for avoiding the plant’s potentially toxic components. The knowledge about balsamroot’s properties to be considered in its selection and preparation is deeply encoded both in language – since its Sec­ wepemc names, ts’elqenúpyeʔ for the leafy tops and tséts’elq for its roots, relate to the plant’s bitter qualities7 – and in the protocols for its preparation as a food, as reported by Teit (1900, 349), who noted that the roots are “very difficult to cook.” Balsamroot is only one of dozens of food plants needing special preparation to mitigate the effects of potentially harmful or seriously toxic properties. The medicine-poison intersection is even more pronounced than the foodpoison overlap. Since medicinal species are commonly selected for traits and effects that reflect physiologically active compounds – for their ability to heal wounds and infections and for their effects on the human digestive, circulatory, or nervous systems, for example – many medicinal species can cause harm if consumed in higher concentrations or over prolonged periods (Duke 1985; Blumenthal, Goldberg, and Brinckmann 2000; Turner and von Aderkas 2009; Tyler 1987). Nevertheless, even strongly toxic plants like strychnine and curare have been used successfully as medicines (McGarry and McGarry 1999). Medicinal plants can stimulate the nervous system, regulate the heartbeat, bring healing relaxation, control internal bleeding, heal a range of infections, and reduce fever or numb pain. However, some of the same species can irreparably damage the liver or kidneys, dangerously lower blood sugar, interfere with normal blood clotting, prevent cell division, or affect the immune system. Plants can also cause skin reactions – pain, redness, blistering, swelling – or can harm the eyes, simply from contact. Yet even such plants are sometimes applied medicinally or even consumed as food (Turner 1984).

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A detailed survey concerning knowledge of edible, medicinal, and poisonous plants and fungal species known in twelve Indigenous language groups in northwestern North America revealed some compelling evidence of overlaps across these categories (Turner 2014).8 A summary of the species in the foodmedicine-poison study, with some examples, is given in table 7-2. In this study, a total of 375 traditional food and medicine plants, fungi, lichen, and algal species, as well as those species reported to be toxic by Indigenous knowledge holders, were surveyed for overlaps across the categories of food, medicine, and poison.9 A significant proportion of the species in the survey (91 in total, or just under 25%) were identified as being used solely as food, with no reported medicinal use or known toxic properties. Fifty-six of the food species were known to be eaten by particular animals as well as by people, and 41 in the total group had parts known to be eaten by animals but not by people. A total of 68 species (18%) that were used as internal medicines had no reported use as food and no reported toxicity. Ten species (less than 3%) were known only as poisons within one or more groups, having no known use as food or medicine. All of the other species (over half, at 55%) represented some degree of overlap in use and knowledge across the food-medicine-poison continuum. Nearly one-third of the food and beverage species (118, or 31.5%) were also used in some way as internally consumed medicines. Of these, 55 had the same part (e.g., root, leaves, or berries) used as both food and medicine, and 63 had different parts used as food and medicine (e.g., fruit eaten but bark or leaves used as medicine). Thirty-nine food and beverage plants (10.4%) were recognized by one or more groups as having some type of poisonous or harmful property, requiring special preparation or consideration around harvesting or processing, and a further 10 (over 3%) had other parts, not eaten, that were reported to be toxic. Eighty medicinal species (over 21%) were also reported to have some potential toxic or harmful properties if not prepared correctly or if taken in too high a dosage, and a few of these, such as false hellebore (Veratrum viride) and water-hemlock (Cicuta douglasii), were regarded as deadly and to be used only with extreme caution. Many people would not use these internally at all, although some would take minute doses. For example, Steedman (1930, 476, 513) described the Nlaka’pamux use of Cicuta: “This is known as a poison to humans and animals. Men, both healthy and ill, sometimes eat a tiny piece of the fresh or dried root after first drinking salmon oil or the oil from a broth in which salmon heads are boiling. At first severe pains and vomiting occur, until after three days, feelings of exhilaration, energy and perfect wellness, follow.” The results of this study are perhaps not surprising. Most people are well aware of the dangers of taking excessive dosages of pharmaceuticals and are careful with medicinal applications, even of relatively common remedies such as cough syrup or aspirin. We guard our children from access to medicines and

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Table 7-2  |  Food, medicine, and poisonous plant species (including algae, fungi, and lichens) in the ethnobotanical lexicons of twelve Indigenous language groups of British Columbia, with examples of plants assigned to various categories Species

Total

Examples

Used as foods or beverages with no reported medicinal, harmful, or poisonous properties

91

Cottonwood mushroom (Tricholoma populinum) eaten (Interior Salish) (Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger 1985); wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) tubers cooked and eaten (Secwepemc and Halkomelem); hazelnut (Corylus cornuta) nuts eaten; mountain potato, or spring beauty (Claytonia lanceolata), corms eaten

More than one different part used as food or beverage

33

Used as foods or beverages that are considered notably health-giving or beneficial when consumed

52

Known to be eaten by animals as well as people (may overlap with other categories)

56

Parts known to be eaten by animals but not by people (may overlap with other categories)

41

Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) inner bark and seeds eaten and gum chewed (several groups); western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) inner bark and branch tips eaten and used to collect herring eggs; balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) taproots, young budstalks, and seeds eaten (many groups); mariposa lily (Calochortus macrocarpus) bulbs and flower buds eaten; “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule) leaves eaten and seeds used as tea and flavouring (Nlaka’pamux) Giant horsetail (Equisetum telmateia) shoots eaten when young (Saanich) and said to be good for the blood; lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) inner bark considered good spring tonic and used as laxative and for worms, as tonic for coughs, and as stomach medicine for ulcers (several groups); tiger lily (Lilium columbianum) bulbs considered a good health food and used for long life (Secwepemc); prickly pear cacti (Opuntia spp.) eaten as valuable food for older men and to help urination (Okanagan)

Black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii) eaten by caribou and deer; spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa) rootstocks eaten by mountain goats as well as people (Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992); lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) inner bark eaten by grizzlies and black bears; hazelnut (Corylus cornuta) nuts eaten by squirrels and bears; yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum) bulbs eaten as favoured food of grizzlies; springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii) rhizomes eaten by geese and ducks; eelgrass (Zostera marina) rhizomes eaten by brant geese and ducks (Turner 1997a, 1997b) Old man’s beard lichen (Alectoria sarmentosa) eaten by deer (Hesquiaht); western larch (Larix occidentalis) buds eaten by blue grouse (Okanagan); black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata) berries eaten by crows, bears, and other animals (many groups); skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton

Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions  |  435

Table 7-2 | continued Species

Total

Examples

americanus) leaves eaten by deer and bear; coltsfoot (Petasites frigidus var. palmatus) eaten by elk; bluebunch wheat grass (Pseudoroegneria spicata) eaten as excellent forage by deer and livestock (Turner 1997b)

Used as foods or beverages known to have harmful or toxic properties if eaten, to need special processing, or to be edible at a certain stage only

39

Used as foods or beverages or in medicinal prepar­ ation(s) taken internally

55

One or more parts used as food or beverage and other parts used for internal medicine

63

Used for food and other parts said to have toxic or otherwise harmful properties

10

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) rhizomes never dug in summer, should be eaten with oil, and must be cooked, but fiddleheads not eaten by most people; whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) seeds eaten but cause constipation if eaten raw or too many eaten; Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) outer fleshy part of arils eaten but may cause sterility if a woman eats too many (Haida); cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum) stems and leaves phototoxic and cause spots and mouth sores, with young shoots eaten only after peeling (many groups); skunkcabbage (Lysichiton americanus) roots eaten only in early spring after prolonged cooking; arrowgrass (Triglochin maritimum) vegetative plants eaten when very young but toxic when older

Red laver seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae) used as food and eaten for indigestion (Gitga’at) (Turner 2003a); licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhiza) rhizomes eaten as sweetener and appetizer and used as medicine for coughs, sore throats, sore gums, digestion, and tuberculosis; Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) pitch chewed as gum, used as breath freshener, used for colds, coughs, and tuberculosis, and said to whiten teeth Giant horsetail (Equisetum telmateia) shoots eaten raw when young and drunk as decoction for arthritis (Gitga’at); subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) seeds, gum, and inner bark edible, and pitch, bark, and boughs used as medicine (Secwepemc and others); cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum) shoots eaten when young and roots used medicinally as purgative and for colds (Nlaka’pamux); Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium) berries eaten and used as antidote for shellfish poisoning, and inner bark used as medicinal tonic (Saanich, Okanagan, and others)

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) rhizomes eaten by some after roasting, fiddleheads eaten after soaking in brine overnight, and tops of fiddleheads considered toxic; chocolate tips (Lomatium dissectum) roots and young tops eaten in spring and later used as fish poison and insecticide (Okanagan and others)

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Table 7-2 | continued Species

Total

Examples

Used for medicine and having some edible qualities (although not necessarily considered “food”)

63

Deer fern (Blechnum spicatum) leaves and stalks chewed when young to alleviate hunger and eaten for stomach and lung troubles (Hesquiaht); Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) cambium eaten as laxative

68

Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) bark drunk as tea for general medicine (Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan); Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum) bark infusion used as poison antidote

Used for medicine and also considered to have toxic or harmful properties under some circumstances

80

Considered toxic and not eaten or used for internal medicine

Male fern (Dryopteris filix-mas) used as poison antidote but also considered poisonous (Gitga’at, Nuxalk); Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) branches used in decoction as medicine but also as poison to kill people and animals; Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) bark and branches drunk as tea for cancer, ulcers, and tonic but only in small amounts; devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus) taken in limited doses and said to cause diarrhoea (Lantz, Swerhun, and Turner 2004); big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) medicinal tea said to cause sterility (Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux)

10

Used in some way for internal medicine and considered neither food nor poisonous

Twistedstalk (Streptopus streptopoides) berries considered poisonous (Gitga’at, Nuxalk); white bog orchid (Platanthera dilatata) poisonous for humans and animals (Okanagan) and also used as charm; water-hemlock (Cicuta douglasii) roots and tops extremely poisonous (Haisla, Ulkatcho, and many others)

Notes and sources: Examples are selected from an inventory of 375 species, excluding medicinal plants used only externally and not consumed in any way (see Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; and Turner 1995, 1997a, 2014). Compiled from a survey of the following language groups: Dakelh (Ulkatcho dialect) (Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996) Ditidaht (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983) Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) (Turner and Thompson 2006) Haida (Turner 2004a) Haisla and Hanaksiala (Compton 1993b) Hesquiaht (Nuu-chah-nulth) (Turner and Efrat 1982) Kwakwaka’wakw (Southern Kwakiutl) (Boas 1921; Turner and Bell 1973) Nlaka’pamux (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Nuxalk (Bella Coola) (H.I. Smith 1928; Turner 1973) Okanagan (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980) Saanich (Straits Salish) (Turner and Bell 1971; Turner and Hebda 1990, 2012) Secwepemc (Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming)

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teach them at an early age to stay away from them. We also rely on a host of informed specialists to provide us with exact information about which medicines to take, how much to take, when or when not to take them, and what potential side effects there are. Many of our medicines are available only through prescription. This is because the fine line dividing medicinal and toxic compounds is well recognized across mainstream society. In Indigenous peoples’ traditional healing, the close relationship between medicinal plants and those that are potentially harmful is likewise well known. Many commonly used foods and beverages around the world are similarly known to be potentially harmful if taken either in large quantities or without some type of processing to reduce the toxic properties (Etkin 2006; Pieroni 1999). A classic example is the potato (Solanum tuberosum), probably the most widely consumed root vegetable in the world. Even the edible tubers of potato contain traces of a bitter alkaloid, solanine, and related compounds, which are found in higher concentrations throughout the potato plant, rendering the green leaves, sprouts, and green, light-exposed tubers very poisonous. Relatives of potato in the same family (Solanaceae), including nightshades (Solanum spp.), belladonna (Atropa belladonna), tobacco (Nicotiana spp.), and many others are similarly poisonous due to high concentrations of alkaloids. The wild ancestral forms of cultivated potato are also toxic (Johns and Kubo 1988; Johns 1996). Most people know that it is necessary to peel potatoes that are green under their skins or else the tubers will taste bitter and unpleasant. Eating too much of a green potato will make one feel ill. Yet most of us are able to eat potatoes without worry of harm, just by using moderation and being guided by our sense of taste. Similarly, for Indigenous peoples, knowledge of the selection, harvesting times, and processing protocols for their plant foods generally keeps them from straying into the “poison” end of the medicine-food-poison spectrum. Plant Medicines in Narrative

Medicinal plants do feature in Indigenous narratives, although not to the same extent as plants in the role of food or materials. One example of a narrative on the origin of a medicine, which eventually became a food, is the Hanaksiala story by Gordon S. Robertson (translated by Emmon Bach and Brian Compton, cited in A. Davis, Wilson, and Compton 1995, 32–3) on the origin of seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae) as a medicine, which eventually became an important food for the Hanaksiala and other Northwest Coast peoples (Turner 2003a). A man, apparently Tsimshian [Ts’msyen], had a wife who was very sick. He went out to look for medicine for her. He dug and cooked butter clams, and made halibut stew, but she couldn’t swallow these foods. Then he was paddling and heard something call “It’s me, hey! Come here!” There

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was a person on a rock out in the ocean who told him to pick the seaweed on the rock, dry it, and chop it up and put it into hot water with grease for a medicine for his wife. He did as he was told, and gave his wife the seaweed, lhaq’esq [łaq’sg]. She was able to eat it and was soon cured from her illness. After she was better, they returned to the rock together and gathered a large quantity of the seaweed. They invited all the village people and held a big feast at which they served the seaweed. At this feast, the man told the people how the seaweed Nawlakw (spirit) had saved his wife; this is how the Tsimshian, and then the Haisla and Hanaksiala, first learned of the value of this seaweed. Kwakwaka’wakw elder Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith explained that she had always been told that this seaweed was first known to her people as a medicine and was then used as a food (cited in Turner 2003a). To this day, it is known as a healthy food, good for the digestion, among other medicinal applications. One Hanaksiala man (now a healthy elder) recounted how, as an infant, his mother was unable to breastfeed him, so she fed him for an entire year on a mixture of this edible seaweed and oulachen grease, until he was able to eat other foods. Another story recounting the origin of a medicine is the Okanagan story of “tamarack,” or western larch (Larix occidentalis), a people-eating monster transformed by Coyote into a medicinal tree (see chapter 12). Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus) is another persona from the spirit world who appears as a supernatural helper, bringing luck and good fortune. Devil’s-club is also mentioned in narratives as being used by shamans for protection against evil and to gain supernatural power, and it is also widely known for its versatility and effectiveness as a curative medicine. Pitch Man, another persona of Northwest Coast narratives, is mostly depicted as the source of pitch as a material in technology, such as for caulking canoes and gluing implements. Pitch is also known from stories as a magical substance to cure blindness or, conversely, to seal the eyes of children being kidnapped by the cannibal woman (Boas 2002). However, tree pitch is equally known as an efficacious medicine, especially for treating topical ailments, to be discussed later in this chapter. The Nlaka’pamux story “Old-One and the Creation of the Nicola Country” intimately links food and medicine plants: “Thus she sowed all the different kinds of plants used by the Indians for food or medicine ... Old-One told her their names ... Thus the Indians learned the edible varieties of roots and the proper kinds of herbs to use” (Teit 1912, 326–7). In other narratives, medicinal plants feature in other diverse roles: stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) as twine and a source of net fibre – a gift of spider people; single delight (Moneses uniflora) as a medicine used by shamans; cedar, fir, and hemlock boughs for ritual purification; and false hellebore (Veratrum viride) roots as a protective charm to vanquish sea monsters such as sisiutl, the double-headed sea serpent of the Kwakwaka’wakw

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(Boas 2002; Swanton 1908; Turner 2004a; see also chapter 12, tables 12-1, 12-2, and 12-3). All of these stories, added to the longstanding and widespread names of plants used as medicines, as discussed earlier, give clues that these plants have been widely known and used across the study area probably for millennia. In addition, the fact that many names for medicinal plants are cognate across wide-ranging language families like Salish and Na-Dené is an indication of the antiquity of peoples’ knowledge and use of these species (see Leonti, Sticher, and Heinrich 2003). Herbal Medicine in Northwestern North America Shamanic Healing and Herbal Healing

Two broadly distinguished areas of healing and medicinal practice are shamanism, or supernatural healing, and herbal medicine. Often, unless some spiritual cause of illness was immediately suspected, the first line of treatment for an illness or injury would be with herbs. Teit (1909, 618), for example, described the Secwepemc approach: “As among the Thompson [Nlaka’pamux] people, a large number of herbs were used as medicines; and when people got sick, they at first resorted to them for remedies. If they failed to do good, it was thought something was wrong with the soul, and a shaman was called.” Shamanism may involve the use of medicinal plants, but often the shaman, or “Indian doctor,” uses such plants in spiritual and ritual ways to gain healing powers or to reveal supernatural causes of illness. Shamans often undergo rigorous training for years, through isolation, fasting, and ceremonial cleansing and purification, to prepare themselves for their role as spiritual leaders and healers in their communities. During this time, and throughout their practice, they may cleanse themselves internally using plants that have purgative or emetic properties (e.g., devil’s-club) or use branches of coniferous trees (e.g., western hemlock or western redcedar) in ceremonial scrubbing at creeks or prayer pools or in the sweat lodge. They may also use plants and parts of plants as charms and for ceremonial protection (e.g., false hellebore roots), but other objects, too, might be used for this purpose. Shamans may travel ritually into the spirit world to gain visions that enable them to cure a patient or bring about a beneficial outcome for a community, using plants to assist them in their quest. Not only shamans, but other individuals, too, use plants as special charms, for spiritual protection, and for ritual cleansing, both internal and external, especially those who are in ritually powerful or vulnerable states: young men and women at puberty, initiates in sacred winter dances, parents of twins, bereaved widows or widowers, or those seeking success in hunting, fishing, canoe making, plant gathering, and other endeavours (see L.R. Smith 2008b; and E.R. Atleo 2004).

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Herbal medicine specialists, many of whom are women, apply a different, yet related, kind of medicine. They treat day-to-day injuries and afflictions, assist in childbirth, care for infants, and help their families and community members to maintain health and well-being through using mainly medicinal plants and tonic preparations. Most families, right up to the present day, can identify individuals among themselves – often grandmothers – who were particularly respected for their knowledge and practice of herbal medicine. Throughout the entire study area, people recount many instances of successful treatments of injuries or diseases using herbal medicines (such as the account at the beginning of this chapter of using yarrow). Another Nlaka’pamux woman, Annie York of Spuzzum, herself a “walking encyclopaedia” of herbal medicine and other plant uses, recalled being treated by her great aunt after a serious back injury from a bus accident in the 1940s. Her aunt Josephine used a carefully administered poultice of the highly toxic water-hemlock roots on her back, which cured her pain in a short time (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Yet another Nlaka’pamux elder, Julia Kilroy (Shuli), recalled how her grandmother made her and her entire family drink nothing but mint tea, tsʔéle (Mentha arvensis), during the 1918 flu epidemic and that none of her family died from this disease (cited in ibid.). Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2007), also a renowned plant specialist, recalled her grandmother Macreet (Marguerite or Mrs Dick Andrew), who was born around 1850, successfully treating a man with venereal disease by preparing a pit in the ground, long enough for him to lie on, filling it with hot sand, and covering it with a tent. She then brewed a decoction of sxwəsəméłp (soapberry, Shepherdia canadensis) – branches, leaves, roots, and all – together with təʕwəʔtiʕweʔ (mint, Mentha arvensis). He lay on the sweat bed and she gave him the “tea” to drink, cup after cup. Mary said the man entirely recovered within twenty-four hours. Mary Thomas’s (pers. comm., 1994, 2005) grandmother also used to make a healing salve from the inner bark of the birch tree, which healed cuts and wounds quickly. Another medicine she learned about as a girl was the inner bark of red-osier dogwood, or “red willow” (Cornus sericea), tseqwtseqwéqwelqw (“little red sticks”) (figure 7-3). Mary demonstrated how this medicine was harvested. After offering some tobacco to the plant and giving thanks to it, she cut off a branch and used the sharp edge of a knife to scrape off long, thin shreds of the bark, down to the wood, until she had accumulated a large handful. For a swollen or sore joints or muscles, she would soak these shavings in boiling water and then pack them over the affected area, leaving them in place for a few hours, until the pain disappeared. “Red willow” medicine was also used to treat toothaches, being placed over the jaw where the tooth was situated. Mary said that the bark shavings could also be packed directly around the tooth, which would eventually cause an abscessed tooth to drop out.10

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7-3  |  Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas preparing to harvest red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) for medicine.

Kwakwaka’wakw elder and cultural specialist Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith was afflicted with tuberculosis of the kidney when she was a young adult. The doctor was considering removing her kidney, but she went home to Alert Bay, and there her grandmother Agnes Alfred prepared a medicine for her, from the barks of devil’s-club, grand fir, and red alder (Sewid-Smith and Dick 1998). Florence Davidson, Massett Haida elder, recalled her own mother treating a serious wound Florence’s son had incurred while climbing a spruce tree. The branch on which the boy was standing suddenly broke, and he fell, catching his arm just below the shoulder on the sharp, splintered end of the bough. They sent him to the hospital in Prince Rupert, but the wound festered and would not heal. When he came home, his grandmother applied a poultice of spruce pitch, bound it to the wound, and left it in place for a few days. When she removed the bandage, a large, sharp sliver of wood came away with the dressing, and after that, his wound healed quickly (Florence Davidson, pers. comm., 1972; see also Turner 2004a).

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Violet Williams, originally Hul’qumi’num, but who had married into the Saanich Nation, described how her older sister Mary had treated her during a difficult childbirth. Violet and her family were picking fruit in the Puget Sound area when she went into labour. Her labour went on for a prolonged time, but there were no doctors available. They all feared for her life and that of her unborn baby. At this point, Mary arrived. She immediately prepared a decoction of red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa) bark and had Violet drink a small amount. This shrub contains cyanogenic glycosides and is strongly purgative and potentially very toxic, but within a very short time the baby was born. Violet quickly regained her strength and recovered fully; she credited her sister – and red elderberry – with saving the lives of both herself and her daughter (cited in Turner and Hebda 2012). These examples are only a few of literally hundreds of oral accounts of the successful application of Indigenous herbal medicines in treating illness and injury and in maintaining health and well-being. Obviously, however, these medicines cannot be used safely without the specialized knowledge of their identification and use that comes with generations of careful observation and experience. It is impossible to separate shamanic healing and herbal healing completely because these approaches converge in many ways. Like shamanism, herbal healing is strongly spiritual, being grounded in an entire belief system in which all plants and animals – even rocks, mountains, and rivers – are considered sentient beings and generous relatives of humans, having exceptional powers to assist people if treated with respect. Those who practise or know about the use of medicinal plants always stress the importance of a careful and respectful approach to plants being harvested for medicine, generally with silent or spoken words of thanks and praise to the spirit of the plant, along with a supplication to aid and help the sick person being treated.11 For example, John Ross (2011, 562) reports for the Spokan, “When collecting medicinal plants, or even utilitarian or food plants, the person sang a medicine song to herself, one of thanksgiving ... Singing over a medicine, the person prayed that the plant would retain its curative powers.” There are many other protocols those harvesting and preparing medicines observe, it is said, for the preparations to be successful and to bring about healing. Some medicinal plants, such as devil’s-club, false hellebore, and Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi), require particular sensitivity since they can be harmful to both the practitioner and the patient if they are not appropriately treated. (Spiritual aspects of healing plants are further discussed in chapter 13.) Categories of Medicinal Plant Applications

Table 7-1 groups medicinal plants used within the study area into several broad categories according to their various applications: general tonics; purgatives,

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laxatives, and emetics; salves, poultices, and washes for skin ailments; medicines for colds, coughs, tuberculosis, and other respiratory ailments; aids for internal ailments (digestive tract and internal injuries); gynaecological medicines; rheumatism and arthritis; and miscellaneous other medicines. Many plants are used in more than one of these categories, and some, such as the yarrow, devil’s-club, and alder bark mentioned previously, are used in multiple ways, transcending virtually all of the different categories of use.12 Within these defined categories, medicines for treating respiratory afflictions (e.g., colds, coughs, and tuberculosis) seem to have the highest representation in terms of number of species used, at about seventy. Many of these medicines (e.g., yarrow, mint, and devil’s-club) are aromatic and are administered in the form of inhaled vapours or incense, in steam baths or sweathouses, or as infusions or decoctions that are drunk in place of other beverages.13 These preparations – such as the tuberculosis medicines described above – often contain more than one ingredient. Leaves, stems, leafy twigs or boughs, bark, pitch, flowers, fruits, or whole plants are all used in treating respiratory ailments. Some of these medicines (e.g., Artemisia spp. and Lomatium dissectum) are utilized in the interior more than on the coast, whereas others (e.g., seeds of “wild celery,” or barestem lomatium, Lomatium nudicaule;14 and rhizomes of licorice fern, Polypodium glycyrrhiza) are used mainly on the Northwest Coast. Many of the plants used to treat colds and respiratory ailments are also applied for a wide spectrum of other afflictions, suggesting that they may be prototypical medicines of high general salience and possibly quite old. Medicines to treat skin ailments, injuries, and infections are almost as numerous and widespread as medicines for respiratory ailments, at about sixty species or closely related groups of species. Most are applied to the skin as salves, poultices, or washes, or in some cases, such as with wild lily-of-the-valley, skunkcabbage, and rattlesnake plantain, all of which are used on burns or cuts, the entire leaf is applied as a covering. The first two are usually bruised slightly before being applied, whereas the rattlesnake plantain leaf is rubbed between thumb and finger until it splits apart, and then the moist inner surfaces of the top and bottom sections are applied to cuts and wounds, being said to heal them without leaving a scar (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Pitch from trees like spruces and pines and the resin of cottonwood buds are heated with animal fat or oil to make a salve, which is then rubbed on the skin to treat slivers, infections, and burns. The bark of alder, salmonberry, and other woody species is steeped or boiled in water and then used as a wash or soaking solution. Many of these medicines for dermatological problems, like the balsamroot pitch described earlier, as well as alder bark and tree pitch, have known antibiotic properties, and some are very widely known and used (McCutcheon 1996; McCutcheon et al. 1992; Ritch-Krc et al. 1996; see also other references cited in table 7-1).

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One particular enigma in this category of medicines is broad-leaved plantain (Plantago major). The leaves of this plant are known as a poultice for burns, cuts, sores, and infections, as well as for various other medicinal purposes, throughout North America – by Abnaki, Algonquin, Anishnaabe, Iroquois, Cherokee, and Shoshone, for example, as well as by numerous peoples in northwestern North America (Moerman 2003, 2009). The plant is believed to have originated in Eurasia, but the plant database of the United States Department of Agriculture suggests that it may be native in parts of North America,15 and Macoun (1920) cites both native and introduced populations near Sidney, British Columbia. The near universality of its use among Indigenous North Americans suggests that it is indeed native or else was introduced to the continent very early on after Europeans arrived. If it was introduced, it is one of the few “exotic” plants, other than potato, that have Indigenous names (not borrowed from English or French) in over twenty languages and major dialects in the study region.16 Leaves of broad-leaved plantain, skunk-cabbage, and wild lily-of-the-valley all have anecdotal evidence of high effectiveness in healing severe burns (Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner and Hebda 2012; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Medicines for internal ailments (digestive tract, kidney and urinary tract, and internal bleeding) are likewise quite numerous, at about fifty species, and some of these are also taken specifically as purgatives and emetics (which are listed separately in table 7-1 but whose actions are obviously related). These are a diverse group of plants but include many types of tree barks and other plants with high tannin content, some of which contain other well-known chemically active compounds such as glycosides (e.g., kinnikinnick) and essential oils (e.g., true fir barks, Abies spp.). In most cases, these medicines are administered in the form of infusions or decoctions. Whereas a few preparations are said to be too strong to take in more than one or two doses at a time, others might be drunk regularly, replacing other beverages over several days or sometimes for weeks at a time. The concentration of the preparation is also a factor that determines the dosage or the length of time over which the medicine is taken. General tonics are taken routinely to maintain or restore good health or are administered at particular times, such as spring and fall, to help the body prepare for the changing seasons. A common belief among Okanagan and other Interior Salish peoples is that just before winter, around November, the blood thickens, and then, around March, it becomes thinner in response to the warmer weather. To assist in this “changing of the blood,” people might drink various tonics at this time, such as a concoction (combination) of kinnikinnick, tall Oregon-grape, and chokecherry bark (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). One elderly Kwakwaka’wakw man said that for many years he had been drinking a daily cup of medicine made from grand fir bark, and he attributed this tonic to his ability to father children well into his seventies (cited in Turner and Bell

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1973). A number of people drink infusions of devil’s-club or alder bark, or they use “wild celery” seeds in their tea on a routine basis. These are more than just beverages because they are reputed to have health benefits. About thirty different species from various parts of northwestern North America are said to have been used specifically for gynaecological conditions, ranging from treating menstrual cramps to medicines that were to be taken before, during, and after childbirth or to enhance lactation for nursing mothers. In 1984, when I was pregnant with my third child, Nlaka’pamux elder Mabel Joe, who was an expert in plant medicines and cultural aspects of plants, took me out to gather some of the medicines that women used around the time their babies were born. During confinement, and immediately postpartum,17 a woman would drink a tea of horsetail (Equisetum hyemale) stems, which she would have gathered, cut into pieces, and dried well in advance. This was to help expel the afterbirth and to stop bleeding. We gathered red-osier dogwood branches, desert currant (Ribes cereum), and wild rose branches, all of which could be used to make a washing solution for the newborn baby. She also furnished me with a jar of preserved cottonwood mushrooms (Tricholoma populinum) and instructed me to wash my baby in the juice of these mushrooms when she was about two or three weeks old, explaining that this would make her strong and independent because mushrooms, although soft, are very strong – able to move large rocks and split open logs as they grow (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Other medicines a woman might take at the time of childbirth included rattlesnake plantain – one of its names is mlámns e x kwísit (“medicine for childbirth”) in the Nlaka’pamux language – and a tea of common juniper (Juniperus communis), said to help contract the uterus and speed up delivery of the baby (but very dangerous to take during most of the pregnancy because it could cause premature birth). Mary Thomas said Secwepemc women during pregnancy were treated with great care and were never allowed to look at dead animals or anything unpleasant. They were bathed with a fragrant tea of creeping snowberry (Chiogenes hispidula) and also drank a tea of this plant.18 On the west coast of Vancouver Island, Ditidaht elder Ida Jones, who had had twelve children herself, used a medicine administered to her the first time by her mother-in-law: the tuberous root of water-parsley (Oenanthe sarmentosa), called waʕiiw’, which is known on the coast as a strong purgative. She said that, after she took one slice of the root, her babies were born very quickly and she didn’t suffer from prolonged labour (cited in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). This plant evidently has an effect similar to that of the red elderberry solution taken by Violet Williams during childbirth, as described previously. At least thirty different species were known for their use to treat rheumatism and arthritis. Plants like devil’s-club are widely used for this purpose, whereas others are more restricted in their usage. Some – like willows – have known antiinflammatory and analgesic properties (such as salicylic acid, the precursor of

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acetyl salicylic acid, or aspirin). For others, little is known about their pharmacological activities. One of these is western showy aster (Eurybia conspicua), called (s-)qweqw’ixén’ (“black foot”) in the western dialect of Secwepemc.19 For the Secwepemc west of Kamloops, this plant was used medicinally in multiple ways, akin to the more widely known yarrow, and was known as a “real good healer.”20 Steam bathing was a common method for treating arthritic and rheumatic aches and pains. Chocolate tips (Lomatium dissectum) is a good example of a plant used in steam therapy. It was used by the Sinixt of the Arrow Lakes area of southern British Columbia to make a steam bath for treating rheumatism, sprains, and pains of any sort, and even pneumonia.21 Another, seemingly quite localized medicine in the study area, used particularly to treat painful joints and muscles, is birch cinder conk (Inonotus obliquus), noted in chapter 6 for its tinder and fire-starting properties. The Secwepemc used it for moxibustion, in which certain parts of the body, such as the joints or lower back, are subjected to localized burns, said to expel pain from underlying tissues. Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994) herself, as a young woman, administered it to some of the elderly women of her community who were suffering from joint pain. She described its use: You wet it [a piece of the fungus, with saliva] a little bit and it will stick to the skin at the joint where it hurts. And then they take ... cedar root [and put it] in the fire, and it’ll light on the end, but not a flame, just a spark, and they touch it. And while it’s burning, you press it down and blow on it, really blow, and then all of a sudden – just a loud “pop” and the thing would just go up. That causes a little blister on the skin, and you put about four, five [pieces] – as many as you can stand – and it would cause a big blister on the joint. Then they would take soft pitch, put it on a piece of leather, and they’d stick it on there, and it would draw out [the pain]. The blistering caused by the small burn may have acted to relieve swelling from underlying tissues by drawing off some of the fluid. This treatment for arthritis is also used by Dakelh and Gitxsan peoples and probably originated with Dene (Athabaskan) peoples, possibly along with the knowledge for making birch-bark vessels. The Saik’uz Dakelh sprinkled the burned area of the skin with powered, dried false hellebore (whułduł) (Poser 2008a; H.I. Smith 1928). On the Northwest Coast, some peoples also practised moxibustion. The Gitga’at used a powder, apparently from spruce needles and a kind of root, possibly false hellebore, that they called “poison root.” Belle Eaton explained that the “five-minute pain” produced by this process, or by hitting the skin with a sharpneedled spruce branch, would cause a scar but also eliminate the greater pain of arthritis: “One pain kills another” (cited in Turner and Thompson 2006, 33). The Kwakwaka’wakw used glowing stinging nettle fibres, tips of waxberry, or

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snowberry, or even the end of a rope to burn the chest or head for severe pain in those areas, sometimes rubbing the affected area first with stinging nettles or false hellebore (Boas 1966). The same principle of counter-irritation is involved in the widespread use of stinging nettle to treat arthritis and rheumatic pain. This treatment usually involved sweat bathing and then hitting the skin over the affected area with bundles of stinging nettle. It was said to be very painful but also very effective. Nlaka’pamux elder Mabel Joe recalled, from when she was a young woman, one of her relatives who could barely walk due to the effects of rheumatism. Mabel gathered four bundles of stinging nettle and handed them one bundle at a time to the woman, who was sitting in a sweat lodge. She hit her legs all over with each bundle, and by the time the treatment was finished, she came out of the sweat lodge able to walk, even without using a cane (cited in Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990; see also Gunther 1973; McIlwraith 1948; G. Palmer 1975b; H.I. Smith 1928; Teit 1909; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner and Efrat 1982; and Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). A similar nettle treatment was applied for paralysis (Boas 1966; H.I. Smith 1928). Counter-irritation also underlies the medicinal use of various members of the buttercup family (Ranunculaceae).22 Throughout northwestern North America, a number of species in this family have been used to treat pains, swellings, boils, and other afflictions. Stl’atl’imx elder Sam Mitchell (pers. comm., 1972), for example, described being treated for a painfully swollen knee after falling off of a horse. Fresh leaves of Pacific anemone (Anemone multifida) were mashed up and applied as a poultice to the painful area but were left on only for a matter of minutes, just long enough to cause redness of the skin and very slight blistering. Leaving them on too long, he was warned, would cause intense pain and excessive blistering with lines of red running down the leg. His knee soon felt better after this treatment. The Haida used macerated buttercup fruits as a counter-irritant for pains, but interestingly, they used an introduced species, Ranunculus acris.23 Buttercups and their relatives are potentially poisonous to humans, a fact also well known.24 All of these medicines, even those used only topically, required a deep level of knowledge and experience for safe and effective use. An example is false hellebore, or “poison root,” whose use is both topical and internal but which is potentially lethal if applied incorrectly.25 It is one of the approximately twenty different species known and used as purgatives, laxatives, and emetics, consumed by some in very small amounts and with great care for ritual purification. Occasionally, it has caused death through accidental overdose or suicide. It is also used, much more routinely, as a poultice for rheumatism, arthritis, and other muscular aches and pains, as well as for spiritual protection and for defence against disease in general. During the 1918 flu epidemic and various other disease epidemics, children sometime wore amulets with false hellebore root around their necks to keep from getting sick. 448 | part two – development

One Nlaka’pamux man was treated for false hellebore (qwn-éłp) poisoning by Annie York’s grandmother when they were hunting in the mountains (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). The man had been washing his musket with a cupful of qwn-éłp solution.26 He had then inadvertently drunk water from a spring using the same cup without properly rinsing it out, and when found, he was sitting by the spring with a contorted face and foam coming out of his mouth. Annie’s grandmother had been making salmon-head soup, and she skimmed the oil from the top of the soup, pried his mouth open with a fork, and poured several doses of oil into his mouth; salmon oil is considered the best – and by some, the only – remedy for qwn-éłp poisoning. In this case, fortunately, it had the desired effect and the man recovered. He said that his head felt “just as light as could be.” Many people throughout the Interior Plateau and beyond know about the importance of this treatment for poisoning from false hellebore and other toxic plants (ibid.). As a purgative, the root of false hellebore was eaten or drunk as an infusion but only in very small amounts because it is so poisonous. One Tsilhqot’in elder (pers. comm., 2004) described the use of this plant, called xiłdɨł, to “clean out all the bad things inside of you. You use the root – if you take it, you might vomit all day and all night; you would take lots of soup with it – just the broth from soup, because you couldn’t swallow anything.” Some people just briefly suck on a small piece of the root and then spit it out. People also bathe in a solution of the roots to treat sore joints and muscles (L.R. Smith 2008b, 129). There are other examples of cleansing “medicines” that are milder and less dangerous, some of them better known as foods. One of these is fireweed (Epilo­ bium angustifolium), a springtime green vegetable at its young stage but also known as a spring tonic because of its laxative properties. The edible inner bark of trees is also said to act as a laxative, and people were warned not to eat too much at once, but the resultant “cleansing” was also said to be beneficial at times. Yet another example is whitebark pine seeds. People enjoy roasting the cones and extracting and eating the kernels, but one Tsilhqot’in man warned against eating too much at once because they “clean you out.” Others say they cause constipation (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Medicinally, they were taken as a remedy to get rid of hookworms (Gilbert Solomon, pers. comm., 2004). Medicines used for their laxative properties, as internal cleansing agents, were often taken in the form of a decoction, frequently after a day of fasting. For example, Secwepemc hunters, among others, took a soapberry decoction as part of a purification regime that sometimes involved sweat bathing. They boiled the roots, stems, and leaves for a full day and fasted over this time. Then, at night, a person would drink four cupfuls of the solution, which acted as a physic by the next morning (Teit 1909, 618-19). This is similar to the previously described treatment for venereal disease, administered by Mary Thomas’s grandmother. Aside from the plants used under the categories specified in table 7-1, about forty species were used in various other treatments – as eye medicines or for treating cancer, nerve disorders, or smallpox. Of these, eye medicines have Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions  |  449

probably been widely applied for millennia and may well have been used by the earliest peoples. Being subjected to smoky fires would be one cause of eye irritation and might explain why many different medicines were developed to treat eye afflictions. Smallpox and cancer, in at least some of its forms, would not have been known or recognized originally. Smallpox, along with various other communicable diseases introduced to the region through contact with Europeans, would have commanded extraordinary measures to treat, but given Indigenous people’s low immunity to these new diseases, any treatments devised would have met with low success (Edwards 1980). Cancer, in the form of visible tumours, may have been treated by early peoples but with unknown success. Pacific yew, whose bark is now well known as the source of the anticancer drug taxol, or tamoxifen (Turner and Hebda 1990), has been used by some Indigenous peoples, apparently for countless generations, as a tonic in the form of a decoction of the bark or wood, as well as to treat unspecified internal ailments. Likewise, birch bark, which Mary Thomas’s (pers. comm., 2005) grandmother used to treat skin sores, is now known to contain a compound called betulin, a powdery substance in the white outer part of the bark, which has been shown to help wounds heal faster and to reduce inflammation.27 These examples show the potential efficacy of Indigenous herbal remedies and the remarkable experimental and observational abilities of Indigenous healers over countless generations. Hallucinogenic and Narcotic Plants

Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America evidently did not traditionally use hallucinogenic substances like “magic mushrooms” (Psilocybe spp.), pey­ ote (Lophophora williamsii), datura (Datura spp., Brugmansia spp.), or ayahuasca (Ban­is­teriopsis caapi), as did other Indigenous peoples in southwestern North America and Central and South America. Neither, apparently, did they use fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria) or its relatives, as the Siberian shamans reportedly did. Shamans, healers, and others seeking supernatural powers and wishing to connect with the spirit world did so through fasting, purification, and other types of rituals, such as dancing, in which they could enter a trance or dream state and thereby gain visions and supernatural guidance (see Amoss 1978; Jilek 1982; and J. Miller 1999). Certain plants, however, are said to help people connect to the supernatural: false hellebore, devil’s-club, and single delight (Moneses uniflora) are three that have been mentioned in traditional narratives as fulfilling this role. The magical or spiritual nature of plants, and their use in “witchcraft” for either good or evil, is considered to be very private knowledge. It is not generally shared and won’t be considered here other than in the most general terms. There were rituals involving plants to prevent one from dreaming of a spouse who had passed away,

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to bring members of a family closer together, to attract a person of the opposite sex, or even to cause sickness to an enemy. There were also plants and charms to protect one against the evil wishes of others. (Plants and spiritual beliefs are discussed further in chapter 13.) Tobacco (Nicotiana spp.), which is known to have narcotic effects due to nicotine and other alkaloids, was grown and used in some parts of the study area (as recounted in chapter 4). Coyote tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) was cultivated by Interior Plateau peoples.28 The plants were carefully tended, and the harvested leaves were dried and smoked in pipes, mostly by men and usually by shamans. Dr Ron Ignace (pers. comm., 2008) explained that tobacco smoke, rising up to the sky, was a medium by which his Secwepemc ancestors entered the spirit world. Tobacco is mentioned in a number of Interior Plateau narratives, including the Nlaka’pamux story “Coyote and the Tobacco-Tree” (Teit 1912, 304; see also Boas 2002, 64), as well as the “Old-One” story, in which the Creator showed the people tobacco and pipestone and taught them how to smoke (Teit 1912, 324-7, as recounted in chapter 12).29 The Haida, and to a lesser extent the Tlingit and Ts’msyen, used another species of Nicotiana,30 a species that no longer exists but whose closest relative, N. quadrivalvis, is used by Indigenous peoples in Oregon and California. Rather than smoking tobacco, however, the Haida and other Northwest Coast peoples chewed the leaves with burned clamshells, which would have helped to activate the nicotine (Turner and Taylor 1972). Northwest Coast peoples of the study area apparently did not smoke any plant material until commercial tobacco was brought in by the early traders, in the form of plugs, and later as shredded leaves, along with pipes. Smoking kinnikinnick was probably a recent practice on the coast, introduced by traders or learned from interior First Peoples.31 As well as Coyote tobacco, the interior peoples, on the other hand, smoked several other plant materials, including kinnikinnick leaves and the inner bark of smooth sumac (Rhus glabra) and red-osier dogwood, or “red willow.”32 Another plant that the Secwepemc and others sometimes smoked is the root of Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi).33 The use of fermented beverages was, from all accounts, unheard of before the arrival of Europeans in the area, although some plants evidently produced effects of intoxication. Curtis (1915, 40) provided an interesting commentary on Kwakwaka’wakw use of elderberry juice, apparently somewhat fermented, as an intoxicant. He also described the neurological effects of eating lupine roots (Lupinus nootkatensis), which contain alkaloids, and of eating chitons and smoking afterward: Then everybody eagerly crowds up to drink the [elderberry] juice down to the last drop, and soon all are apparently completely intoxicated, though

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there can be little alcohol in the beverage. These Indians assert that lupin-roots eaten raw produce a strong contraction of the eyelids, as if one were gazing into the sun, which continues until the taste of the roots has passed away. It is also averred that one who eats steamed black chitons [Katharina tunicata] ... and immediately thereafter smokes tobacco loses control of his locomotor muscles and, powerless to check himself, walks straight ahead, always toward the sea, and into the water until someone restrains him or the shock of cold water brings him to his senses. Many white men have been curious enough to experiment on themselves with elderberry. Aromatic Plants Yarrow and many other species already mentioned as medicines are part of a major class of medicinal and otherwise useful plants in the study region known especially for their aromatic properties. A relative of yarrow in the northern interior, Tilesius’ wormwood (Artemisia tilesii), is known as “medicine leaves,” or hodzih łaanaw (“caribou leaves” in Tahltan). Even the dead hanging leaves and old fruiting heads of this plant remaining from the previous year are strongly scented.34 Like yarrow, Artemisia tilesii has a multitude of uses. Its volatile constituents include a mixture of thujone and isothujone (also present in yarrow), the latter compound having codeine-like pain-relieving properties. A poultice of “medicine leaves” is applied to cuts to stop bleeding and is also used to treat skin infections. The plant is used to treat colds and sore throats, and even cancer. In the form of an infusion of the leaves and flowering tops, it is taken as a laxative and to treat stomach ache and rheumatism, as well as being applied externally to swollen joints and as an eyewash. The crushed leaves are rubbed on the hands to remove odours, and the plant is used as an incense, deodorant, and disinfectant in the home, as well as being burned as a smudge to repel mosquitoes. Some people use it as flavouring in cooking and even eat the peeled, raw shoots, usually with oil (Andre and Fehr 2000; A. Jones 1983; Russell Kari 1987; Moerman 2003; Overfield, Epstein, and Gaudioso 1980). The uses of aromatic plants overlap considerably, and as a group, they have been widely applied as external and internal medicines, to flavour and preserve food, as beverage teas, for cosmetic and protective purposes as hair rinses and washes, as mouth fresheners, as ceremonial scrubbers, for therapeutic and ritual purification in steam baths or sweat lodges, for washing hunting and fishing gear, for cleansing bedding and households of ill or deceased people, as incenses and smudges, as therapy for babies and children, and as insect repellents and pesticides for both humans and livestock (Turner 2009). Table 7-3 summarizes these uses of aromatic plants across the study area. In all, over sixty-five species are identified, with the sum total of their uses in the different categories

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Table 7-3  |  Applications of aromatic plants based on a survey of twelve language groups in northwestern North America Applications of aromatic plants

Number of species

Aromatic beverage tea

>16

Burned as fragrant or protective smudge or incense

>15

Ceremonial scrubbing

>5

Aromatic/therapeutic sweat bath or wash, as well as rub; often gives protection against predators, illness, and evil spirits Chewing or food product Flavouring for cooking

Insecticidal and insect repellent; fungicidal and/or preservative properties

>25

>18 >10 >17

Medicinal application, external

>25

Scent for aesthetic or cosmetic purposes for skin, scalp, or hair

>17

Medicinal application, internal

Sleep-inducing or dream-inducing Therapy for children and babies

Wash for hunting or fishing gear to mask human scent and/or bring luck and success

>34 >6

>10 >9

Note: For language groups and sources, see table 7-2. See also Turner (2009).

exceeding 200 since, like yarrow and Tilesius’ wormwood, almost all of these species are used in multiple ways. As seen in table 7-1, virtually all coniferous tree species throughout northwestern North America were utilized for their aromatic qualities (Turner 1988a). The boughs were used as scrubbers during ceremonial bathing and purification. The gum and needles of Douglas-fir, pines, spruces, hemlock, and true firs were chewed to cleanse the mouth and freshen the breath, and also used for coughs and respiratory ailments. The boughs were used in sweat lodges to produce fragrant and therapeutic steam, as well as for the bedding, flooring, and thatching of shelters. They were also used as poultices for injuries and swellings. Liquid pitch collected from the blisters on the bark of grand fir, amabilis fir, and subalpine fir was used in many preparations: mixed with water, boiled, and taken as a tonic and laxative or for coughs and tuberculosis; mixed with grease or fat and eaten as a laxative; or rubbed on sores and boils (Boas 1966; Turner 1988a; Turner and Bell 1973; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Both practical and spiritual functions of aromatic plants are reflected in their use as protective agents that mask the human scent. On the practical side, for

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example, is the use explained by Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York (pers. comm., 1976), who said that a girl or young woman preparing to travel in the mountains should rub herself with the boughs of subalpine fir to prevent being attacked by bears or other predators: “Any food you eat, say for instance if it’s dry fish, before you go to bed, you wash your face clean. You take that [fir] and you wash your face with that, and your clothes, you rub it with that ... and you put on clean clothes, and you hang [your clothes] up further away from the camp so nothing bothers you. That’s the way they do ... if you have a girl that has to go out. That’s from way back” (see also Turner 2009; and Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Additionally, masking the human scent on hunting and fishing gear, or on the skin of hunters and fishers handling the gear, by washing or rubbing with the boughs of coniferous trees would have increased the chances of success. Although it is not possible to present details about the use of all of the aromatic species listed in the table, the applications of four representative aromatic plants in the study region are described in the next sections: Rocky mountain juniper, field mint, Canby’s lovage, and wild roses. These species typify broader groups of aromatic plants.35 Rocky Mountain Juniper and Its Close Relative, Pacific Coastal Juniper

These slow-growing, hard-wooded trees of the cypress family (Cupressaceae) occur in the interior as far north as Telegraph Creek and extend south to New Mexico, Colorado, and California, in the case of Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum), and occur along the rocky coastline of southern British Columbia and Puget Sound, in the case of Pacific coastal juniper (J. maritima).36 Junipers are well known as a source of flavouring37 and for a range of applications, including spiritual protection in many parts of the world. In northwestern North America, Indigenous peoples have used the branches of these species, wherever they grow, as a household “disinfectant” by boiling them on the stove or as a fumigant by placing them in the fire or on the top of a hot stove and letting the smoke permeate a room. This purification is practised especially at times of illness or death in a household and is said to protect the people in the house from illness or from the ghosts of those who have departed. If someone dies, after the body is removed from the house, a solution of juniper, sometimes mixed with wild rose (Rosa acicularis or other spp.) branches, is used to wash the bedding and clothing of the deceased person, as well as the walls and floors of the house. This solution is then poured across the windows, the doorway, and paths leading to any outbuildings, a process said to prevent the spirit of the person from returning to haunt the household (Gunther 1973; Steedman 1930; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). During disease epidemics, the branches were hung in the house to protect the inhabitants from illness (Turner and Bell 1971).

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A person with flu might be treated by inhaling the steam from boiling juniper branches, with a canvas covering the head to hold in the vapours. Juniper tea was used variously as a drink or wash to treat arthritis, rheumatism, muscular aches, paralysis, digestive tract or stomach ailments, colds, coughs, influenza, the “black measles,” chickenpox, heart conditions, and high blood pressure. When “berries” were attached to the branches, the solution was said to become much stronger (Turner 1988a).38 Some people drank juniper tea once every week or two, so “you will never get sick” (G. Palmer 1975b, 50). A decoction of the boiled roots was used as a footbath for rheumatism by Indigenous peoples of western Washington (Gunther 1973). For kidney or urinary tract ailments, the “berries” were eaten, or a decoction of branches was drunk. A decoction of the boughs also made a disinfecting bath for any sick person, as well as a drink for a general tonic, and was also used as a wash for wounds, sores, or burns (Gunther 1973; Turner 1988a). Sometimes juniper tea was drunk in the sweathouse as part of a cleansing and purification ritual, during death or bereavement, for puberty rites, and as a charm for luck, wealth, or love (G. Palmer 1975b; Turner 1988a). Juniper was also used against pests: the vapours and/or smoke from burning juniper also keep mosquitoes away. The Nlaka’pamux used a decoction of the berries as a tick wash for horses (Steedman 1930), and the Secwepemc used a solution of the branches to keep earwigs and bedbugs out of a house (G. Palmer 1975b). Juniper is also said to increase blood coagulation, and for this reason, Okanagan hunters used to soak their arrowheads and bullets in water infused with pounded juniper branches and berries; it was said to cause the blood of deer that were shot to coagulate so that they could not run far (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980).39 Canby’s Lovage

Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi; Apiaceae) is an important traditional medicine plant for Indigenous peoples of the southern Interior Plateau and Rocky Mountain regions of Canada and the northern United States.40 The people who use it treat it with great respect. As with many medicinal plants, traditional harvesters would speak to Canby’s lovage, known variously as yiʔut (Secwepemc), xásxes (“always good”) (Okanagan), and ʔayut (Ktunaxa), acknowledging and thanking it before collecting the root.41 Some harvesters would break off the root and replant the remaining part of the root crown in the ground. The root was then dried for about three weeks, before being stored in a tobacco pouch or medicine bag. It was commonly traded and used as a gift (Turner 1997a, 1998). It is both smoked and chewed as a medicine, as well as being administered as a scent and in the form of a tea to treat colds. A piece of root could be tied in a piece of cheesecloth and kept near a baby’s face to prevent the infant from catching a cold. This treatment was used in winter, and the root was changed

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every few days. The root can also be held in the mouth to give a good taste and to relieve coughs and colds, as well as for tuberculosis and sore throat. As well, it can be used as an incense in the sweat lodge, especially to treat colds (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Ray 1932; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). In the case of a toothache, it is said to numb the nerves when placed on the tooth. Ktunaxa people sometimes carried the root around in their pockets as an immediate “first aid,” in case of cuts and burns needing treatment (Turner 1998). Canby’s lovage root was also considered a good general internal medicine. It can also be made into an infusion or “tea,” which is drunk for pneumonia (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990). In addition, it has the very special quality of reviving those who have lost consciousness, gone into a trance, or become “possessed” by spirits, such as the “bluejay spirit.”42 The root, which is still highly valued, is also rubbed on clothing and the face as a perfume before a dance (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Sometimes the dried root was mixed with tobacco for smoking, or rolled in cigarettes, to give the smoke a pleasant menthol taste (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980).43 Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1995) recalled, What our people did [with yeʔut] ... after it was dry, scrape it and mix it in your tobacco, or you can soak it in hot water and leave it steep for a while and drink it, as a relaxer. It’s good for colds, chest congestion ... My dad, I remember watching him – he’d take his pocketknife and scrape it [the root] like a powder and mix it with his tobacco. And they also used that, as well as red willow [Cornus sericea], for toothache. Put it on his tooth and I guess it had some kind of a painkiller in it. And then also they drank it ... they made a tea from the root ... for a very bad cold, like bronchitis. But I guarantee you it’s horrible-tasting. Aimee August (pers. comm. to Randy Bouchard, 1992), another Secwepemc elder, also remembered this plant: “When I was a little girl, [I’d] go to feast, drumming – I smelled the smoke and my mother said, ‘Don’t sleep, don’t sleep!’ But I did. I guess I was doped – I’ll say, kind of a perfume. The hunters would bring it back – one or two [roots] in their pockets. They say don’t boil it, don’t crush it or nothing. Just put a little piece in your mouth and if the flavour goes away, use another piece. It tastes good and it’s relaxation.” Field Mint, or Canada Mint

Field mint (Mentha arvensis; Lamiaceae), native to North America, has a strong “minty” odour, easily detected when one walks through a meadow or marshy area where it is growing. Most First Peoples in northwestern North America, particularly in the Interior Plateau, know and name this mint and use it in some way for its scent.44 Among the Nlaka’pamux, it is known as one of the most 456 | part two – development

important scented plants. People soak the entire plant in warm water to make a hair-dressing solution and use the dried plants to scent feathers in pillows (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2005) described how it was used in pit-cooking: “Sometimes my grandma used to go down to the meadow, and she’d pick the meadow hay with the mint grass in it. And that flavours your cooking. If you put the leaves, some of your mint grass, in your ... what you use to cover your rocks with, so you can imagine that mint will come out, and it’ll get in your cooking.” Mary Thomas also recalled how, when she and her brother and sister found some baby skunks and had fun playing with them, her grandmother scolded them thoroughly, made them sit outside on the woodpile, and then – in an effort to rid them of the reeking skunk odour – washed them and their clothes thoroughly with a mixture of plants, the main ingredient being field mint. Some people also used a mint solution to get rid of bedbugs in the house. Mint was, and is, also used widely in medicinal preparations. The leaves are used to make a beverage tea, which was also used to treat bad colds (G. Palmer 1975b), fevers, pains, swellings, colic in children, and “summer complaint,” with its symptoms of headache and bleeding nose – possibly sunstroke. It was also drunk as a general tonic for “good health” (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). The Nlaka’pamux used a decoction of mint to steam rheumatic joints and as an inhalant for congestion during a severe cold (Steedman 1930). The Nuxalk made a mint decoction to drink for stomach pain, and the Dakelh used a cupful of a mint decoction for colds and stomach and lung afflictions (H.I. Smith 1928). Mint tea was also used as an eyewash (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990). As reported earlier, Nlaka’pamux elder Julia Kilroy told how her grandmother made a large pot of field mint tea during the 1918 flu epidemic after the First World War. The entire family drank this, and as Julia recalled, “We didn’t get sick that time, but everybody [else] did. Sick and dead ... [This mint] must be a good medicine” (cited in Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 233). White settlers quickly adopted wild mint as a beverage tea and medicine (Steedman 1930).45 Field mint is sometimes referred to as “wetland mint.” Another mint used widely within its range is “dryland mint,” or wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), which is used as a food preservative, in tea, and as a smudge against mosquitoes and other insects. Both wild bergamot and field mint are called xwexwʔúʔxw (“smell-smell [of a menthol type]”) in the Secwepemc language (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1995). Wild Roses

Wild roses (Rosa spp.; Rosaceae) are famous for their fragrance. In the study region, there are five major species, some of which hybridize, so they are often difficult to distinguish. First Peoples sometimes name the tiny-flowered Rosa Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions  |  457

gymnocarpa separately from the larger-flowered species (including R. acicularis, R. nutkana, R. pisocarpa, and R. woodsii), but generally the same names are applied to whichever roses are found within a given territory, and the different species are used similarly. Because roses are prickly, as well as because of their scent, they are widely used in ceremonial protection. Hunters and others seeking purification steeped rose branches in water and used the infusion as a body and hair wash after sweat bathing to get rid of the human scent and thereby prevent hunted animals from detecting their presence. A decoction of rose leaves and branches, sometimes with other plants, was drunk as well by those seeking protection and purification (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Rosebushes were, and still are, used in protection against evil thoughts, bad spirits, and ghosts. At times of illness and death, the person caring for the sick or attending to a corpse drank rose tea and bathed in a rose decoction “to protect one from being ‘haunted’ – so the dead person won’t give you any bad luck” (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980, 131). Similarly, if one was “jinxed” by a bad person practising witchcraft, he would wash himself with rose-branch tea. As with Rocky Mountain juniper, a rose solution was used to wash the bedding, walls, and floors of a house in which someone had died, and rose branches were kept around the house and yard to prevent the ghost of the deceased from returning to haunt the house. In some cases, before a corpse is buried, rose branches are used to sweep out the grave in order to ensure no one else will be drawn down into the spirit world (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). There were many other charms and rituals involving wild rose during bereavement and other times of life. For example, rose twigs were used in the beds of bereaved spouses for purification (Steedman 1930). When a corpse is taken out of a house, rose branches are placed around the dwelling, left for four days, and then burned. This “keeps the disease in the body” (G. Palmer 1975b, 67). Wild rose branches and flowers, especially of R. gymnocarpa, were used to make a beverage tea, which could also be drunk for innumerable medicinal purposes, including as a tonic for general illness. A tea of wild rose, chokecherry, and red-osier dogwood branches was drunk for vomiting, diarrhoea, and other illnesses. Nlaka’pamux elder Bernadette Antoine noted, “It settles your system, settles your system right down, cools it down” (cited in Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 268; see also Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; and Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Rosebush tea could also be used as a wash for sore eyes (Steedman 1930). Tea from rose fruits, or “hips,” is also commonly made as a beverage and was also drunk for coughs and flu (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990). Rose petals mixed with pine pitch, grease, and red ochre paint were used as a cosmetic face cream, for blemishes, and for a newborn’s skin (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). A decoction of boiled rose roots was drunk by a woman after childbirth, as well as being used to treat syphilis and other ailments. Chewed

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or mashed rose leaves were applied to bee stings to reduce swelling and pain and were also applied to abscesses, painful areas, and sore eyes (Densmore 1939; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Bark Medicines Somewhat overlapping with the previous category of aromatic plants is another major group of medicines, namely those dozens of medicines derived from the bark of trees or shrubs. Bark medicines have been prepared from virtually every common species of tree or shrub across northwestern North America. In most cases, it is said that the “real medicine” is contained in the softer, moister, lightercoloured inner portion of the bark rather than in the hard, usually darker outer bark (Turner and Hebda 1990). Barks are widely used as drugs, even in the modern pharmaceutical industry (e.g., quinine from the bark of Cinchona for treating malaria), as well as for many other purposes (Prescott-Allen and Prescott-Allen 1986; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009). Barks of woody plants contain complex mixtures of a range – sometimes many dozens – of pharmacologically active constituents, including alkaloids, glycosides, volatile oils, tannins, esters, alcohols, gums, and resins (Duke 1985), and many have known antibiotic properties. Bark medicines are applied externally as poultices, salves, and washes or internally as infusions and decoctions. Sometimes mixtures of barks, or barks combined with other plant parts, are used. Ailments treated with bark medicines range from skin and eye complaints to internal problems involving the respiratory, circulatory, gastrointestinal, and urinary systems. Bark medicines are also used as gynaecological aids, for labour and childbirth, as abortive agents, as tonics for the maintenance of health, and in some cases, as antidotes to poisons. Many bark medicines are widely known. In one survey of about twenty-five Saanich (Straits Salish) and Cowichan (Hul’qumi’num, or Halkomelem) bark medicine species (Turner and Hebda 1990), over fifty of the seventy-nine reported individual medicinal remedies used by these peoples were used similarly by at least one other Northwest Coast group. Several were used by five or more Northwest Coast groups.46 Barks of all but one of these twenty-five species, or of related species in the same genera, were also used medicinally by other Indigenous peoples in North America.47 For example, forty-nine different North American groups used the bark of cherry and plum species (Prunus spp.) for medicinal purposes.48 In many cases, the plants had applications similar to those of the Saanich and Hul’qumi’num. For example, a medicine of fir (Abies spp.) bark was used as a dermatological aid by at least thirteen other Indigenous groups outside of the Northwest Coast region49 and as a venereal aid by five others. Cascara bark was used as a laxative and digestive tract aid by at least eight other North American groups. Cherry (Prunus spp.) bark was used as a tonic by at least nine other groups, and elderberry – the medicine that Violet Williams credited with

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saving her life during childbirth – was used as a gynaecological aid by at least four others (see Moerman 2003). Medicinal Mixtures and Combinations Many plant medicines were, and are, applied and administered as mixtures, both as medicinal teas and in steam baths or other treatments. An example is the Okanagan combination of western redcedar and Douglas-fir boughs, wild rose (Rosa acicularis) branches, and sometimes stinging nettle, boiled together to make a skin and hair wash for use during a sweat bath. This mixture was said to have a beautiful fragrance and could be drunk as a tonic, as well as being used for bathing (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). As another example of a medicinal mixture, Secwepemc elder Nellie Taylor (pers. comm., 1994) prescribed a bathing solution for muscular aches and pains, bruises, and swellings that was a decoction of three local plants: dragon sagewort (Artemisia dracunculus), northern wormwood (A. frigida) – both relatives of Tilesius’ wormwood, described previously – and white clematis (Clematis ligusticifolia). On one occasion the effectiveness of this preparation was demonstrated when my friend Dr Ron Ignace, of the Secwepemc community of Skeetchestn (see R.E. Ignace 2008), was bucked off of his horse and suffered bruising and stiffness. We collected the plants according to Nellie Taylor’s recipe, and Ron’s wife, Marianne, boiled them together in a large pot of water until the solution was a deep-green colour. She then poured this medicine into the bathwater, and Ron soaked in it for about an hour. This treatment worked well; Ron said he felt “like a new man!” H.I. Smith (1928, 7) provides descriptions of many different medicinal mixtures. A Dakelh (Northern Carrier) remedy for paralysis or weakness also includes the stems of what was probably black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata), called “bear-berry,” mixed with the needle tips of pine (probably Pinus contorta), the inner bark of wild gooseberry (Ribes sp.), the inside pulp of raspberry canes (Rubus idaeus), and the inner bark of wild rose. These ingredients were placed in a large vessel, boiled down to a thick decoction, strained and bottled, and then administered in doses of about 30 millilitres (2 tablespoons) twice a day, at sunrise and sunset. The Gitxsan made a medicine used as a poultice for rheumatism, hemorrhage of the lungs, and boils or skin ulcers by mashing the large, round, green rootstock of a fern (probably Dryopteris sp.) with the barks of “balsam fir” (Abies lasiocarpa) and devil’s-club, a little gum of “scrub pine” or Sitka spruce, and the root of skunk-cabbage. This mixture was warmed a little before application (ibid., 4). Another poultice mixture, prepared by the Nuxalk, included half a cup of cottonwood buds, picked some time between December and March, two roots of cow-parsnip, half a cup of buds of mountain alder (Alnus incana ssp. tenuifolia), and a little water. This mixture was mashed and then applied

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7-4  |  Saanich elder Elsie Claxton preparing the ingredients for her “ten-barks” medicine.

warm, but uncooked, for pains in the lungs or hips, like rheumatism. Said to effect a cure within two days, it was considered harmful if left on longer.50 One Kwakwaka’wakw mixture for aching limbs included about 2 kilograms (“4–5 pounds”) of fresh rockweed (Fucus sp.), cut up and mixed with dried tobacco, red alder bark, and the bark, berries, or leaves of black twinberry. This mixture was heated with red-hot rocks and placed as a compress on various aches and pains, such as sore and swollen feet (Boas 1966). In many Indigenous societies within the study area, each family has its own special recipes, which are considered to be private property, but healers will always prepare them on request for those who need them. Saanich elder Elsie

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Claxton described one of her special family medicines, which we called “tenbarks” medicine because it is made from a combination of ten different kinds of bark: trembling aspen, cascara, June plum, arbutus, Pacific crabapple, grand fir, “pussy willow” (Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra), saskatoon berry, bitter cherry, and flowering dogwood. Strips of bark or unpeeled branches from all of these, sweetened with licorice fern rhizomes or trailing blackberry leaves, were boiled until the decoction was a dark-brown colour (cited in Turner and Hebda 1990, 2012). This medicine was used to treat tuberculosis, spitting of blood, and some other ailments. It came originally from Elsie’s father-in-law. He passed it on to her husband, who then passed it on to her. It is prepared by boiling the mixture of barks and twigs together for a long time. The solution is then cooled and stored; the sick person drinks it over a period of time. This medicine has been administered successfully to Elsie’s family members suffering from tuberculosis. Elsie described how one woman, who had tuberculosis so badly that she couldn’t walk, took this medicine and recovered. Elsie thought it was important to share the ingredients so that the recipe wouldn’t be lost (figure 7-4). In any case, as Elsie’s son, Dr Earl Claxton Sr (pers. comm., 2005), explained, knowing the ingredients is only part of a medicinal recipe since there is a spiritual part – special words that the healer will say when gathering and preparing a medicine – that is known only to the owner of the medicine.51 Harvesting Medicines People who use and prepare medicines harvest them as needed, from their outdoor “medicine cabinet” (J. Nelson 1990, 9). Those medicines available (or at their best) only at a certain time of year can be harvested in season and then dried and stored for use as needed. Medicine specialists would – and still do – often keep an entire assemblage of medicines ready for use in case of illness or injury in the family or community. Many herbalists prepared herbs to be boiled in batches, similar to the way traditional Chinese herbal medicines are provided. Sometimes people travelled for long distances to obtain the medicines they required. For example, Haida healers would travel far up the Yakoun River to the lake to harvest yew wood (łgiid), devil’s-club (ts’iiłanjaaw), common juniper (k’al.aa łk’am.alee), and other plants for medicine (ibid.). Individual families or lineages often owned medicine-gathering places, as with other resource-harvesting sites. Furthermore, it is generally considered best to harvest medicines from remote locations, away from everyday human activities. Gitga’at elder Helen Clifton (pers. comm., 2005) was taught by her own elders that when people went out to harvest a medicine such as devil’sclub, they should concentrate their thoughts on just that task and not try to accomplish anything else: “Just think of that medicine and of the person you

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want to help with it.” For the medicine to be effective, the person harvesting the medicine had to approach the medicine plants with great respect, in a clean state, and without any malicious thoughts. Usually, medicine gatherers would go out early in the morning, before eating anything. They would follow the protocol of not collecting too much, only as much as was needed, and always ensure that all of the medicine that they harvested and prepared was used and not wasted or thrown away. They would harvest tree bark in thin vertical strips, so as not to girdle the tree, allowing it to heal itself quickly. Usually, too, people harvested bark from the east, or sunrise, side of the tree (or sometimes from the side next to the river) because it was said to heal faster on this side. Elsie Claxton explained that the patient would also heal quickly if this procedure was followed (cited in Turner and Hebda 1990, 2012). Mary Thomas (2001, 45) described how her grandmother Macreet used to approach plants she wanted to use for medicine with care and respect, acknowledging the plant and saying to it, “The Creator put you here, that I take help from you. I need your help” (see also chapter 13). Mary (pers. comm., 1998) also explained that the old people always told her that medicines growing in remote places, especially at higher elevations in the mountains, were more powerful and had more strength than their counterparts growing down in the valleys or closer to human settlements (see also L.R. Smith 2008b). She said people would often gather the medicines – like subalpine fir, false hellebore, mountain valerian, and Canby’s lovage – while they were up camping in the mountains during root-digging or berry-picking season. Thus harvesting and preparing medicines was an important part of peoples’ seasonal rounds, as will be discussed further in the next chapter. Conclusions Every Indigenous group throughout northwestern North America – and probably, safe to say, the world over – has developed a range of medicines and healthcare products from the plants in their territories (Moerman 2009). Categories of health and well-being may be quite different from those recognized in Western medicine. In other ways, however, there are marked commonalities in the use of herbs and in the ways that they are applied. For example, scented and aromatic plants are widely used as medicines for respiratory ailments, administered as infusions or decoctions that are drunk or as an aromatic steam whose vapours are inhaled. Aromatic plants are also used to make medicinal washes and salves to treat wounds and infections and as cleansing agents, fumigants, and incenses. Not surprisingly, many aromatic compounds have marked antibiotic properties and may have other health benefits that are only now becoming recognized (Beresford-Kroeger 2010).

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Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1995) recalled that her Secwepemc grandmother always kept a large pot of western redcedar boughs boiling on the back of the stove, as a way to protect the inhabitants of the house from illness and to impart a pleasant fragrance to the house. On Vancouver Island, Kwakwaka’wakw cultural specialist Kim Recalma-Clutesi (Oqwilowgwa) (pers. comm., 2011) recalled that her grandparents did the same. Aromatic plants are also used in northwestern North America, and in many other parts of the world, as food preservatives, for beverage teas, for insect repellents, for hair and skin washes, and for inducing relaxation. All of these applications closely match concepts and applications within the modern alternative medical field known as “aromatherapy.” Given the universality of aromatic plant use by humans today – and even by animals, as exemplified by cats’ love of the mint catnip (Nepeta cataria) – it is likely that ancient humans, too, from Pleistocene times and earlier, used scented plants in their medicines and other types of preparations. It is perhaps no wonder that wild roses (Rosa spp.) are the most widely named type of plant in the language groups of northwestern North America (see chapter 3). Likely, applications of familiar scented species were readily transferred to other species with similar aromas that people encountered in their movements across the landscape in early times. This type of transference probably occurred for other types of medicinal plants as well, with basic modes of use and preparation being tried out on new species that were reminiscent of those people already knew. It was probably a complicated and drawn-out process both of learning by experimenting and of transferring and extending the knowledge already held. Some of the lessons on medicinal use must have been particularly hard, given the potential dangers of some medicinal plants if used in too high a dosage, in too concentrated a form, or over too prolonged a period. How much experimentation did it take, and over how long a time and with how much reinforcement, for the general knowledge of the deadly poisonous nature of false hellebore to be engrained in the medicinal knowledge systems of peoples throughout the entire area? As another example, many Interior Plateau peoples warn that women should never drink a solution of big sagebrush because it might cause sterility. Nlaka’pamux elder Bernadette Antoine explained, “if somebody makes you that kind of medicine, don’t drink it. You wouldn’t have any more kids. No children ... it’s just too powerful” (cited in Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 173). Okanagan elder Selina Timoyakin suggested that the reason sagebrush is such a good medicine is that it is “almost poisonous” itself and can kill germs (cited in Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980, 79). How long did it take for this kind of knowledge to disseminate? One reflection of the time depth of the important knowledge associated with plants like false hellebore or big sagebrush is the similarities in their names across the various languages within their range. Names that are cognate across

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different but related languages can indicate long-term familiarity with a plant through its ancestral proto-name (Leonti, Sticher, and Heinrich 2003). In the case of false hellebore, whose range extends from the coast to the interior, at least three Coast Salish (Sechelt, Squamish, and Straits) and two Interior Salish (Stl’atl’imx and Nlaka’pamux) languages share a cognate form (cf. Nlaka’pamux qwn-éłp) of Proto-Salish origin. For big sagebrush, the three northern Interior Salish languages (Stl’atl’imx, Nlaka’pamux, and Secwepemc) share a cognate name (cf. Nlaka’pamux kéwkwu, possibly meaning “far from water”). For both of these plants, the Okanagan and Snchítsu’umshtsn names are related to each other but not to the other cognate forms. None of the names of either of these species crosses over language family boundaries, although, at least for false hellebore, there are other cognate forms in the Wakashan, Ts’msyen, and Na-Dené language families. Thus the notion that the traits – both healing and harmful – of these two medicinal plant species were learned and passed down through the generations from possibly thousands of years ago is not unreasonable. Medicinal plants are major players in the botanical knowledge dynamics of the entire area. Many are used simultaneously in Indigenous food systems and may have originated concurrently with foods as people were exploring their new environments and gaining familiarity with the plant world opening up to them. The new colonists to the Americas, whether arriving along the coast or by land across Beringia, may have retained the knowledge and use of some medicines from their experiences with the same or closely related species in northeastern Asia. Some of the uses and practices that relate to medicinal plants may also have been readily transferred from one species to another if the characteristics were similar. This is almost certainly the case with aromatic species, which are likely, as noted previously, among the oldest medicines used by humans. It is probably also true for the bark medicines. Methods of medicine preparation may have paralleled the development of cooking technologies for food plants. For example, pit-cooking, or use of earth ovens, may well have developed from or given ready rise to steam bath and sweathouse practices related to medicinal plants, healing, and purification. Similarly, the preparation of infusions and decoctions of medicinal plants in water may have arisen as people were developing methods of steaming and boiling foods in rock depressions, baskets, and bentwood boxes. Possibly, too, “teas” left over from cooking processes were first drunk as convenient beverages and then for their flavour, before being discovered to have diverse therapeutic properties. Unfortunately, there is little direct evidence for medicinal plant use in the archaeological record.52 Medicines, unlike food or most technological materials, have a tradition of confidentiality, especially when it comes to specific, spiritually based medicinal charms or recipes connected with the supernatural world. Certain masks and

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sacred objects may be similarly private. This secrecy may constrain the dissemination of knowledge and practice around medicinal plants. Nevertheless, such knowledge did spread in many cases. Consider one of the most widely known medicines, also regarded as highly spiritual, with many strict protocols guiding its use: devil’s-club. Specific practices vary, but the use and characteristics of this species are embodied in traditional narratives on the Northwest Coast and beyond. Its names show evidence of its enduring salience, reflecting some Proto-Dene, Proto-Ts’msyenic, and Proto-Salishan elements. The Dene (Athabaskan) names translate as “big thorn/spine,” but the others are evidently unanalyzable, indicating antiquity. The Nuxalk name also pertains to devil’s-club’s sharp spines and the slivers they cause, associated with those of Douglas-fir bark. The South Wakashan peoples – Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Makah – apparently did not use devil’s-club medicinally to the same extent as others, although the plant is widespread within their territories.53 The lack of recorded medicinal use, however, may relate more to the private nature of medicinal plant use in Nuu-chah-nutlh culture than to an absence of medicinal application. The detailed knowledge surrounding the use of medicinal plants, including information about their effects and how to collect, prepare, and administer them, is an important component of Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems, obviously critical for people’s very survival. Unfortunately, today, much of this knowledge is held only by the eldest generations of Indigenous peoples. Many of the people who contributed the knowledge cited in this chapter have since passed away. However, the various plants still exist, and with care and attention, this important aspect of Traditional Ecological Knowledge can be renewed and recovered; it still has the capacity to enhance human health, well-being, and enjoyment long into the future.

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App e n d i x 1

Major Sources of Information for the Book

Many of the examples provided in the various chapters of these two volumes are drawn from my own learning and research with well-informed botanical and cultural experts. Indigenous consultants are cited by name, and their cultural affiliations are noted throughout the book. Often, in cases where they mention particular places, I have travelled there with them and seen first hand the locations they refer to. I have spent many hours with people like Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth), Dr Mary Thomas, Dr Margaret Siwallace, Annie York, Florence Davidson, Alice Paul, John Thomas, Elsie Claxton, Helen Clifton, Joan Morris (Sellemah), Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim), and many other Indigenous experts whose words and knowledge appear throughout this book. For this reason, the book represents a personal journey for me and, in a sense, a culmination of my own learning experiences extending and accumulating over more than forty-five years. Much of my ethnobotanical work has been in collaboration with other academic colleagues as well – graduate students, linguists, anthropologists, botanists, geographers, and historians – including a number of Indigenous scholars and experts. A substantial portion of the information drawn from my ethnobotanical and ethnoecological studies has been previously published in other forms, some of it co-authored with these Indigenous and academic colleagues, including graduate students. These publications are cited and listed in the References section of volume 2. Some of my authored and co-authored publications represent studies of particular species and groups of species of cultural importance, such as Turner and Taylor (1972) on Northwest Coast tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), Turner (1977) on black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii), Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. (1992) on

spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa), Turner (1988a) on coniferous trees of the Interior Salish, Kuhnlein and Turner (1987) on cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum), Turner (1982) and Lantz, Swerhun, and Turner (2004) on devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus), Turner and Kuhnlein (1982) on springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii) and silverweed (Argentina egedii), Turner and Kuhnlein (1983) on camas (Camassia spp.) and riceroot (Fritillaria spp.), Turner (1984) on Ranunculaceae counter-irritants, Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger (1985) on cottonwood mushroom (Tricholoma populinum), Turner (2003a) on edible seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae; syn. Porphyra), and Turner (1981) and Turner and Burton (2010) on soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis). Other publications focus on the ethnobotanical knowledge systems of particular peoples, such as Turner and Bell (1971) on the Coast Salish of Vancouver Island, Turner (1973) and Turner, Ari, et al. (2009) on the Nuxalk (Bella Coola), Turner and Bell (1973) on the Kwakwaka’wakw, Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy (1980) on the Okanagan-Colville, Turner and Efrat (1982) on the Hesquiaht (a Nuu-chah-nulth people), Turner and Hebda (2012) on the Saanich, Turner, Thomas, et al. (1983) on the Ditidaht (Nitinaht), Turner, Thompson, et al. (1990) on the Nlaka’pamux (Thompson), Turner (1992b) on the Stl’atl’imx, Hebda, Turner, et al. (1996) on the Ulkatcho Dakelh (Carrier), Turner (2004a) on the Haida, Turner and Thompson (2006) on the Gitga’at, Ignace, Turner, and Peacock (forthcoming) and Turner, Ignace, and Loewen (forthcoming) on Secwepemc ethnobotany, and Turner, Bouchard, et al. (1987) on Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc ethnobotany. There have also been some overviews and review articles from which some of the general statements and summary tables in the book are drawn, such as Turner and Hamersley-Chambers (2006) on Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau ethnobotany, Andre, Karst, and Turner (2006) on Arctic and Subarctic ethnobotany, Hunn, Turner, and French (1998) on Interior Plateau ethnobiology, Turner (1995) on northwestern North American ethnobotany, Turner (2001) and Turner and Lepofsky (2013) on British Columbia ethnobotany, Turner (2005) on ethnoecology, and Garibaldi and Turner (2004) on “cultural keystone species.” Some of the publications I have authored or co-authored relate specifically to various chapter topics in this book and have served as background for these sections, such as Turner (1974, 1987, 1988b, 1989) and Turner, Ignace, and Compton (1998) (as well as the ethnobotanies of specific peoples listed above) for chapter 3 (language and classification); Deur et al. (2013), Parrish, Turner, and Solberg (2007), Turner and Brown (2004), Turner, Burton, and van Eijk (2013), Turner and Clifton (2009), Turner, Gregory, et al. (2008), Turner, Łuczaj, et al. (2011), and Turner and Turner (2008) for chapter 4 (changes); Kuhnlein and Turner (1991), Laforet, Turner, and York (1993), Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein (1985), Turner (1995, 1997a), Turner and Davis (1993), Turner, Robinson, et al. (2012), and Turner and von Aderkas (2009) for chapter 5 (food systems); Turner (1996, 1998) for chapter 6 (technologies); Andre, Welsh, and Turner (2003), Turner (2009), and

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Turner and Hebda (1990) for chapter 7 (medicine); Lantz and Turner (2003) and Turner (1992b) for chapter 8 (seasonal rounds); Turner (2003a, 2003b, 2006a, 2006b) and Turner, Marshall, et al. (2008) for chapter 9 (social organization); Turner and Loewen (1998) and Turner and Ommer (2004) for chapter 10 (trade and exchange); Deur and Turner (2005), Peacock and Turner (2000), Turner (1997b, 1999), Turner, Ari, et al. (2009), Turner and Berkes (2006), and Turner, Deur, and Lepofsky (2013) for chapter 11 (environmental management systems); SewidSmith and Dick (1998) and Turner (2005) for chapter 12 (narrative); Turner (2005), Turner and Atleo (1998), Turner and Berkes (2006), and Turner, Ignace, and Ignace (2000) for chapter 13 (belief systems); and Turner (2005) and Senos et al. (2006) for chapter 14 (conclusions). Aside from work in which I was directly involved, I have drawn on research undertaken by numerous graduate students and colleagues. Students whose theses and dissertation research are particularly relevant to this book and for whom I have served as supervisor or co-supervisor include Dr Brian Compton (1993b), Michèle Kay (1993), Chief Earl Maquinna George (1997, 2003), Juliet Craig (1998), Dawn Loewen (1998), Dr Sandra Peacock (1998), Dr Kelly Bannister (2000), Kimberlee Chambers (2001), Trevor Lantz (2001), James Jones (2002), Ann Garibaldi (2003), Dr Brenda Beckwith (2004), Judith Thompson (Edōsdi) (2004, 2012), Amanda Karst (2005), Alestine Andre (2006), Dr Allis Pakki Chipps-Sawyer (2007), Stuart Crawford (2007), Severn Cullis-Suzuki (2007), Jen Pukonen (2008), Amy Deveau (2010), Megan Dilbone (2011), T. Abe Lloyd (2011), Carla Burton (2012), Thiago Gomes (2012), Leigh Joseph (2012), Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria (2013), and Katherine (Kate) Proctor (2013). Ongoing graduate work by Andra Forney and Thomas Child has also contributed to the book in various ways. Other graduate theses that I have drawn on in particular include Stephen McNeary (1976), Dr Alston Thoms (1989) and his subsequent work (e.g., Thoms 2008a), Elizabeth Ritch-Krc (1992), Rick Schulting (1994), Dr Allison McCutcheon (1996), Bob Bandringa (1999), Dr Nancy Mackin (2004), Dr Felice Wyndham (2004), Dr Brian Thom (2005), Andrea Weiser (2006; see also Weiser and Lepofsky 2009), Lisa Strecker (2007), Dr Ron Ignace (2008), Linda Smith (2008b), and Dr Patricia Vickers (2008). All of these theses are cited in the References section of volume 2. As well as the ethnobotanical studies with particular cultural groups already cited, a number of others have been important sources of general information in this book. These include works by Boas (1921) and the U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton (1998) on the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Steedman (1930) on the Nlaka’pamux (Thompson), Gunther (1973) on the peoples of Western Washington, Zalmai Zahir (pers. comm., 2010) on the Lushootseed, Hart (1974) on the Selish (Flathead), Hart, Turner, and Morgan (1981) on the Ktunaxa, G. Palmer (1975b) on the Secwepemc (Shuswap), G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner (2003) on the Snchitsu’umshtsn (Coeur d’Alene), A.G. Marshall (1977) on the Nez Perce, Fleisher (1980) on the Klallam (Clallam), Galloway (1982) on the Upriver

Appendix 1 | 469

Halkomelem, A. Jones (1983) on the Inuit, Kennedy and Bouchard (1983) on the Sliammon, Gill (1983, 2005a, 2005b) on the Makah, Russell Kari (1987) on the Dena’ina (Tainaina), Russell (1991a) on the Alutiiq, Compton (1993b) on the Haisla, Hanaksiala, Oweekeno, and Kitasoo, Johnson (1994) on the Wit’suwet’in, Johnson (1997) on the Gitxsan, H.I. Smith (1997) on the Gitxsan, J.A. Ross (2011) on the Spokan, Hunn Selam, and family (1990) on the Sahaptin, Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. (1999) on the Ktunaxa, and Bannister (2006) on the Prophet River First Nation. Unpublished works, especially by my colleagues Randy Bouchard and Dr Dorothy Kennedy, as well as by Dr Jan van Eijk, have also been very helpful and are cited here with appreciation. Daniel Moerman’s (2003) monumental ethnobotanical compendium provided a continent-wide overview of ethnobotanical applications of plants. Other key literature sources for the book have included, but are not limited to, the following. For chapter 2, on ethnoecology in the past, I have particularly benefited from the research of others since I have not personally been involved in archaeobotanical or palaeoecological research. Lepofsky’s (2004) overview was invaluable. I also drew extensively from works by Ames and Maschner (1999), Bernick (1998b), Croes (e.g., 1992, 1995; Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009b), Erlandson et al. (2007), Fedje and Mackie (2005), Hayden (1992), Hebda and colleagues (see K.J. Brown and Hebda 2003), Kirk and Daugherty (2007), Matson, Coupland, and Mackie (2003), Matson and Magne (2007), Moss (2011), Moss et al. (2004), and Pielou (1991), among others. For chapter 3, I drew on the collective work of many linguists specializing in the various northwestern North American languages, whose accurate recordings of the names of plants and other botanical terminology are featured in the chapter’s tables as well as in appendices 2 and 3, on which most of the chapter is based. I have tried to retain the accuracy of these names while still maintaining some consistency in respect to orthographic systems in order to allow comparisons across languages where different conventions are used. The symbols I use for these names are based mainly on the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA ), as explained at the beginning of the book (see also references in appendix 2). As well as the various dictionaries and ethnobotanies from which these terms are drawn, chapter 3 reflects the insights of Cecil Brown, Thom Hess, M. Dale Kinkade, Aert Kuipers, Laurence C. Thompson and M. Terry Thompson, Jan van Eijk, Randy Bouchard, Bill Poser, Leslie Saxon, Aliana Fisher, Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, Sonya Bird, and James Kari, among others. Chapter 4, on the changes faced by Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America following the entry of European newcomers, was informed by the first-hand accounts of Indigenous people like Dr Mary Thomas (2001) and Joan Morris (Sellemah) (pers. comm., 2011–13) and by written historical accounts of interactions (e.g., Moziño 1970; and Scholefield 1914), as well as by a wide range of more recent academic works, including writings by

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K.T. Carlson (2001), R.C. Harris (1997), Kuhnlein (1989a), Lutz (2008), McDonald (2003), Ommer et al. (2007), Suttles (1951a, 1951b), and Thornton (2008). For chapter 5, on plant foods, the methods and expertise of Harriet Kuhnlein and her colleagues yielded important information. Since the late 1970s, she has undertaken a host of collaborative community-based ethnonutritional studies on Indigenous peoples’ food systems and particular food species, having expanded her work in the past decade or more to the international stage (see Kuhn­lein, Erasmus, Creed-Kanashiro, et al. 2006; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Spigelski, et al. 2013; and Kuhnlein and Turner 1991, citing many more references). In chapter 6, on plants in technology, Friedman’s (2005) and Whelchel’s (2005) work on Ozette and Stewart’s (1977, 1984) on fishing technologies and cedar provided valuable insights. In chapter 7, Johnson’s (1997) dissertation on Gitxsan health and wellness and Harlan Smith’s (1928) materia medica of the Nuxalk (Bella Coola) were particularly helpful. Studies that related particularly to chapter 8, on seasonal rounds, included Hayden’s (1992) edited volume on the Keatley Creek peoples of the Interior Plateau, Ron Ignace’s (2008) dissertation on the Secwepemc, and Linda Smith’s (2008b) thesis on spiritual power in Tsilhqot’in belief; teachings and conversations with Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), Kim Recalma-Clutesi (Oqwilowgwa), Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth), and Douglas Deur were also invaluable. Chapter 9, on the role of social organization, benefited from insights from Suttles (1987a, 1987b) and Ames (1991) as well as from work by Schulting (1994) and Hayden (1992; see also Hayden and Schulting 1997). Chapter 10, on trade and exchange, drew on archaeological findings from, for example, Ames and Maschner (1999), R.L. Carlson (1976, 1994), and Croes (1997), as well as from more recent examples of exchange seen in linguistic and cultural patterns. Since peoples’ management systems are directly related to their beliefs, these references were also relevant to chapter 11, on traditional systems of land and resource management. In addition, the following publications were important for this chapter: M.K. Anderson (2005, 2009), Boyd (1999b, including chapters by Johnson, H.T. Lewis, and Suttles), Deur (2000; as well as Deur and Turner 2005; and Deur et al. 2013), Lepofsky (2009a), Lepofsky and Lertzman (2008), Lepofsky and Peacock (2004), Mack and McClure (2002), McDonald (2003), Menzies (2006b), Norton (1979a, 1979b), and Stryd (1997). For chapter 12, on stories and narratives, I reviewed many of the texts recorded by ethnographers Franz Boas, James Teit, John Swanton, Charles Hill-Tout, and others. Boas (2002), a recent translation of his 1895 edition of Indianische Sagen von der Nord Pacifischen Küste Amerikas, edited and annotated by Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, was especially valuable. Chapter 13, on belief systems and worldviews as they relate to peoples’ relationships with plants and environments, benefited from the works of E.N.

Appendix 1 | 471

Anderson (1996), M.K. Anderson (2005), E.R. Atleo (2004, 2011), Berkes (2012), R.K. Nelson (1983), and Thornton (1999, 2008). Finally, chapter 14, which offers conclusions, is largely a reflection and compilation of ideas and recommendations drawn from the various other parts of the book, but it also draws from works such as Hunn (1999), Nazarea (1999), Senos et al. (2006), Stepp, Wyndham, and Zarger (2002), Thom (2005), and Wyndham (2004). Discussions with my colleagues E. Richard Atleo (Umeek), Brenda Beckwith, Doug Deur, Robin Gregory, Eric Higgs, Dana Lepofsky, Nancy Mackin, Gary Martin, Rosemary Ommer, and Barbara Wilson (Kii’iljuus) have also served to ground this chapter.

472 | appendix one

App e n d i x 2

Names of Selected Native Plant Species in Indigenous Languages of Northwestern North America General Note In the course of my research for this project, I created a database of information on the plants of northwestern North America and the names that exist for them in a wide range of Indigenous languages and major dialects. Using lexical comparisons to find names that are both phonologically and semantically similar, I have been able to determine some of the borrowed terms that signal interaction across language boundaries, as well as many cognate terms that are based on common linguistic origin and thus reflect common ancestral knowledge of plants. I attempt to tease out these possible links and their implications throughout this book, especially in chapters 3 and 4. Although the database is not complete or definitive, its contents reflect the richness, variation, and ethnobotanical congruence of culturally salient and relevant plants, both native and introduced, across different languages and major dialects, different ecological zones, and diverse cultural homelands. The full database is accessible at the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091) and contains two parts: a list of over 250 indigenous species or basic plant taxa for which names were found in three or more Indigenous languages or major dialects in the study area; and a list of roughly 45 introduced cultivated or weedy plant species for which names were found in three or more languages or dialects. Since the evidence in the database underpins arguments I make in the book, I wish to give readers a glimpse of it. The appendices that follow provide a “sampling” of culturally important plants from the study region that have been documented in Indigenous languages and dialects. Appendix 2 highlights ten native plant species and appendix 3 highlights two introduced, cultivated plant

species (turnip and potato). All are plants with a high cultural salience, which I refer to at various points in the book. In appendix 2, the first three entries are representatives of the major categories of algae (red laver, Pyropia spp.), ferns (spiny wood fern, Dryopteris expansa), and conifers (gymnosperms) (Pacific yew, Taxus brevifolia) respectively, and the last seven are flowering plants, listed in alphabetical order of their scientific genera. Each plant has its own table. The first column of each table lists the Indigenous languages and major dialects for which plant names have been documented. The second column contains the plant names as they are recorded in those languages and dialects (along with specific parts of plants identified, such as berries) and, when known, the gloss or analysis of the term. Some dialectic or other variants of the names from different speakers or different sources are also included. The third column lists corresponding reference sources for the plant names and definitions. There is not always a one-to-one correspondence between the Indigenous names and the scientific species in this table. For this reason, some Indigenous terms are cross-referenced to more than one species. In some cases, there is confusion in the original source about the actual species referred to; in other cases, scientific names have been changed. I have indicated any uncertainty in identification, referencing, or transcription of the names with a notation. Detailed information on the plant names is not available for every language; an absence of information (such as the lack of an analysis for a term) does not necessarily mean that a term cannot be analyzed but only that it was not reported in the reference sources available. In the table, the languages are listed in an order that is partly geographical and partly based on linguistic relationships. The list begins with languages indigenous to the northern coast and moves southward and toward the interior, with languages listed within their respective language families. Some of the major dialects in which plant names frequently differ are listed separately (e.g., Skidegate Haida and Massett/Alaska Haida). In certain cases where dialectic differences tend to be minor, dialect variants are identified by name (e.g., “Massett” and “Alaska” for Haida), according to the dialects denoted in the original reference source. As noted in the introduction to this volume, the orthography, or writing system, used here and throughout the book is based on the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA ), with some alterations to make Indigenous words more easily read by nonlinguists. Please see “Note on the Writing System Used in This Book” in the introductory section of this volume for an explanation of the writing system and a guide to the symbols used to denote plant names in the book and in these appendices. Botanical species and nomenclature generally follow that in Klinkenberg (2013). In all cases, please consult the original sources at the end of the appendix to ensure complete accuracy for a given language.

474 | Appendix 2

Table A2-1 | Pyropia abbottiae (V. Krishnamurthy) S.K. Lindstrom (syn. Porphyra abbottiae Krishnamurthy), Pyropia perforata (J. Agardh) S.C. Lindstrom, and related Pyropia and Porphyra spp. – red laver, or “edible seaweed” (Bangiaceae; Rhodophyta) (general reference: Turner 2003a) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Yupik (Chugach)

Russell 1991a; Wennekens 1985

Tlingit

tsaqałqaq (“Porphyra perforata”; Pyropia torta) (Alutiiq, English Bay, Port Graham, Prince William Sound dialects)

łaàq’ask, łaaq’áak, q’áats’ (“common edible seaweed”) (Tongass dialect)

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

sgiw (Massett dialect); sgíw (Alaska dialect) (P. abbottiae); q’aats’ (M), q’áats’ (A) (“Porphyra laciniata”); OR sangga, sanga (M), sángg (A) ‘winter’; OR sangg sxiiwee (M), sángg sgíiwaay (A) ‘winter seaweed’ (P. torta, P. lanceolata and other spp.)

Boas 1890; Norton 1981; Turner 2004a

jagałq’a (Outer Inlet dialect, probable name); dzagałgey (Upper Inlet dialect) (“laver or nori” – Porphyra)

Russell 1991b; Russell Kari 1987

Haida (Skidegate)

Emmons 1991; Jacobs and Jacobs 1982; Krause 1956

sgyuu (P. abbottiae); gup (also apparently applied to brownish-red laver seaweed too old to eat); singga, singga sgiiwaay ‘winter seaweed’ (P. torta, P. lanceolata and other spp.)

Turner 2004a

łakits (Bulkley R. dialect); łakeʔis (Babine dialect)

Hargus 2007; John­ son Gottesfeld 1993

Dakelh (Cheslatta)

łak’us

W.J. Poser, pers. comm., 2012

Tsilhqot’in

“tish-guns” ‘underwater-scale’ (meaning uncertain)

Turner 2004b

łaq’asx

Johnson 1997

Dena’ina (Tanaina) Witsuwit’en Dakelh/Carrier (Saik’uz, Nadleh/ Stellako, Lheidli)

Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

Nisga’a

Gitxsan

Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language) Kitasoo Haisla

łagaʔas (borr. fr. Ts’msyenic language, most likely Gitxsan)

łaks, łax

łaq’askw, łaʔasq, łak’askw w

łəʔask

łáeʔəxsk (P. abbottiae); dá’a łən, t’aʔałṇ (inedible seaweed; P. torta) (and variants) łaq’sg, łaq’s

Poser 2008a, 2008b

Kay 1993

Burton 2012

Turner and Thompson 2006 Compton 1993b Compton 1993b

Appendix 2 | 475

Table A2-1 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Heiltsuk

łq’st (seaweed); l’qkw (seaweed in plugs)

Rath 1981

łəqq’stən ‘draped over the rocks’ (Kwak’wala dialect); łaq’asdi (Nak’wala dialect), łaq’ast (G̱uts’ala dialect) ʕumumits, ʕumumts (also Ulva and other green algae) (Hesquiaht and other dialects); kw’iny’imts in some dialects

Deveau 2010; Turner and Bell 1973 Turner and Efrat 1982

ts’aayupsii (general term for all seaweeds; not specifically for Pyropia)

Gill 1983

Oowekyala Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language) Nuu-chah-nulth Ditidaht

łq’st (P. abbottiae); dał (apparently for inedible seaweed)

Compton 1993b

ts’aaypish (marine algae, gen., and Pyropia spp.)

Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983

łaq’s

Turner 1973, 1974

Sechelt

łéq’sta (probably mainly Pyropia perforata)

Squamish

łéq’es (probably mainly Pyropia perforata)

Timmers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972

Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’)

łə́q’əs (probably mainly Pyropia perforata)

Klallam

łə́q’es (“sea lettuce” – Ulva spp.)

Makah Nuxalk Comox

Straits Salish

Lushootseed

łéq’stən, łéqstn

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973-78

Bouchard and Turner 1976

Turner and Bell 1971

łə́q’əs (probably mainly Pyropia perforata) (Saanich)

Turner and Hebda 2012

łábats (“sea lettuce” – Ulva spp.)

Bates, Hess, and Hilbert 1994

Fleisher 1980

Table A2-2 | Dryopteris expansa (K.B. Presl) Fraser-Jenkins & Jermy – spiny wood fern (Dryopteridaceae) (general reference: Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Yupik (Chugach)

kun’aq (“Athyrium filix-femina”), kun’aqutaq (Prince William Sound dialect) (rhizomes); tseturqaaraat (Nelson I dialect) (both D. dilatata)

Russell 1991a; Wennekens 1985

476 | Appendix 2

Table A2-2 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Tlingit

kw’áłx (“Athyrium”); kw’álx (“fern with edible roots”)

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

sk’yaaw (Massett dialect), sk’yáaw (Alaska dialect) (edible rootstocks); saagwaal (plant)

Emmons 1991; Jacobs and Jacobs 1982; Krause 1956

Turner 2004a

sk’yaaw (edible rootstocks); ts’aagul (plant)

Turner 2004a

Ahtna

ʔaax (Lower dialect) (“fern, general”)

Dena’ina (Tanaina)

ux (rhizome); ux t’una ‘ux (‘leaf ’) (also for Athyrium filix-femina)

Smelcer, Kari, and Buck 2011

Chipewyan

nítélits’uchoghé (D. spinulosa)

Marles 1984

Dakelh (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake; Saik’uz)

ʔah (“fiddlehead fern”)

Poser 2008a, 2008b

Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

ʔah, datsan ʔah

Kay 1993

Tsilhqot’in

Morice 1893; Turner 2004b

Nisga’a

ʔax (not identified in original source) (Morice notes: “‘roots’ eaten by Carrier; not found in Chilcotin area”; but does occur at Chilco, Tatlyoko Lakes, at base of glaciers) ax

ax “the principal root food used by Gitxsan” (‘Wii Ax crest on pole of ‘Woosimlaxha at Kispiox Village)

Burton 2012

Johnson 1997

aa

Turner and Thompson 2006

Kitasoo

ʔaʔ

Compton 1993b

Heiltsuk

t’íbáṃ, t’íbṃ (also Polystichum); t’íbaém (fern root) (cf. possibly t’ípa ‘to step, tread, to find fern roots or cockles by feeling with the feet’)

Rath 1981

Haida (Skidegate)

Tahltan (Tałtan)

Witsuwit’en

Gitxsan Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language) Haisla

ch’ooł (cf. ch’oh – quills)

diǝyin’

sá-qus (“fern roots”); t’íbàm (rootstock); t’ip’às (plant, fronds)

Russell 1991b; Russell Kari 1987

Robert Quock, cited in Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997 Hargus 2007; Johnson Gottesfeld 1993

Compton 1993b

Appendix 2 | 477

Table A2-2 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Oowekyala

t’ibam; see also tsákyus (“unidentified fern root”)

Compton 1993b

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language) Nuu-chah-nulth

Ditidaht Quileute

Nuxalk

Comox Sechelt Squamish Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’) Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō)

478 | Appendix 2

tsakkus, tsakus (edible rootstock; also Polystichum); OR tságanu; tsakkusməs (plant); təlstəlgwatłuw’ (fronds)

Turner and Bell 1973; U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton 1998

ʔitsmapt (also Athyrium, Polystichum); t’ipaa (prob. this species); also shishitłmaptk’uk ‘resembling bracken fern’ (see also Athyrium); ʔitsmapt, ʔitsmakt (also Polystichum); OR ʔiʔitsmaptk’uk ‘resembling Polystichum’ (all Hesquiaht dialect)

Turner and Efrat 1982

ts’ikwí (fern roots; Athyrium specified); tseqweʔeʔput (whole plant – identified as Athyrium) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish ts’əkwaʔ ‘an edible root’; see also Polystichum, Lilium)

Kuipers 2002; J.V. Powell and Woodruff 1973

ʔitsipt (also Athyrium)

sqw’alm, sqw’almiixw, sqw’alqw’almłp [cf. ProtoSalish qw’al, qw’ay ‘to scorch (burn to) ashes, black; roast, ripe(n)’: berry, gen.]; xala (any fern tops); qaxmats (any fern plant, or dead fronds); qalxm ‘dig fern roots’ (cf. ProtoCoast-Salish qalx ‘digging stick’)

Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1973, 1974

t’thékwa (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish ts’əkwaʔ ‘an edible root’) (see also Polypodium: théxayem; cf. Proto-Coast-Salish s-(ts)xal-m ‘sword fern’)

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973-78; Kuipers 2002

ts’ékwaʔ (rootstocks) (also Polystichum); tsxalm (fronds) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish s-(ts)xal-m ‘sword fern’)

Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 2002

stsawch (“roots of a fern with edible fingerlike appendages”)

sthxélem (identified as as deer fern, Blechnum spicant, but likely this species; see also Polystichum) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish s-(ts)xal-m ‘sword fern’) t’thə́kwe (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish ts’əkwaʔ ‘an edible root’)

Timmers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1971 Galloway 1982; Kuipers 2002

Table A2-2 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Klallam

tsáqwa (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish ts’əkwaʔ)

Lushootseed (Northern)

k’ləlk’aláts

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Lushootseed (Southern)

ts’əkwíʔ, tsókwi (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish ts’əkwaʔ ‘an edible root’); skwíʔxw (also listed as Pteridium aquilinum, bracken fern)

Lower Cowlitz

ts’əkwíʔ; ts’kwai (cf. Proto-Salish ts’əkwíʔ ‘wood fern’; Proto-Coast-Salish ts’əkwaʔ ‘an edible root’)

Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton)

(s-)ts’ə́kwaʔ (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish ts’əkwaʔ ‘an edible root’)

Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River)

(s-)ts’ə́kwaʔ (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish ts’əkwaʔ ‘an edible root’)

Nlaka’pamux

tsíkwa, “tsíkwa,” and other variants (“a kind of brake but not the common kind” – Steedman) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish ts’əkwaʔ ‘an edible root’); ts’úkwiʔ (identity uncertain in original source) (cf. bracken rhizome, fresh, uncooked)

Gunther 1973

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002 Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987 Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

Kuipers 2002; Steedman 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990

Table A2-3 | Taxus brevifolia Nutt. – Pacific yew, or western yew (Taxaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Tlingit

sáqs, s’aqs ‘bow and arrow’

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

łgiid (Massett dialect), łgíid (Alaska dialect) ‘bow’

Emmons 1991; Jacobs and Jacobs 1982; Krause 1956

Nisga’a

hax dak ‘bow’

Haida (Skidegate) Gitxsan

hlgiid (łgiid) ‘bow’ w

w

haxwdakw ‘bow, instrument for shooting’; OR xwdakw ‘shoot’ (verb); OR sgan haxwdakw

Turner 2004a Turner 2004a Burton 2012

Johnson 1997

Appendix 2 | 479

Table A2-3 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language)

sahakwdak ‘bow’

Turner and Thompson 2006

sxánhukwdák ‘tree for bow’; OR sa hakwdə́k ‘making bow’ tł’humq’, tł’mq’as (one yew or a grove of yew) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əməq ‘yew’)

Compton 1993b

Kitasoo Haisla

Heiltsuk

tł’əmq’á (wood); tł’əmq’ás (tree); t’hémq’ (yew wood); tł’hémq’ás pl. tł’hít’hemq’ás (yew tree) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əməq ‘yew’)

Oowekyala

tł’əmq (wood, or tree); tł’əmq’as (tree) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əməq ‘yew’); OR p’its’as ‘hard tree’

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language) Nuu-chah-nulth Ditidaht Makah

tł’əmq’i (tree); tł’əmq’ (wood); OR tł’əmq’q’a (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əməq ‘yew’)

tłatmapt ‘wedge plant’; ORwitaapt ‘plant used for warring’ (Hesquiaht dialect) tłatapt ‘wedge plant’ tł’ixiiʔaqtłbap ‘red inside plant’ (“k’lexedakxłebapt” – Gunther)

Quileute

xiiyá

Nuxalk

qwuts’ułkw

Comox

xwéʔitay (cf. xwéʔit ‘wedge’); xweʔetay (Tla’amin dialect) (cf. Local Coast Salish xwʔit ‘wedge’)

Sechelt

xweʔítay (cf. Local Coast Salish xwʔit ‘wedge’)

Squamish

tł’mq’áy’ (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əməq ‘yew’); OR xweʔítay’ ‘wedge tree’ (cf. Local Coast Salish xwʔit ‘wedge’)

480 | Appendix 2

Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Kuipers 2002; Rath 1981; Nancy J. Turner, notes with Evelyn Windsor and Mary Hunt, 1996 Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1973; U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton 1998 Turner and Efrat 1982 Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983 Gill 1983; Gunther 1973 J.V. Powell and Woodruff 1973

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1973, 1974

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973-78; Kuipers 2002

Kuipers 2002; Timmers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972 Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969, 2002

Table A2-3 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’)

təxwátsəłp, təxwáʔtsəłp ‘bow tree’ tə́xwətsəłp ‘bow tree’; Chilliwack tł’amq’ł (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əməq ‘yew’)

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1971

Galloway 1982; Kuipers 2002

Straits Salish

tł’əng’q’-íłch (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əməq ‘yew’) (Saanich)

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Hebda 2012

Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō)

Klallam Lushootseed (Northern) Lower Cowlitz

tł’əngqłch (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əməq ‘yew’)

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

ts’əxəbidagwap (bark); ts’əxbíd-ats (tree)

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973

tłámeł’k’ł (spelling uncertain) (cf. ProtoCoast-Salish tł’əməq ‘yew’)

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002 Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

Nlaka’pamux

Stl’atl’imx: tł’əmq’-áz’ (var. tł’əm’q’-áz’) (stem unanalyzable – Van Eijk, in Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987); OR təxwʔats-áz’ ‘bow-plant’ (cf. təxwʔats ‘bow’); OR təxwʔats-áłp ‘bow-plant’; OR ts’úts’xl’-az’ ‘snowshoe plant’

t’éʔxwełp (prob. borr. fr. Halkomelem); OR tskín’ek ‘hew-weapon’; OR tskin’ek-éłp ‘hew weapon or bow-plant’

Secwepemc

tskwínək (Eastern dialect) ‘bow’

Okanagan (also OkanaganColville)

nekwnúkw; OR tskwink ‘bow’

G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming

Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton)

Kuipers 2002; Steedman 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990

Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980

Spokan

ʔatsech’nalqw, ʔatsichn-álqw ‘tied back plant (bow plant)’

tskwen’chalqw, tskwn’chálqw ‘bow tree’

G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003

Selish (formerly Flathead)

tskwn’chá ‘bow wood’

Hart 1974, 1976

Snchítsu’umshtsn

Upper Cowlitz

Sahaptin

wawanínts

wawaninsh

Hart 1974, 1976; J.A. Ross 2011

Gunther 1973

Hunn, Selam, and family 1990

Appendix 2 | 481

Table A2-3 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Ktunaxa

ts’iypił (well-known bow material)

Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; Ktunaxa/ Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. 1999

Table A2-4 | Allium cernuum Roth – nodding onion (Liliaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Slavey

ts’ihgøʔ

Kaska

tł’ooge désts’ii ‘pungent grass’

Lamont 1977; Kaska Tribal Council 1997 (Mt Slavey dialect)

Sekani

suzziullie

Witsuwit’en

tło iłtsin

Dakelh (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake)

tł’o ʔəltsən; OR tł’otsən (cf. tł’o ‘grass, hay’; ‘smelly grass’) (“wild onion”); OR lizanyo (borr. fr. French les oignons) (pertains to cultivated and wild onions) tł’otsən

Dakelh (Saik’uz)

Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

Tsilhqot’in Nisga’a Gitxsan

Haisla

482 | Appendix 2

tł’otsən

tł’ets’en (cf. tł’ fr. tł’ugh ‘grass’; sen ‘strong scent’) (also garden onion) ts’anksa gaaq (also poss. Allium schoenoprasum)

ts’anks sa gaaqw, ts’enksa gaaq (Western dialect), ts’anksa gaaq (Eastern dialect) ‘raven’s underarm odour’ mgwts’i (for wild and cultivated onions)

Kaska Tribal Council 1997 (Liard dialect)

Lena Izony McCook, pers. comm. to Aliana Parker, 2013; A. Davis and Tsay Tay Forestry Limited 2008

Hargus 2007; Johnson Gottesfeld 1993 Poser 2008a

Poser 2008b

Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Kay 1993 Turner 2004b Burton 2012 Johnson 1997; ‘Ksan 1980; H.I. Smith 1997 Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Table A2-4 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Heiltsuk

mqw’ts’í (garden onion only)

Oowekyala

mqw’ts’ḷ’i (also garden onion)

Rath 1981; Nancy J. Turner, notes with Evelyn Windsor and Mary Hunt, 1996

Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language)

meqw’ets’í (also garden onion)

Nuu-chah-nulth

ʕisaq; OR ʕiʕisaqk’uk ‘resembling onion’ (mainly garden onion, A. cepa) (Hesquiaht dialect) q’iyaq’iya, q’iyaq’iyaa (nodding onion, garden onion) (borr. fr. Makah)

Turner and Bell 1973; ; Kuipers 2002; U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton 1998

Ditidaht

Turner and Efrat 1982

Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983

q’iyiq’iy (gen. term for onions); OR “klíʔyeʔklíyebupt” tł’xwtsn (also garden onion) (possibly borr. fr. Athabaskan)

Gill 1983; Gunther 1973

Sechelt

st’áshat

Squamish

qwuláwa (cf. Proto-Salish qwlawl ‘edible tuber’; cf. Camassia)

Kuipers 2002; Timmers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972

Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969, 2002

st’éxət (also A. acuminatum); domestic onion: éniyels (borr. fr. English)

Galloway 1982; Kuipers 2002

Makah Nuxalk Comox

Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’) Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō)

Straits Salish

Klallam

Lower Cowlitz

Upper Chehalis

máqw’et’th

qw’áxwoy’əts’

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1973 Bouchard and Kennedy 1973–78; Kuipers 2002

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1971

sqw’ə́xw (prob. also A. acuminatum); OR qw’əxwíyəch, qw’əxwiyəch (pertaining to ‘underarm odour’) (Saanich); qw’áxweʔəts (Songish) (also apparently A. acuminatum and garden onion) qw’əxwəyəch

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

maxál’uʔ (cf. Ktunaxa word for Erythronium); OR qiwáłqs (“onion”)

M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1985; Kinkade 1991

qiwáłqs, sqiwáłaln (“onion”)

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1971; Turner and Hebda 2012

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Appendix 2 | 483

Table A2-4 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton)

qwláwaʔ, qwláwa-ʔúl ‘real/original onion’ (A. cernuum and domesticated onion) (cf. Proto-Salish qwlawl ‘edible tuber’; cf. Camassia); (cf. also (s-)nə́qləqs – small onion, prob. A. acuminatum)

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

qwléwe (cf. Proto-Salish qwlawl ‘edible tuber’; cf. Camassia) (Note: tsepíʔes – A. acuminatum)

Kuipers 2002; Steedman 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990

qweláwi, qwelíwa; OR xelíwa (cf. Proto-Salish qwlawl ‘edible tuber’; cf. Camassia); OR seháʕykw’ (Note: saxk – Allium douglasii and/or A. geyeri) qwliẃlsh, qwəlíwəl’sh (cf. Proto-Salish qwlawl ‘edible tuber’; cf. Camassia) (Note: sisch – Allium sp.)

Kuipers 2002; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980

qw’láwi (A. douglasii); cf. also tanán shaak (Allium spp., wild species; A. acuminatum)

Hunn, Selam, and family 1990

Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River)

Nlaka’pamux Secwepemc Okanagan

Snchítsu’umshtsn Selish (formerly Flathead) Sahaptin Ktunaxa

484 | Appendix 2

qwláwaʔ, qwláwa-ʔúl ‘real/original onion’ (A. cernuum and domesticated onion) (cf. Proto-Salish qwlawl ‘edible tuber’; cf. Camassia); (cf. also (s-)nə́qləqs – “small onion”, prob. A. acuminatum)

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

qwléwe (Western, Eastern dialects) (also garden onion) (cf. Proto-Salish qwlawl ‘edible tuber’; cf. Camassia)

Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming

Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003

qwlíwyeʔe (apparently unanalyzable) (cf. Proto-Salish qwlawl ‘edible tuber’; cf. Camassia) (Note: has cognate terms in six out of seven Interior Salish languages)

Hart 1974, 1976; Kuipers 2002

ʔakuwał, ʔakuhał (Lower dialect); sxáyukw’ (prob. A. geyeri)

Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. 1999

Table A2-5 | Amelanchier alnifolia (Nutt.) Nutt. ex M. Roem. – saskatoon berry, or serviceberry (Rosaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Tlingit

gaawáq (also Rubus pedatus)

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

gaan xaw’laa, gaan xaw.ulaa (Massett dialect), gáan xáw’laa (Alaska dialect) ‘sweet-berry’ (fruit)

Emmons 1991; Jacobs and Jacobs 1982; Krause 1956 Turner 2004a

Haida (Skidegate) Dena’ina (Tanaina)

Tahltan, Tałtan Kaska Sekani

gaan xaw’laa ‘sweet-berry’ (fruit)

kentł’ech’ (Upper Inlet dialect) ‘flat-blue’

detłideja, detłideje (berries); dechitł’eje (bush)

k’e jíjé’ dihcho dzídzé’ ‘blue grouse berry’; jíje choʔ ‘big berry’

k’ehmi-ehe (cf. Proto-Athabaskan q’iʔn ‘saskatoon berry’)

Turner 2004a

Russell 1991b; Russell Kari 1987

Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997

Kaska Tribal Council 1997 (Liard dialect)

Krauss 2005, 129

Chipewyan

kinjíé

Marles 1984

Dakelh/Carrier (Saik’uz, Nadleh/ Stellako, Lheidli)

mai dənəłgəs; OR k’en, k’enmaiʔ (Saik’uz dialect); k’emai; OR k’en (bush) (ProtoAthabaskan q’iʔn ‘saskatoon berry’) k’en mai, k’e mai (Proto-Athabaskan q’iʔn ‘saskatoon berry’); OR mai dənəłgəs

Krauss 2005; Poser 2008b

Tsilhqot’in

dɨg (berries); dɨgichen (bush) (“five varie­ ties”) (possibly contracted from dînsh-gige ‘blue grouse berry’ – see Kaska term)

L.R. Smith 2008b; Turner 2004b

gyam, gem (Western dialect), gam (Eastern dialect) (berries); sgangem (W), sgangam (E) (bush)

Johnson 1997

gyem (berries); sgən gyem (bush)

Turner and Thompson 2006

ga m’aʔi

Compton 1993b

Witsuwit’en

Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

Nisga’a

Gitxsan Ts’msyen, (Sm’algyax language) Kitasoo

Haisla

Heiltsuk

łighah, łəghəx (‘together’)

gam (berries); sq’an gam (bush)

t’iłṃ (berries); t’il’as (bush)

t’iłə́ṃ (berries); t’iłás (bush)

Hargus 2007; Johnson Gottesfeld 1993

Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Kay 1993; Krauss 2005

Burton 2012

Compton 1993b

Rath 1981; Nancy J. Turner, notes with Evelyn Windsor and Mary Hunt, 1996

Appendix 2 | 485

Table A2-5 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Oowekyala

tiłṃ (berries); tiłàs; OR t’il’as (uncertain) (bush) íxp’aʔà (cf. ʔixp’a ‘sweet’) (berries); íxp’aʔèms (bush)

Compton 1993b

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language) Nuu-chah-nulth

t’iʔiłtup (Gold River and Alberni River, Hesquiaht dialects)

Turner and Bell 1973; U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton 1998

Turner and Efrat 1982

Nuxalk

sq’sk (berries); sq’sk-łp (bush)

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1973, 1974

Comox

shíshis (berries); shíshisay (bush)

Sechelt

q’eʔán (berries); q’eʔánay (bush) (poss. mistaken for Crataegus douglasii – cognate with Salishan names for Crataegus)

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973-78; Kuipers 2002

Squamish

snástam (berries); nástam’ay (bush)

Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969

Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’)

təshnéts

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1971

Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō)

Straits Salish Samish

Klallam

Lushootseed (Northern)

Lower Cowlitz

486 | Appendix 2

ts’əsléts (berry); ts’əslétsəłp (bush); sk’ek’éxwə (dried berries, borr. fr. Nlaka’pamux sk’áxem)

schíʔsəng, schíchsən (berries); schiʔsən-íłch (bush) (Saanich)

steitchsan

Kuipers 2002; Timmers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972

Galloway 1982

Turner and Hebda 2012 Gunther 1973

chəchsinəch

Gunther 1973

kə́sx, kísx; OR qw’ál’xw [cf. Proto-Salish qw’al, qw’ay ‘to scorch (burn to) ashes, black; roast, ripe(n)’: berry, gen.] (berries); kasáaxan’ł (approx.) (bush)

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

qw’əlastəb (cf. qw’əl ‘cook, bake’) [cf. ProtoSalish qw’al, qw’ay ‘to scorch (burn to) ashes, black; roast, ripe(n)’: berry, gen.] (berries); k’olástabats, qulástabats (“name of the wood of this plant” – Gunther)

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973

Table A2-5 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Upper Chehalis

tsə́shsh, tsəsháshi; OR qw’əlástm (berries) (see juniper) [cf. Proto-Salish qw’al, qw’ay ‘to scorch (burn to) ashes, black; roast, ripe(n)’: berry, gen.; see also Rubus spectabilis, Rubus ursinus, Fragaria, and Vaccinium] qw’alástab [cf. Proto-Salish qw’al, qw’ay ‘to scorch (burn to) ashes, black; roast, ripe(n)’: berry, gen.]

M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1985; Kinkade 1991; Kuipers 2002

(s-)tsáqwəm (berries, gen.); (s-)tsáqwm-az’ (bush, gen.); stsaqwəm-ʔúl ‘real/original saskatoons’ (main type); (s)pə́qpəq ‘white’ (cf. pə́q ‘white’) (low variety) (cf. ProtoSalish pəq ‘white’); (s)wəłkwaʔúʔsaʔ (~ (s)wałkwaʔúʔsaʔ) ‘red-berries’ (but usual term for ‘red’ is tsəqw-tsíqw) (red-berried variety); and three other named varieties

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

Twana Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton) Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River)

Nlaka’pamux

Secwepemc

Okanagan

(s-)tsáqwəm (berries, gen.); (s-)tsáqwm-az’ (bush, gen.)

Kuipers 2002 Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

stsáqwm ~ stséqwm (fruit, gen.); stsaqwm-éłp (bush, gen.); stseqwm-úy ‘real/original saskatoon’; OR y’h-úseʔ; OR sqwistm, sqwistm-éłp (regular, “tall” variety); spəqpáq, spəqpaq-éłp ‘white-white’ (“low” variety) (cf. Proto-Salish pəq ‘white’); and six other named varieties

Kuipers 2002; Steedman 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990

síyaʔ (berries, gen.; also grapes); siʔíłp (bush, gen.); słaq (“regular saskatoons”) (berries, southern group); słqiłp (bush of słaq berries for southern group, saskatoon bush, gen. for northern); siyíya (dry rocky habitat variety) (berries); siʔíłp (bush); and nine other named varieties; also spep’aʕts’álaqw (straight new suckers of saskatoon)

Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980

speqpeqʔúw’i, or spəqpəq (Western, Eastern, Northern dialects) (“now they just say speqpeq” – Cecilia deRose, pers. comm. to Marianne B. Ignace, 1993) (berries, regular variety); speqpeqełp (bush, regular variety) (cf. Proto-Salish pəq ‘white’ – Kuipers 2002); stsíqwem (‘red’) (W); stsíqwu (‘red’) (E) (a “red” variety)

G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen, forthcoming

Appendix 2 | 487

Table A2-5 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Snchítsu’umshtsn

słaq, słaq (see also under Vaccinium sp.)

Spokan

słáq (“valley serviceberry”); npekwpkwáxen (“lowbush mountain blueberry” – J.A. Ross 2011, possibly a saskatoon variety); sy’éy’eʔ (“mountain serviceberry”)

G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003

Selish (formerly Flathead)

Nez Perce

Sahaptin Ktunaxa

słáq (berries); słqé (bush); siy’éy’eʔ ‘to become discouraged’ (translation uncertain) (variety with redder fruit)

Hart 1974, 1976; J.A. Ross 2011 Hart 1974, 1976

kayapásx (A. alnifolia); kikéye (A. utahensis)

A.G. Marshall 1977

sq’umu (berries) (Hart: skw’úmuʔ); sq’umuʔwuʔk; OR ʔak’-wuʔk ‘arrow bush/wood’; syaʔya (variety, growing on high cliffs, rocky ground, with more, larger seeds, smaller fruits that fall off quickly) (see Okanagan siyíya)

Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; Ktunaxa/ Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. 1999

chchaa (berries); kkáasu (bush) (also Amelanchier spp.)

Hunn, Selam, and family 1990

Table A2-6 | Corylus cornuta Marsh. – beaked hazelnut (Betulaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Witsuwit’en

tsalits kɛkwə’n

Dakelh (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake)

dake (nut); dakechən (bush)

Hargus 2007; Johnson Gottesfeld 1993

Nisga’a

Gitxsan

488 | Appendix 2

ts’ak’a tyaýtkw ‘dish of thunder’; OR ts’ak’a ts’inhlik ‘dish of squirrel’ sgan-ts’ek’ (Western dialect), sgan-ts’ak’ (Eastern dialect) ‘hazel nut plant’; sgantsak’ [Note: cf. Stl’atl’imx: seeds: s-ts’ə́k’ (general for any conifer seed, but specific to whitebark pine, Pinus albicaulis); see also Nlaka’pamux Rosa gymnocarpa fruit; cf. Proto-Salish s-ts’ik’, s-ts’ik (fir or pine cone, nut, acorn); Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’, Musqueam) st’thitsm and Squamish ts’ichn both for hazelnut]

Poser 2008a

Burton 2012 Johnson 1997; Kuipers 2002

Table A2-6 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language)

wineeym desx ‘food, of the squirrel’ (nuts, general)

Turner and Thompson 2006

“hul-li-a-ko-bupt” (Swan – transcription uncertain), haalaʔaqabap (cf. haalaʔayak ‘a type of gambling game’) [may be wrong i.d.; from Swan only]

Gill 1983; Gunther 1973; Swan 1869

q’əp’axw ‘(hazel)nut’ [cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Kuipers 2002; Tim­ mers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972

Makah

Comox

Sechelt

Squamish

Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’)

Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō)

Straits Salish

Lummi

q’əpxwayʔ ‘unidentified tree with strong wood’ [cf. q’əpxwim ‘make a crunching noise’; also q’əpxw, q’əp’xw, q’əpkw, q’əp’kw’ ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Kuipers 2002

q’p’axw (also nut, gen.) [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]; OR ts’íchn (Dominic Charlie only; prob borr. fr. Halkomelem) [cf. Proto-Salish s-ts’ik’, s-ts’ik (fir or pine cone, nut, acorn)]

Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969, 2002

st’thítsəm (Quw’utsun’, Musqueam), st’thitsm; OR p’qw’axw (innovator) [cf. ProtoSalish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1971

qwp’áxw, qopə́xw (nuts); qwp’axw-íłch (bush) (Saanich) [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Kuipers 2002; Suttles 1951b; Turner and Hebda 2012

st’thíitsəm (hazelnut, any nut – walnut, peanut, poss. acorn); st’thíitsəməłp (hazelnut bush) [cf. Proto-Salish s-ts’ik’, s-ts’ik (fir or pine cone, nut, acorn); st’thíkwəm (tiny slivers on hazelnut husks – cf. Tsísqem, a Stó:lō village near the Maccallum archaeological site, meaning “fine slivers of Douglas-fir [bark]” or “hazelnut [pod]”)]

k’op’uxełch (bush) (Gunther) [cf. ProtoSalish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Galloway 1982; Kuipers 2002; Lepofsky and Lenert 2005, 16

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Appendix 2 | 489

Table A2-6 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Nooksack

q’p’uxw [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Kuipers 2002

Lushootseed (Northern) Lushootseed (Southern) Twana, Skokomish Lower Cowlitz Upper Chehalis

Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton)

Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River) Nlaka’pamux

Secwepemc

490 | Appendix 2

q’áp’uxw, q’p’úxw (hazelnut, nuts in gen.); q’p’úxw-əts (bush, tree) [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973

q’áp’uxw (nuts); q’áp’uxway (bush) [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Kuipers 2002

qábux (nuts), qabúxwats (bush) (Gunther) [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel) nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

kaw’ús (pl. káw’usmx); ká-póhw, prob. [k’ap’úxw] (nut); q’aʔp’úuxwan’ł (approx) [prob. k’ap’úxwn’ł] (bush)

k’ap’úxw (nuts), k’ap’úxn’ł (bush) [cf. ProtoSalish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

q’áp’xw; OR “sets.ɛm” (Ruby Creek – Newcombe) (nuts); q’áp’xw-az’ (bush) [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’] q’áp’xw (nuts); q’áp’xw-az’ (bush) [cf. ProtoSalish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

q’apúxw (also nuts, gen.); q’apuxw-éłp (bush) [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel) nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’] qéʔp’xw (Western, Eastern dialects), qéʔp’uxw (nuts) (today, some people apply this to any kind of nut, but others say it’s only for hazelnut); qeʔp’uxwełp (bush) [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002 Kinkade 1991; M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1985 Kuipers 2002; Newcombe 1897-1916 (1903); Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

Kuipers 2002; Steedman 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990

Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming

Table A2-6 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Okanagan

q’íp’xwaʔ (hazelnut, nuts in gen.); (s)q’ep’xwíłp (bush; also Comandra umbellata) [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel) nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Kuipers 2002; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980

Snchítsu’umshtsn Spokan

q’ip’xwé, q’ip’xweʔ [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’ ]

q’ép’xweʔ (nut); q’p’xwʔálqw (bush)

Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003

Selish (formerly Flathead)

q’ép’xweʔ (hazelnut) [cf. Selish (Kalispel): q’eep’éxw ‘sound of something hard that cracks when you unexpectedly bite on it, e.g. stone in bread’ [cf. Proto-Salish q’ap’xw, q’ap’xw ‘(hazel)nut’; cf. also q’əpxw and variants ‘to crunch (when chewed)’]

Hart 1974, 1976; Kuipers 2002

kkuush (nuts); kkúush-aash (bush)

Hunn, Selam, and family 1990

Hart 1974, 1976; Kuipers 2002; J.A. Ross 2011

Upper Cowlitz

k’kósas (whole bush) (Gunther)

Gunther 1973

Ktunaxa

ʔimpum (both bush and nut)

Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; Ktunaxa/ Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. 1999

Sahaptin

Table A2-7 | Heracleum maximum Bartram – common cow-parsnip (Apiaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Yupik (Chugach)

ugyuun (Prince William Sound; Port Graham/English Bay dialects)

Russell 1991a; Wennekens 1985

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

Turner 2004a łk’iid (Massett dialect), łk’íid (Alaska dialect) (shoots, whole plant); łk’iid łqaamee (M); OR łk’íid łqáamaay (A) (cf. łqaa.m ‘bull kelp’ – M)] (stalks)

Tlingit

Haida (Skidegate)

yaanaʔeet; [kúuxw (dried stem)], yaanaʔeit

hlk’iid (łk’iid) (shoots, whole plant); tsiji kw’aaluu (qw’aaluu) (stalks)

Emmons 1991; Thornton et al. 2004

Turner 2004a

Appendix 2 | 491

Table A2-7 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Ahtna

guus (Central, Lower dialects); t’aan’ delq’esi Smelcer et al. 2011 (Mentasta dialect); celery root: guus tsaazeʔ

Dena’ina (Tanaina) Tahltan

gis (all dialects); OR buchgi (borr. fr. Russian) (Outer Inlet dialect) etsok’, ets’ok, etsokh

Slavey

ts’ehgø

Sekani

sûdle, soonleh

Kaska

atsok

Witsuwit’en

qus

Dakelh (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake)

gus, gwas (plant); gəsrih (cow-parsnip roots); (cf. Gusdadaʔ, man’s given name; lit. ‘cow-parsnip sickness’)

Dakelh (Saik’uz)

gus

Reference(s)

Russell 1991b; Russell Kari 1987

Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997

Kaska Tribal Council 1997 (Mt Slavey dialect); Lamont 1977

Lena Izony McCook, pers. comm. to Aliana Parker, 2013; A. Davis and Tsay Tay Forestry Limited 2008 Kaska Tribal Council 1997 (Liard dialect)

Hargus 2007; Johnson Gottesfeld 1993 Poser 2008a

Poser 2008b

Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

dugus, dagus

Nisga’a

haḿook, hamooq’, ham’ooq

Burton 2012

Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language)

layoon (“mature plant”; “male” plant – budstalks); pʔiins, p’iins (leaf petioles)

Turner and Thompson 2006

layóon (stem, budstalks); p’iins (leaf petioles)

Compton 1993b

gwúg’wdṇ (buds, budstalks); gísdem, gísdṃ “wild rhubarb, cow-parsnip”

Rath 1981; Nancy J. Turner, notes with Evelyn Windsor and Mary Hunt, 1996

Tsilhqot’in Gitxsan

Kitasoo Haisla

Heiltsuk

492 | Appendix 2

sul, sul(-chen)

gatł’oqwots, huukw (plant); haʔmooq ‘implement for sucking’ (budstalks); OR p’iinst, biins (leaf petioles)

qaqukw’dṇ (stems); gìsdṃ (leaf petioles)

Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Kay 1993 Turner 2004b Johnson 1997

Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Table A2-7 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Oowekyala

gwùqw’dṇ (stems, budstalks); gìsdṃ, gìsdṇ (leaf petioles)

Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language)

k’umaq’q’a (larger, hollow stalks; budstalks); gidzəq (hairy cow-parsnips; not edible); k’uk’aq’i (flower budstalks, hollow); gístem (leaf petioles)

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1973; U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton 1998

Nuu-chah-nulth

hum’aaq (flower budstalks); qiłtsuup (young leaf petioles); qiłtsmapt (plant) (all Hesquiaht)

Turner and Efrat 1982

huubaaq (flower budstalk, prob.); kiistap (leaf petioles, prob.)

Gill 1983; Gunther 1973

Ditidaht Makah

huubaaq (flower budstalk); qistuup (leaf petioles); qistuupapt (plant)

Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983

Quileute

tł’óopit

Nuxalk

xwiq’ (also garden rhubarb, Rheum)

Comox

xákwu

Sechelt

yálup (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish yalup ‘cow-parsnip, Indian rhubarb’)

Squamish

yúlaʔ (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish yalup ‘cow-parsnip, Indian rhubarb’)

Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’)

yaalaʔ (edible stems); saaqw’ (prob. leaf petioles)

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1971

yáləʔ (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish yalup ‘cowparsnip, Indian rhubarb’); saʔəqw (both Saanich dialect)

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Hebda 2012

waká ‘kills the pain’

Gunther 1973

Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō)

Straits Salish Klallam Quinault

yáalə́, yálə, Chilliwack yale, yalə, yáale (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish yalup ‘cow-parsnip, Indian rhubarb’); sóqw’ (cow-parsnip sprout, esp. the edible inside part)

sxwməkwusngən (also there is a plant called “wild celery”: səmkwúsəng – apparently similar but not the same)

J.V. Powell and Woodruff 1973

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1973, 1974

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973–78; Kuipers 2002

Kuipers 2002; Timmers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972 Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969, 2002

Galloway 1982; Kuipers 2002

Gunther 1973; L.C. Thompson and Thompson [1975–80]

Appendix 2 | 493

Table A2-7 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Lushootseed

yúlaʔ (“wild celery”; prob. budstalks) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish yalup ‘cow-parsnip, Indian rhubarb’); waʔqa (“leaves of cowparsnip, regarded as female”; prob. edible leafstalks); OR skw’əbshəd

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Lower Cowlitz Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton) Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River)

Nlaka’pamux

Secwepemc

Okanagan Snchítsu’umshtsn

yálp; OR qw’éłaplm’x (“wild celery, celery”) (cf. qw’ił-, possibly referring to ‘wild celery’) hákwaʔ (plant)

Gunther 1973; Kinkade 2004; Kuipers 2002

hákwaʔ (plant); (n-)qayxw-xən ‘man-foot’ (flower budstalks); (n)múłats-xən, smúłatsxən ‘woman-foot’ (Fraser River dialect) (leaf petioles); sulí [Heracleum root (Edith O’Donaghey, pers. comm., 1984); also Angelica genuflexa]

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

xwtéłp (Western, Eastern dialects) (plant) (cf. Proto-Interior-Salish xwt-ałp ‘cowparsnip’); sqelemxwúpyeʔ, sqelemxwúxwpyeʔ (“male” plant – flower budstalk); nuxwenxwúpyeʔ, nuxwenxwúxwpyeʔ (“female” plant – leaf petioles)

Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming

qhoqhłp, xwóxwełp (cf. Proto-Interior-Salish xwt-ałp ‘cow-parsnip’)

Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

hékwuʔ (sometimes hakwuʔ-éłp); sqayqixwKuipers 2002; úpeʔ ‘man-root’ (budstalks); nnəxwnoxw-úpeʔ Steedman 1930; ‘woman-root’ (young leaf petioles) Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990

xwuxwtíłp (also rhubarb, Rheum sp.) (cf. Kuipers 2002; Turner, xwtam ‘to cut up’ plural) (cf. Proto-Interior- Bouchard, and Salish xwt-ałp ‘cow-parsnip’) Kennedy 1980

Spokan

xwxwtéłp (cf. Proto-Interior-Salish xwt-ałp ‘cow-parsnip’)

Selish (formerly Flathead)

xwté ‘to cut’ (derivation uncertain) (also Hart 1974, 1976; Apium graveolens, celery), Kalispel xwtełp (cf. Kuipers 2002 Proto-Interior-Salish xwt-ałp ‘cow-parsnip’)

Columbian

494 | Appendix 2

Hart 1974, 1976; Kuipers 2002; J.A. Ross 2011

M. Dale Kinkade, pers. xwuxwtáłp (cf. Proto-Interior-Salish xwt-ałp ‘cow-parsnip’) (Note: cognates in all comm., 2002 Interior Salish languages except Stl’atl’imx and Nlaka’pamux)

Table A2-7 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Sahaptin

txu [possibly borrowed]

Ktunaxa

wumʔał, wúmał

Hunn, Selam, and family 1990

Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; Ktunaxa/ Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. 1999

Table A2-8 | Oplopanax horridus (Sm.) Miq. – devil’s-club (Araliaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Yupik (Chugach)

Tlingit

tsukilzanarpak (Prince William Sound, Port Graham/English Bay dialects)

s’áxt’; OR áchta

Russell 1991a; Wennekens 1985

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

ts’iiłanjaaw (Massett dialect), ts’íiłanjaaw (Alaska dialect)

Turner 2004a

Haida (Skidegate) Ahtna

Dena’ina (Tanaina) Tahltan

ts’iihlnjaaw (ts’iiłlnjaaw), ts’iihlinjaaw (ts’iiłinjaaw) (cf. ts’iihl ‘gambling sticks’)

Turner 2004a

xeshkeghkaʔa (Outer Inlet, Upper Inlet dialects) ‘prickle-big-big’; heskhkegh (Inland, Iliamna dialects) ‘prickle-big’

Russell 1991b; Russell Kari 1987

xos cogh (Lower dialect)

khos choo, xwus choo; khuschoo (Robert Quock – cited in Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997)

Sekani

whush cho ‘big thorn’

Witsuwit’en

whis tso

Dakelh (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake)

hudai; OR hułghəł

Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

whəscho ‘prickle big’, whəscho t’an

Gitxsan

huʔums, wəʔuumst, haʔums (Eastern dialect), waʔumst (Western dialect)

Dakelh (Saik’uz)

Nisga’a

Emmons 1991; Krause 1956

huł ghəł

waʔums

Smelcer et al. 2011

Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997 A. Davis and Tsay Tay Forestry Limited 2008

Hargus 2007; John­ son Gottesfeld 1993 Poser 2008a

Poser 2008b

Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Kay 1993 Burton 2012

Johnson 1997

Appendix 2 | 495

Table A2-8 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language)

wooms

Kitasoo

wóoʔms, wóoʔmms; sxánwóoʔms (plant)

Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority 2001, 77; Turner and Thompson 2006

Heiltsuk

wíq’ás

Oowekyala

wìq’as

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language)

ʔixwmiy

Nuu-chah-nulth

n’aap’aałmapt (Hesquiaht dialect)

Turner and Efrat 1982

Ditidaht

ʕayxwqwapt ‘codfish lure plant’ (cf. ʕaʕayxws ‘propeller-like codfishing lure’); OR q’uuquy’aatskapt ‘codfish lure plant’ (cf. q’uuquy’a ‘propeller like lure for codfish’)

Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983

Haisla

Makah

hʔuìq’as (berries hʔuiqtuài) a kind of “bear’s berries”

haaʔałbap ‘fishing lure plant’ (cf. haaʔał ‘bass fishing’)

Compton 1993b

Compton 1993b

Rath 1981; Nancy J. Turner, notes with Evelyn Windsor and Mary Hunt, 1996

Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 2001; Turner and Bell 1973

Gill 1983; Gunther 1973

Sechelt

tsk’ałkw (cf. stsk’ ‘fir bark slivers’); OR sk’alk (plant); st’ls tin an ‘highbush cranberries of the grizzly bear’ (berries) ch’íʔt’ay (cf. Local Coast Salish elements, with Squamish to Lushootseed: k’atł ‘devil’s-club’)

ch’ʔát’ay (leaves ch’ʔat’ayíya); OR ch’áʔat’ay (cf. Local Coast Salish elements, with Squamish to Lushootseed: k’atł ‘devil’s-club’)

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973-78; Kuipers 2002

Squamish

ch’átiyay’ (cf. Local Coast Salish elements, with Squamish to Lushootseed: k’atł ‘devil’s-club’)

Bouchard and Tur­ ner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969, 2002

Nuxalk Comox

Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’)

496 | Appendix 2

qwáʔpəłp

Turner 1973

Bouchard 1978; Kuipers 2002; Timmers 1977; Turner, Tim­mers, and Bouchard 1972

Turner and Bell 1971

Table A2-8 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō)

qwáapəłp

Galloway 1982

Straits Salish

qwáʔp-əłch (Saanich dialect)

Lummi

qwún’numpł

Kuipers 2002; Tur­ ner and Hebda 2012

Lushootseed (Northern)

sxədíʔ-ats (xadíaʔts, xadíaʔts – Gunther); OR chicháchilúʔ (Snuqualmie – Gunther)

Klallam

Upper Chehalis Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton)

Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River)

Nlaka’pamux

Secwepemc

Okanagan Spokan Upper Cowlitz

Sahaptin

Gunther 1973

puqłch

Gunther 1973

pəsʔáynł (cf. pə́saʔ ‘monster, mean person, mean thing, evil spirit, gnat, insect pest, bad thing, dangerous’)

Kinkade 1991; M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1985

k’átł-az’ (plant) (cf. Local Coast Salish elements, with Squamish to Lushootseed: k’atł ‘devil’s-club’); məx-máx (spines, a general term) (cf. Proto-Interior-Salish max ‘sliver’)

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

k’átł-az’ (plant) (cf. Local Coast Salish elements, with Squamish to Lushootseed: k’atł ‘devil’s-club’); məx-máx (spines, a general term) (cf. Proto-Interior-Salish max ‘sliver’)

k’étyeʔ (cf. Local Coast Salish elements, with Squamish to Lushootseed: k’atł ‘devil’s-club’)

(s)k’etseʔełp (Western dialect), (s)k’etsəʔéłp (Eastern dialect) (cf. Local Coast Salish elements, with Squamish to Lushootseed: k’atł ‘devil’s-club’); OR xwuxwéləqw (E) ‘smell-tree/wood’ (Aimee August, pers. comm. to R. Bouchard and Dorothy I.D. Kennedy, [1972] – not the “real name”)

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

Kuipers 2002; Steed­ man 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990 Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming

xaxaʕáy’łp (also Ribes lacustre); OR xwuxwuʕwáy’łp

Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980

sqaipqáipas

Gunther 1973

xoxoʔíłp; OR xwuxwugwáy’łp

shqapqápnu-waaash ‘rash bush’

Hart 1974, 1976; J.A. Ross 2011 Hunn, Selam, and family 1990

Appendix 2 | 497

Table A2-8 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Ktunaxa

nałiytsaxawuʔk

Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. 1999

Table A2-9 | Ribes divaricatum Douglas – coastal black gooseberry; R. lobbii A. Gray – gummy gooseberry; R. inerme Rydb. – whitestem gooseberry; and R. oxyacanthoides L. ssp. irriguum (Douglas) Sinnott – northern gooseberry (Grossulariaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Tahltan

dahghoodze (R. oxyacanthoides)

Chipewyan

daghósjíé (R. oxyacanthoides)

Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997

Kaska

Marles 1984

Witsuwit’en

dahhoshéʔ, dzídze ghose, háyo (dzídzé’) (Ribes spp.)

ts’ǝndewǝzgi (R. oxyacanthoides)

Kaska Tribal Council 1997 (Liard dialect)

Dakelh (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake)

ʔət’angwəz (possibly related to ʔət’ankal ‘raspberry’) (R. oxyacanthoides); dangwəz (possibly related to dang ‘summer’), ʔət’angwəz “black gooseberry”

Poser 2008a

Dakelh (Saik’uz) Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

Tsilhqot’in

Nisga’a Gitxsan Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language)

498 | Appendix 2

ʔindawəz (R. oxyacanthoides)

ʔindawəs, ʔindawəz (R. oxyacanthoides) tenexwez ‘it’s got prickles on it’ (eaten in large quantities) (R. oxyacanthoides)

Hargus 2007; Johnson Gottesfeld 1993

Poser 2008b

Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Kay 1993

Turner 2004b

dilus (berries – apparently gooseberry, gen.); sq’andilus (bush) (R. divaricatum)

Burton 2012

dales, diles (gooseberries)

Turner and Thompson 2006

dilawasa, dilusaʔa, dilusa (fruit); sgandilusaʔa (plant) (R. divaricatum, R. oxyacanthoides, and possibly R. lacustre)

Johnson 1997; H.I. Smith 1997

Table A2-9 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Haisla

Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Heiltsuk

tł’atł’anuł (berries); tł’atł’anul’as (bush) (R. divaricatum) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’; Proto-Salish t’am-; extension -xw is Coast-Salish)

témxwiy’álí (berries); témxwm’ás (bush) (R. divaricatum) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’; Proto-Salish t’am-; extension -xw is Coast-Salish)

Oowekyala

tṃxwy’àli, tṃswm’ali (berries); tṃxwm’as (bush) (R. divaricatum) (cf. Proto-CoastSalish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’; Proto-Salish t’am-; extension -xw is Coast-Salish)

Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language) Nuu-chah-nulth Ditidaht

Makah Nuxalk Comox

Kuipers 2002; Rath 1981; Nancy J. Turner, notes with Evelyn Windsor and Mary Hunt, 1996

t’émxwel’i (berries); t’émxwmes (bush) (R. divaricatum, R. lobbii) (cf. Proto-CoastSalish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’; Proto-Salish t’am-; extension -xw is Coast-Salish)

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1973; U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton 1998

miłk’iw’a (berries); miłk’iqmapt (bush) (R. divaricatum) (Hesquiaht)

Turner and Efrat 1982

shachkaapix ‘sharp round things’ (goose­ berry, gen.) (berries); shachkaabap (bush)

Gill 1983; Gunther 1973

t’ám’exw (berries); t’ám’exway (bush) (Ribes divaricatum) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’; Proto-Salish t’am‘in name of gooseberry’; extension -xw is Coast-Salish)

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973–78; Kuipers 2002

tłabuuxway (berries); tłabuuxwayapt (gooseberry plant) (both R. divaricatum and cultivated gooseberries) (apparently borrowed; cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’; Proto-Salish t’am-; extension -xw is Coast-Salish)

Kuipers 2002; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983

atł’anuł (berries); atł’tł’anu-łp (bush) (R. divaricatum)

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1973

Sechelt

st’amxw (berries); t’ámxway (bush) (R. divaricatum) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’)

Squamish

t’əm’xw (berries); t’əm’xwáy’ (bush) (R. divaricatum) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’)

Kuipers 2002; Tim­ mers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972

Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969, 2002

Appendix 2 | 499

Table A2-9 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’)

t’ám’xw, t’émʔxw, t’ém’xw (cf. Proto-CoastSalish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’) (R. divaricatum, R. lobbii)

Turner and Bell 1971; Kuipers 2002

Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō) Straits Salish

Klallam

t’éemxw, t’eməxw (Chilliwack) (berries); t’áamxwełp (bush) (R. divaricatum, poss. also R. lobbii) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘ gooseberry’)

qémkw’ (berries – Ribes divaricatum, R. lobbii); qəmkw’-íłch (bush) (R. divaricatum, R. lobbii); qəməʔíłch (R. lobbii) (cf. ProtoCoast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’) (Saanich dialect) t’um’uxw (berries), tə́m’əq; t’amuxwiłch; cf. also “mountain gooseberry (ripe in Aug.)”: tuqwum’ (“squeeze it; something from inside pops out and it’s like jelly”) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’)

Galloway 1982; Kuipers 2002 Kuipers 2002; Turner and Hebda 2012

Fleisher 1980; Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002; L.C. Thompson and Thompson [1975–80]

Quinault

kłeʔémwus ‘tied on your nose’

Gunther 1973

Twana

t’əbʔə́x (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’)

Kuipers 2002

t’amə́xw (berries); t’amə́xwn’ł (bush) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’)

Kuipers 2002

Lushootseed (Northern)

Lower Cowlitz Upper Chehalis Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton)

Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River)

500 | Appendix 2

ts’áq’ab, ts’áqad, sts’əq’áb, ts’əq’áb, sts’əqáb-ek; OR t’əbxw (cf. Proto-CoastSalish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’) (Ribes divaricatum, Ribes spp.); tsákab(h)ats (Snohomish); t’úbxw (berries), t’úbxwats (bush) (Swinomish) (last three Gunther)

t’amə́xw (berry) (cf. Proto-Coast-Salish t’aməxw ‘gooseberry’); tmuxwas (bush)

(s-)xniz’ (berries); xníz’-az’ (rarely s-xníz’-az’) (bush) [poss. borr. fr. Tsilhqot’in] (R. divaricatum, R. irriguum, possibly R. inerme; also domesticated gooseberries)

(s-)xniz’ (berries); xníz’-az’ (rarely s-xníz’-az’) (bush) [poss. borr. fr. Tsilhqot’in] (R. divaricatum, R. irriguum, possibly R. inerme; also domesticated gooseberries)

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987 Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

Table A2-9 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Nlaka’pamux

sxets’ə́n’ (berries); sxets’n’-éłp (bush) (R. divaricatum, R. irriguum)

Secwepemc

stxwelxúxwel’ (Western, Eastern dialects) (cf. xwel’ ‘to smell’) (berries); xuxweléʔłp, txwelxwleʔłp; OR xixwuxwut (W) (bush) (wild or domesticated gooseberry)

Kuipers 2002; Steedman 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990

Okanagan

nt’ít’meleps ‘grabbing the neck’ (cf. t’imm ‘grabbing with the fingers’; -lps ‘neck’), nt’it’mlps (cf. Proto-Salish t’am- ‘in name of gooseberry’) (berries); nt’et’mlpsíłml’x (R. irriguum) (wild gooseberry bush); xsałq ‘good fruit’ (berries); xsiłml’x ‘good bush’ (bush) (both R. irriguum)

Kuipers 2002; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980

nt’ét’m’l’ps ‘little stemmed berry’ (‘mountain gooseberry’ – R. irriguum) (cf. Proto-Salish t’am- ‘in name of gooseberry’)

Kuipers 2002; Hart 1974, 1976; J.A. Ross 2011

pílus (Ribes spp. – “gooseberry”)

A.G. Marshall 1977

Snchítsu’umshtsn

Spokan Selish (formerly Flathead)

Nez Perce Ktunaxa

hnt’it’mel’ps, nt’it’em’-ełps (possibly pertaining to throat and/or mane) (Ribes sp.) (cf. Proto-Salish t’am- ‘in name of gooseberry’)

nt’é ‘to beach, to get to the land from the water’ (“gooseberries” – Ribes sp.); ntètemélps “currants” [cf. Selish: stəm’tú (apparently unanalyzable) (“currants” – Ribes sp.), and cf. Proto-Salish t’am- ‘in name of gooseberry’]

kisyit’in (fruit) (R. irriguum, R. oxyacanthoides), kishyít’in (Hart – Ribes sp.)

G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming

Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003

Kuipers 2002; Hart 1974, 1976

Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; Ktunaxa/ Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. 1999

Appendix 2 | 501

Table A2-10 | Vaccinium membranaceum Douglas ex Torr. – black mountain huckleberry, or thinleaf huckleberry (Ericaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Tlingit

ts’éekáxkw’ “mountain blueberry” (identity not positive)

Emmons 1991; Krause 1956

Kaska

etsíh choʔ

Sekani

myeʔ cho

Kaska Tribal Council 1997 (Liard dialect)

Witsuwit’en

yəntəmiʔ (see also V. caespitosum); OR dəgi (Hargus – “black huckleberry”)

Tahltan

Dakelh (Stuart/ Trembleur Lake)

Dakelh (Saik’uz)

Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

Tsilhqot’in Nisga’a

Gitxsan Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language) Kitasoo

502 | Appendix 2

Turner, Saxon, and etsis tse dle, etsih tse dle, etsistsedle (Robert Thompson 1997 Quock – cited in Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997) (small blueberry); etsihcho, etsischoo, etsis cho (a type of blueberry)

Lena Izony McCook, pers. comm. to Aliana Parker, 2013; A. Davis and Tsay Tay Forestry Limited 2008 Hargus 2007; Johnson Gottesfeld 1993

dəje (berries), dəjechən (bush); OR yəntəmaiʔ Poser 2008a (i.e., possibly as V. myrtilloides, but called ‘lowbush blueberry’ or elsewhere ‘ground berry’ (berries); yəntəmaiʔchən (bush) (see also V. caespitosum) tsəłcho (“huckleberry”) Poser 2008b

ʔiłtsəl (berries); ʔiłtsəl chən (bush) (same as V. ovalifolium); OR mai ‘berry’ (borr. fr. Ts’msyen or Gitxsan)

Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Kay 1993

sim maay’ ‘real berry’ (see also V. parvifol­ ium); OR maay’im lax-sgan’ist ‘berry of the mountain’ (black, sweet berries from mountains; prob. this species); OR miigaanii, miigaaniy’ (“black huckleberry”; more probably V. alaskaense); OR possibly huksaʔalt

Burton 2012

nelghes (the ne- element may pertain to nen ‘ground’) (see also V. caespitosum)

Turner 2004b

‘mii yał; ‘miyeł (Western dialect), ‘miyał (Eastern dialect); OR simmaaʔy; bushes with black fruit: gadimis miháał, mihał (berries) (see also V. caespitosum)

Johnson 1997; H.I. Smith 1997

t’úʔutsgṃ m’á’i, t’úʔuʔtsgṃ m’á’i ‘black berry’

Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority 2001; Turner and Thompson 2006 Compton 1993b

Table A2-10 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Haisla

Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Heiltsuk

sikwsegwis (“mountain blueberry”); siksəgwits’as, sksəgwits’as (plant) (sykw- ‘blueberry’)

sixsgwís (“mountain blueberry” – with big, shiny berries; probably this sp.) (see also V. caespitosum, V. alaskaense, V. ovalifolium)

Oowekyala

sìkwsgwis

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language)

sələ́m (see also V. ovalifolium); OR xal’os (possibly V. caespitosum or other species); also: “tsEltsEle” “scarlet berries (Mountain)” (Newcombe – cf. Nlaka’pamux name)

Compton 1993b; Kuipers 2002

Nuxalk

sqaluts ‘berries, gen.’ (berries); sqaaxlutsłp (bush, without berries on it) (cf. sqala V. parvifolium)

Rath 1981; Nancy J. Turner, notes with Evelyn Windsor and Mary Hunt, 1996

Kuipers 2002; Newcombe 1897–1916; Turner and Bell 1973; U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton 1998 Kuipers 2002; Turner 1973

Comox

ʔúsaʔ “blueberry species”

Sechelt

hámałnach (berries and plant: dark, sweet berries, large, mountain growing) [Note: V. alaskaense: ʔúsa (berries); úsay (bush) “valley blueberry”; grows with V. ovalifolium at Lynn Valley; larger berries, not as sweet]

Kuipers 2002; Timmers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972

kwxwáaməls (berries); OR kwxwáamálsəłp ‘rapping or knocking berries’ (because of the way they are sometimes picked by knocking the branches)

Galloway 1982; Kuipers 2002

Squamish Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō) Lushootseed Lower Cowlitz Upper Chehalis

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973-78; Kuipers 2002

úsaʔ (berries); úsaʔay (bush) “large blueberry” [cf. Proto-Salish ʔus(-a) ‘egg, berry’; cf. V. ovalifolium, V. membranaceum]

Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969, 2002

sts’əb-áyʔus; OR swədáʔx (blue huckleberry, mountain huckleberry, blueberry) (cf. Proto-Salish wənaʔx ‘berry sp.’) wənáy’x (berries); wənáy’xan’ł (bush) (“Yakima huckleberry”)

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

wanaix (“huckleberry”) (cf. Proto-Salish wənaʔx ‘berry sp.’) (see V. membranaceum); OR st’ə́xwlm’

Gunther 1973; Kinkade 2004; Kuipers 2002

M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1985; Kinkade 1991; Kuipers 2002

Appendix 2 | 503

Table A2-10 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Twana

wədʔax (cf. Proto-Salish wənaʔx ‘berry sp.’) (see V. membranaceum)

M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 2002; Elmendorf 1960; Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton)

məxáz’ (berries – some say these are slightly different kinds); məxáz’-az’ (bush)

Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River)

ʔúsaʔ ‘egg/berry/round object’ (berries – some say these are slightly different kinds); ʔúsʔ-az’ (bush)

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

Nlaka’pamux

ts’əlts’ále (berries); ts’əlts’ales-éłp (bush); “freak variety”: mxəts’wn’-éłp

Secwepemc

wenéx (Western dialect), wənéx, wnéx (Eastern dialect) (berries); wenaxełp (W), wunəxéłp (E) (bush) (cf. Proto-Salish wənaʔx ‘berry sp.’); OR sesép (see also V. caespitosum) (cf. Proto-Interior-Salish səp ‘to shake off berries from a bush’; səsəp ‘blueberry or huckleberry’) (see V. scoparium and other spp.)

Okanagan

Moses-Columbian Snchítsu’umshtsn Spokan Selish (formerly Flathead)

Nez Perce

504 | Appendix 2

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

Kuipers 2002; Steedman 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990 Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming

st’xałq ‘sweet fruit’; cf. t’axt ‘sweet’ (berries) (possibly related to ProtoInterior-Salish t’əx ‘sweet’); st’exłqíłmel’x (bush)

Kuipers 2002; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980

st’shastq, st’sha, st’əsh-ástq (‘NOM-sweetcrop’) (possibly related to Proto-InteriorSalish t’əx ‘sweet’) shtéshałq (berry); st’sháłq, st’eshłqwłp (bush); (possibly related to Proto-Interior-Salish t’əx ‘sweet’)

Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003

sw’ə́naʔx, sw’ə́n’aʔx “highbush blueberry” (cf. Proto-Salish wənaʔx ‘berry sp.’ – Kuipers)

Kuipers 2002

Hart 1974, 1976; Kuipers 2002; J.A. Ross 2011

Hart 1974, 1976; st’shá (cf. t’sh ‘sweet’) (fruit); st’əshłqéłp ‘sweet plant’ (orig. i.d. V. globulare) (possibly Kuipers 2002 related to Proto-Interior-Salish t’əx ‘sweet’ – Kuipers); Kalispel: st’əxhá(łq) (also possibly related to Proto-Interior-Salish t’əx ‘sweet’)

tsemíitk (orig. i.d. V. globulare)

Table A2-10 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Upper Cowlitz

wənay’x ‘huckleberry’ (cf. Proto-Salish wənaʔx ‘berry sp.’)

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Sahaptin

wíwnu (also V. alaskaense)

Ktunaxa

łəwiyał (fruit and plant) (orig. i.d. V. globulare Rydb.)

Hunn, Selam, and family 1990

Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; Ktunaxa/ Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. 1999

Notes: Differences in writing system between this appendix and the Ts’msyen Language Authority’s spelling are as follows: underlined a is written here as a schwa [ə]; ’ is written here as a full glottal stop [ʔ] when between two vowels; k is written here as q; and underlined m is written here as ṃ (with a dot underneath). For Skidegate Haida, the terms follow the requirements of the Skidegate Haida Language Authority. Sources: Specific references are cited in the tables. Botanical species and nomenclature generally follow that in Klinkenberg (2013). General sources include Gunther (1973) for western Washington groups, Kuipers (2002) for Proto-Salish, Newcombe (1897-1916) for various terms, Suttles and Elmendorf (1963) for Salish prehistory, Turner (1987, 1988a, 1988b) for general categories, Turner (2003a) for seaweed (Pyropia [Porphyra]), and Turner and Burton (2010) for soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis). Compiled from a survey of the following languages and major dialects (asterisks indicate languages outside of the study area, but in some cases plant names are included for comparative purposes): Ahtna (Smelcer, Kari, and Buck 2011) Chehalis (Lower) (M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 2002; Gunther 1973) Chehalis (Upper) (M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1985; Kinkade 1991) Chipewyan* (Marles 1984) Columbian (Moses-Columbian) (M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1982 and 2002) Comox (including Sliammon, or Tla’amin) (Bouchard and Kennedy 1973–78; Kennedy and Bouchard 1983) Cowlitz (Lower) (M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1982; Kincade 2004) Cowlitz (Upper, or Taitnapam) (M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1982; Kinkade 2004) Dakelh (various dialects) (Dr William J. Poser, pers. comm., 2003; Carrier Linguistic Committee 2000) Dakelh (Saik’uz dialect) (Poser 2008b) Dakelh (Stuart/Trembleur Lake dialect) (Poser 2008a) Dakelh (Ulkatcho dialect) (Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Kay 1993; H.I. Smith 1920-24) Dena’ina (Tanaina)* (Russell 1991b; Russell Kari 1987) Ditidaht (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983) Gitxsan (Gitksan) (Bruce Rigsby, pers. comm., 2003; Hargus 2007; Johnson 1997; Johnson Gottesfeld 1994; ‘Ksan 1980; H.I. Smith 1997) Gwich’in* (Andre and Fehr 2000) Haida (Turner 1974, 2004a) Haisla (Hanaksiala) (Compton 1993b; A. Davis, Wilson, and Compton 1995) Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’, or Cowichan) (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 1999–2011; Gerdts et al. 1997; Turner and Bell 1971) Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō) (Galloway 1982, 2009; Suttles 1955)

Appendix 2 | 505

Heiltsuk (Heiltsuk College and Staff 1997; Rath 1981) Inuit (Inupiaq-Kotzebue)* (A. Jones 1983) Kaska (Kaska Tribal Council 1997 for Liard dialect) Kitasoo (Compton 1993b; J.A. Dunn 1978) Klallam (Clallam) (M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 2002; Fleisher 1980; L.C. Thompson and Thompson [1975–80]) Ktunaxa (Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council et al. 1999) Kwak’wala (Kwakwaka’wakw) (Hunt 1922; Turner and Bell 1973; U’mista Cultural Society, Pasco, and Compton 1998) Lushootseed (North and South dialects) (M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1982; Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Bates, Hess, and Hilbert 1994; Gunther 1973) Makah (Gill 1983; Gunther 1973) Nez Perce (A.G. Marshall 1977) Nisga’a (Nancy Mackin, pers. comm., 2011; Burton 2012; McNeary 1974, 1976; Nisgha [Nisga’a] School District 1986; Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a 1995) Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Nuu-chah-nulth (M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 2002; J. Powell 1991, 41-2; Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995; Turner and Efrat 1982) Nuxalk (Turner 1973, 1974) Okanagan (Okanagan-Colville) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980) Oowekyala (Compton 1993b) Quileute (J.V. Powell and Woodruff 1973) Sahaptin (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990) Sechelt (Bouchard and Kennedy 1977a; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972) Secwepemc (Shuswap) (Kuipers 1974, 1983; G. Palmer 1975a, 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming) Sekani (Lena Izony McCook, pers. comm. to Aliana Parker, 2013; A. Davis and Tsay Tay Forestry Limited 2008) Selish (formerly Flathead) (Hart 1974, 1976, 1979) Slavey (Slave) (Dene-Thah, Dene-Dhea)* (Kaska Tribal Council 1997 for Mountain Slavey dialect; Lamont 1977) Snchitsu’umshtsn (Coeur d’Alene) (G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003) Spokan (B.F. Carlson and Flett 1989; Hart 1974, 1976; J.A. Ross 2011) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh) (Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969) Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc (Pemberton and Fraser River dialects) (Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987) Straits Salish (Saanich dialect) (Wayne P. Suttles, pers. comm., 1982; Montler 1991; Suttles 1951a, 1951b; Turner and Bell 1971; Turner and Hebda 2012) Tahltan (Tałtan) (Iskut Elders 2005; Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997) Tlingit (Bruce Rigsby, pers. comm., 2003; Emmons 1991; Jacobs and Jacobs 1982; Krause 1956; Newton and Moss 1984, 18; Sheldon Jackson College 1976; Thornton 1999, 2008) Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith, pers. comm., 2008–09; L.R. Smith 2008a, 2008b; Supreme Court of British Columbia 2007 and Turner 2004b for Tsilhqot’in court testimony) Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax) (also spelled Tsimshian) (Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority 2001; Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority and Sm’algyax Committee of School District 52 2011; Turner and Thompson 2006) Twana (M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 2002; Elmendorf 1960; Gunther 1973) Witsuwit’en (Interior Skeena River) (Bruce Rigsby, pers. comm., 2003; Hargus 2007; Johnson 1994; Johnson Gottesfeld 1993) Yupik (Chugach, Alutiiq)* (Ager and Ager 1980; Griffin 2001 for Cup’it, Nunivak Island, Alaska; Russell 1991a; Wennekens 1985)

506 | appendix two

App e n d i x 3

Names of Two Introduced Plants (Turnip and Potato) in Indigenous Languages of Northwestern North America General Note For explanations and descriptions of the general database from which these appendices were drawn, see the note at the beginning of appendix 2. The full database is accessible at the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/ 1828/5091) and contains two parts: a list of over 250 indigenous species or basic plant taxa for which names were found in three or more Indigenous languages or major dialects in the study area; and a list of roughly 45 introduced cultivated or weedy plant species for which names were found in three or more languages or dialects. For an explanation of the writing system and a guide to the symbols used to denote plant names in the book and in these appendices, please see “Note on the Writing System Used in This Book” in the introductory section of this volume. Table A3-1 | Brassica rapa L. – garden turnip (Brassicaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Tlingit

anahoo, kadux’alʔaa, anahoo (rutabaga: Brassica naprabrassica); tł’aadéin aa “turnip”

Emmons 1991; Jacobs and Jacobs 1982; Krause 1956

arepga (Outer Inlet dialect), alunga (Upper Inlet dialect)

Russell 1991b; Russell Kari 1987

Haida (Skidegate)

Dena’ina (Tanaina)

yanahaw, yanaahuu (Chinook jargon)

Turner 2004a

Table A3-1 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Witsuwit’en

lesutsam

Dakelh/Carrier (Stuart/Trembleur Lake

lusoocham (borr. fr. French le choux de Siam “Siam cabbage”); yanalru (“squash,” “questionable entry”; may be “turnip”) ʔanulye, hanułyeh (cf. seeds ʔanulye)

Hargus 2007; John­son Gottesfeld 1993

Dakelh/Carrier (Saik’uz, Nadleh/ Stellako, Lheidli)

Poser 2008a

Poser 2008b

Tsilhqot’in

danapes (borr. fr. English “turnips”)

L.R. Smith 2008b; Turner 2004b

Nisga’a

inuu (Chinook jargon)

Burton 2012

Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language)

‘yaanəhuu (Chinook jargon)

Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority 2001; Turner and Thompson 2006

Gitxsan

k’inuu (Chinook jargon)

Kitasoo

y’áeenəhúu, y’anahú (Chinook jargon)

Heiltsuk

y’nahú (Chinook jargon)

Haisla

y’ànawu, y’anawù (Chinook jargon)

Johnson 1997

Compton 1993b

Compton 1993b

Rath 1981; Nancy J. Turner, notes, 1996

Oowekyala

y’ànahu

Nuu-chah-nulth

ququm’itsk’uk ‘resembling a skull’ (cf. qum’its ‘skull’); OR tanaps (borr. fr. English) (see also B. campestris) (both Hesquiaht dialect)

Turner and Efrat 1982

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1973, 1974

Comox

yanahu (Chinook jargon); OR tanáps (borr. fr. English) ʔílawiʔ

Sechelt

ʔalawíʔ

Squamish

sxwəlawúʔ

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language)

Ditidaht Nuxalk

508 | Appendix 3

panaps (borr. fr. English “turnips”)

ʔilawuʔ

Compton 1993b

Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 1994; Turner and Bell 1973

Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973–78; Kuipers 2002 Kuipers 2002; Timmers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972

Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969

Table A3-1 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Halkomelem (Upriver, or Stó:lō)

shxw’áləwù (French chou-navet ‘swedish turnip’ – poss. through Chinook Jargon)

Galloway 1982

Lushootseed

didəbuʔ

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973

Straits Salish

shxwil’éwəʔ (Saanich dialect)

Lower Cowlitz

ninəmú, niminú (name uncertain)

Upper Chehalis

ninamú (“rutabaga”)

Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton, Fraser River)

tanaps (borr. fr. English “turnips”) (Pemberton, Fraser River dialects)

Nlaka’pamux

Okanagan (also Okanagan-Colville) Selish (formerly Flathead) Ktunaxa

ʔes-təkwl’itqín ‘yellow head/top’ (yellow turnip, swede); ʔestpiqqín ʔesnpəkpkwúkwps tək turnip ‘white head/top little flattened bottom/ root turnip’ (white turnip); OR łəq’łqw’óqw’uʔps ‘wide bottom/root’

Turner and Hebda 2012

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1985; Kinkade 1991; Kuipers 2002

Kuipers 2002; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987 Steedman 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990

lagwúlaʔxw ‘poked into the ground’ (cf. legám ‘pierce, poke into’); OR tanáps (borr. fr. English “turnips”)

Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980

məlmilkw’ ‘round ones’ (rutabaga)

Hart 1974, 1976

áqkłamałakɛnam ‘somebody’s skull’ (approx.), qak’ənkwəkw’əkwəwátqən (Hart)

Chamberlain 1892; Hart 1974, 1976

Table A3-2 | Solanum tuberosum L. – Irish potato (Solanaceae) Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Tlingit

k’únts’

Emmons 1991; Jacobs and Jacobs 1982; Krause 1956

Haida (Massett, Alaska)

sguusiid (Massett dialect), sgúusiid (Alaska dialect) (by some accounts from English “good seed”)

Turner 2004a

Appendix 3 | 509

Table A3-2 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Haida (Skidegate)

sgawsiid, sgaawsid [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”; or by some accounts from English “good seed”]

Kuipers 2002; Turner 2004a

Tahltan

k’unts

Kaska

k’uts (Liard dialect)

Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997

Sekani

làbàdaak (prob. borr. fr. “lepetak” – Chinook Jargon)

Dena’ina (Tanaina)

Witsuwit’en Dakelh/Carrier (Saik’uz, Nadleh/ Stellako, Lheidli) Dakelh (Ulkatcho)

galduxa

lemədets

lubudak (borr. fr. Canadian French la pataque, ultimately from taino patata, in the Caribbean native language of Haiti); OR lumudak (borr. fr. Canadian French la pataque, possibly via Sekani)

Russell 1991b; Russell Kari 1987

Kaska Tribal Council 1997 (Liard dialect) Krauss 2005

Hargus 2007; John­son Gottesfeld 1993 Krauss 2005; Poser 2008b

hanułyeh, hanaałyii

Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Kay 1993; Krauss 2005

Tsilhqot’in

xanełyinsh ‘it grows’

Nisga’a

sguusiit

L.R. Smith 2008b; Turner 2004b

Burton 2012

Ts’msyen (Sm’algyax language)

sgusí, sgusiit (said to be from English “good seed”)

Turner and Thompson 2006

Gitxsan

Kitasoo Haisla

Heiltsuk

Oowekyala

Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala language)

Ditidaht

510 | Appendix 3

gusiit, sgusiit

Johnson 1997

sgusí (said to be from English “good seed”)

Compton 1993b

gwusí

Rath 1981

gusì, gusìt (said to be from English “good seed”)

Compton 1993b

g uʔsì (said to be from English “good seed”)

Compton 1993b

qaawits (potato) [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Kuipers 2002; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983

w

kussiy (Kwak’wala dialect); qos (Lqw’alla dialect)

Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 2011; Turner and Bell 1973

Table A3-2 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Makah

qaawits (potato) (Ozette potatoes preferred over other varieties because “you just plant them, they don’t need any care”) (Gill 2005b, 414) [cf. ProtoSalish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Gill 2005b; Kuipers 2002

kwusi (said to mean “good seed”) (Chinook jargon)

Turner 1973, 1974

Quileute Nuxalk Comox Sechelt

Squamish Halkomelem, (Quw’utsun’) Halkomelem, (Upriver, or Stó:lō)

Straits Salish Samish Lummi Klallam

qáawats [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Kuipers 2002

qawth [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Bouchard and Kennedy 1973–78; Kuipers 2002

sqawts [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Bouchard and Turner 1976; Kuipers 1967, 1969, 2002

sqáwtł, sqáwth (same as name for Sagittaria), sqəw’théen (also other edible roots) [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1971

sqewth (also “wild potato”) (Songish); sqewəs; ? sqəw’théen (Saanich dialect) [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Kuipers 2002; Turner and Bell 1971; Turner and Hebda 2012

sqawts [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Kuipers 2002; L.C. Thompson and Thompson [1975–80]

sqawts (Chinook jargon) [Note: sqawts also refers to “wild potato, wild sweet potato,” which grows at “old camping and fishing grounds; important in the old days” (Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972) – apparently Jerusalem artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus] [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Kuipers 2002; Timmers 1977; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972

sqéewth, sqewth (Chilliwack dialect) [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]; OR ? sxə́ykwəl (some grew at American Bar in the 1920s – possibly Jerusalem artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus)

Galloway 1982; Kuipers 2002

sqews [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

sqawts [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Appendix 3 | 511

Table A3-2 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Lushootseed

sqawts [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]; OR spíqwuts, spáyqwuts (also wapato, Sagittaria latifolia)

Zalmai Zahir, pers. comm., 2010; Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

Lower Cowlitz Upper Chehalis Twana Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton, Fraser River)

tsáqwł (also wapato, Sagittaria latifolia)

Gunther 1973; Kuipers 2002

qaawim’ [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]; OR tsáqwł, tsáqwłnl (potato patch)

M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 1985; Kinkade 1991; Kuipers 2002

(s-)qawts (also Chinook jargon); qawtsúpzaʔ (tops) [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]; OR pəták, paták [borr. fr. French patate (“when potatoes were first obtained by the tribe they addressed them as ‘Chief ’ and danced to them four times before eating them” – Teit)]

Kuipers 2002; Teit 1906, 279; Turner 1974; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987

qaʔwəb [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Nlaka’pamux

takwól’ss, təkwtakwól’ss, steqwól’s; OR pəték (Chinook Jargon, fr. French – Merritt word)

Secwepemc

pətak (borr. fr. French “la patate”)

Okanagan

patáq (borr. fr. French “la patate”); OR sken’kwín’em (also Claytonia) (used in Colville area when potatoes were first introduced; later French name applied) (see also Sagittaria); Colville sqáqaw’tsn [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”] paataq (borr. fr. French patate) (cf. Proto-Interior-Salish paták); OR sqigwts [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Snchítsu’umshtsn

Kuipers 2002

Kuipers 2002; Steed­ man 1930; Teit 1900; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990 G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming

Kuipers 2002; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980

Kuipers 2002; G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003

Spokan

patáq (borr. fr. French); sqaqwtsn [cf. Proto-Salish s-qawts “(Indian) potato”]

Hart 1974, 1976; Kuipers 2002; J.A. Ross 2011

Selish (formerly Flathead)

patáq (borr. fr. French)

Hart 1974, 1976

512 | Appendix 3

Table A3-2 | continued Language (major dialect)

Indigenous name(s), referent, translation if known

Reference(s)

Moses-Columbian

lapták (borr. fr. French)

Sahaptin

lapatáat (borr. fr. French)

M. Dale Kinkade, pers. comm., 2002

Ktunaxa

waʔta (see also Claytonia lanceolata)

Hunn, Selam, and family 1990

Hart 1974, 1976; Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981

Sources: For a list of background references, see appendix 2.

Appendix 3 | 513

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N ot e s

Preface 1 Cf. Saanich qwłáʔəl and Klallam qwłúʔiʔ for edible blue camas (Camassia spp.). 2 For example, in the Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc, or Lillooet, language (Fraser River dialect), nodding onion is called qwláwa-ʔúl (“real/original onion”) (cf. also Squamish qwuláwa, Secwepemc qwléwe, Nlaka’pamux qwléwe, Okanagan-Colville qweláwi, and Selish (Flathead) qwlíwyeʔe). References for these terms are provided in appendix 2 and in the associated database. Those peoples who use the term for nodding onion also usually apply it now to domesticated onion (Allium cepa). The Sahaptin, who speak a language unrelated to Salish, have borrowed the term qw’láwi and apply it to Douglas onion (A. douglasii). 3 The Interior Salish peoples use another, unrelated term for camas, derived from Proto-Interior-Salish (ʔítxwaʔ) (Kuipers 2002). In some cases, the situation is confounded by a tendency of early chroniclers and explorers to use the term “onion” for any sort of edible bulb and, in the southern region, having adopted the name “camas,” to apply this term to various other edible root vegetables, especially species of Lomatium, or biscuitroot (Hunn, Turner, and French 1998). 4 The range of nodding onion extends north to the Skeena River area and beyond, and it also occurs across North America east to Ontario, New York, and North Carolina (Klinkenberg 2013). Note on the Writing System Used in This Book 1 English does not have direct grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence (e.g., -ght sounds like -t in some words, and there are many “silent” letters), whereas typically Indigenous language writing systems do. 2 For Skidegate Haida, however, I have respected the Skidegate Haida Language Authority’s requirement that their writing system be used unchanged, so there are a few symbols that differ from the others in this case. In particular, hl is used rather

than ł and k rather than q. Terms written using the general system for the book are provided in parentheses. Note also the following differences in writing system between that used in this book and the Ts’msyen Language Authority’s spelling for the following: underlined a is written here as a schwa [ə]; ’ is written here as a full glottal stop [ʔ] when between two vowels; k is written here as q; and underlined m is written here as ṃ (with a dot underneath). 3 The charts were developed by Aliana Parker, with advice from Dr Sonya Bird, Dr Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, and Dr Leslie Saxon, all of the Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria. 4 Because of the number of different orthographies, and also due to phonetic variation, there is some overlap between the actual sounds of the letters a, e, and ɛ. These APA symbols represent the variety of sounds in different languages that each of the letters may stand for. Chapter One 1 For further reading on these topics, consult E.N. Anderson et al. (2011), Berkes (2012), Hunn (1999), J.T. Inglis (1993), Johnson and Hunn (2010), Lepofsky (2009a), Menzies (2006b), and Nazarea (1999). 2 For further discussion on the loss of biocultural diversity and implications of language loss, see T.J.S. Carlson and Maffi (2004), W. Davis (2009), Evans (2010), Global Diversity Foundation (2013), Harrison (2007), Hunn (1999), Loh and Harmon (2005), Maffi and Woodley (2010), Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2003), Pretty et al. (2009), Thornton (2008), and Wyndham (2004). 3 For convenience, these distinct taxonomic groups are often broadly included under the general category of “plants” in this book. General references to vegetation used include Calder and Taylor (1968), G.W. Douglas et al. (1998–2002), Hultén (1968), Klinkenberg (2013), Mackinnon, Pojar, and Coupé (1992), Parish, Coupé, and Lloyd (1996), and Pojar and Mackinnon (1994). 4 As noted previously, for the Northwest Coast, only the area north of the Columbia River is covered here in detail, and for the Subarctic, only the southwestern part is included. 5 Na-Dené peoples’ territories extend from central Alaska right across the Subarctic, almost to the Arctic Ocean (Gwich’in), and eastward across northern Canada as far as Hudson Bay (Chipewyan). There are also Dene (Athabaskan) speakers and their descendants in restricted coastal locations in southern Oregon (e.g., Tolowa, Upper Rogue River and Upper Coquille, Lower Rogue River, and Upper Umpqua), in northern California (e.g., Kahto, Hupa, Mattole–Bear River, and Eel River), and in the southwestern United States, including Plains Apache; Chiricahua, Mescalero, Navajo (Diné), and Western Apache (all of the Western Apachean subgroup); and Jicarilla and Lipan (both of the Eastern Apachean subgroup). 6 In general, I provide the scientific names of plant species the first time I refer to them in a chapter, in the tables, in cases where a plant may not be well known by its common name, or where I am distinguishing between species called by the same common name. The authorities for these names are provided in appendices 2 and 3 (and in the full database from which these appendices are drawn, posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space at http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091), but for simplicity I have not cited them in the main part of the book. I also do not usually provide the scientific names of animals since most are well known by their common names.

516  |  Notes to pages xxxiii–10

7 Based on compilations from Compton (1993b), Gunther (1973), Hunn, Selam, and family (1990), Hunn, Turner, and French (1998), Turner (1995, 1997a, 1998), Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy (1980), Turner, Thomas, et al. (1983), and Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). 8 Examples of analyses of crop origins include Eshbaugh (1993), Hammett (1997), Rindos (1984), B.D. Smith (1989), C.E. Smith (1968), and Yen (1974). Interdisciplinary approaches in ethnobotany and ethnoecology are discussed in E.N. Anderson et al. (2011), Dickson, Oeggl, and Handley (2003), Nazarea (1999), and Thoms (1989). 9 As an example of the inferences that can be made from examination of stone tools in archaeological settings, Lepofsky and Lenert (n.d.; see also Lepofsky and Lenert 2005) present an analysis of the abundance of cobble chopper tools found at the Mccallum site, a central Fraser Valley settlement or camp occupied repeatedly around 6,000 years ago. This site presents an intact stratigraphy, including a small structure, well-preserved faunal and botanical remains, and well-dated contexts. They identified a range of plants, including berries of a Rubus species, possibly salmonberry or blackcap, that were processed and disposed of in the semi-subterranean structure, as well as a number of woods, especially Douglas-fir, used for fuel. They conclude that people were involved in very intensive food processing within the structure and that the cobble choppers would have been used for various tasks, including but not limited to woodworking. They also suggest that the increased use of adzes and hand mauls in later years may have been associated with working with western redcedar rather than with harder woods like Douglas-fir. 10 Lepofsky (2004, 373) describes an archaeological bias against ancient plant use and marginalization of palaeoethnobotany in the Northwest region as a “self-fulfilling prophecy”: plant use, particularly plant food gathering (mainly a woman’s activity), was previously not seen to be important relative to hunting and fishing, and therefore the potential for plant remains was usually not included in archaeological sampling strategies or methods. If such records are not expressly sought, they are seldom found, further reinforcing the perceived unimportance of plants. 11 See discussions in Lepofsky (2004). See also Lepofsky (2009a, 2009b), Lepofsky, Blake, et al. (2000), Lepofsky, Heyerdahl, et al. (2003), Lepofsky and Lenert (2005), Lepofsky, Moss, and Lyons (2001), and Lepofsky and Peacock (2004). 12 References for wet site analyses include Croes (1989, 1992, 1995, 1997, 2003), Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner (2009a, 2009b), Bernick (1998b, 2003, 2013), and Nicholas (1998). 13 References to dry site and carbonized remains include G.W. Crawford (2008), Hayden (1997), Nicholas, Wollstonecroft, and Baptiste (1997), Nicholas, Bonneau, and Westfall (forthcoming), Peacock (1998), Thoms (1989), and Wollstonecroft and Baptiste (forthcoming). Due to oxidation, usually from burning, plant parts are converted to pure carbon – like a piece of thoroughly burned toast. In this form, they shrink but retain their shape, texture, and cell structure, so they can often be readily identified. Charcoal is the most common type of charred plant material, and not surprisingly, the most common contexts for carbonized remains are hearth sites and earth oven features, in conjunction with fire-cracked rock. Charred remains are not affected by pH, so they can also appear in middens and other sites where plants would normally not be found. However, charring also results from natural or human-caused forest fires or from structures that have burned, intentionally or accidentally, so the context and situation of charred plant remains must be carefully explored.

Notes to pages 18–23  |  517

14 See K.R. Adams and Smith (2011), Bocquet et al. (1987), Gremillion (1997), Lepofsky (2004), Lertzman et al. (2002), Minnis (2004), Pearsall and Hastorff (2011), Sutton, Sobolik, and Gardner (2010), Trigger (2008), and Turner, Ari, et al. (2009). 15 On the use of BP and other conventions for dating, see chapter 2, note 6. 16 Even in shell middens, plant remains do exist but have often been overlooked by researchers because they are not anticipated (Moss 2011). 17 Note that Hesquiat Harbour is the gazeteered name, whereas the name of this Nuuchah-nulth First Nation is Hesquiaht, with –aht referring to “people.” The Hesquiat Harbour artifacts apparently date to the early 1800s and include items of western redcedar (Thuja plicata) and yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis) bark, redcedar limbs, bitter cherry (Prunus emarginata) bark, Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) root, bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) stipes, and possibly basket sedge (Carex obnupta) and tule (Schoenoplectus sp.). There are also some materials imported through recent trade with Europeans, such as manila and sisal cordage. There are many parallels in materials and basketry and cordage styles to the artifacts recovered from the Ozette site, and the diverse styles of mats, baskets, bags, and pouches represent some of the finest examples of these objects to be found anywhere on the coast (Bernick 1998a). 18 One of the best known Neolithic finds in Europe is from a frozen site in the Tyrolean Alps at the border of Italy and Austria. Here, at an elevation of over 3,200 metres, in 1991 the frozen body of a man (named Ötzi after the Ötztal Alps, the mountain range where he was found within the Tyrol region) was discovered in a melting glacier. He had died at around age forty-six about 5,200 years ago – the earliest intact human body known to date. Fortunately, there were many important plantand fungus-based artifacts associated with Ötzi, revealing the immense potential of such sites in palaeoethnobotany and demonstrating how plant remains can be used to indicate travel routes and seasonality in archaeological contexts (Dickson 2000; Dickson, Oeggl, and Handley 2003; Oeggl et al. 2007). 19 For references to culturally modified trees, see Eldridge (1997), Lepofsky (2004, 2009a, 2009b), Stryd (1997), Stryd and Eldridge (1993), Turner, Ari, et al. (2009), and Turner and Wilson (2008). 20 See Deur (2000, 2005), Hunn (1981), Lepofsky and Peacock (2004), Moss et al. (2004), and Norton (1985). 21 However, as pointed out by Ives (2010) and others, it is important to understand that lines of evidence do not always converge and sometimes can suggest different histories. For example, people of different genetic affiliations may speak the same language, and people speaking very different languages may have similar cultural practices, indicating different types and rates of knowledge exchange and transmission. 22 An example is Coast Ts’msyen sṃgán (“real wood”) (Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority 2001, 50). 23 Following closely were a series of publications defining and characterizing Traditional Ecological Knowledge (e.g., Berkes 1993; Freeman and Carbyn 1988; J.T. Inglis 1993; and M. Johnson 1992) and acknowledging it as having immense importance in the management of local resources, in the husbanding of the world’s biodiversity, and in providing locally valid models for sustainable living (e.g., E.N. Anderson 1996; M.K. Anderson 2005; Berkes 1999, 2012; Deur and Turner 2005; J. Ford and Martinez 2000; Lepofsky 2009a; Menzies 2006b; Minnis and Elisens 2000; Nazarea 1999; and N.M. Williams and Baines 1993). Traditional Ecological Knowledge has also been recognized as being complementary to scientific and other academic knowledge, contributing valuable insights and approaches, as well as detailed local knowledge,

518  |  Notes to pages 23–36

to our overall understanding of human-environment interactions (Corsiglia and Snively 1995; Gadgil, Berkes, and Folke 1993; Posey 1990; Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995; Zent 2009). Chapter Two 1 For references to wapato, see Darby (1996, 2005), Garibaldi (2003), Kuhnlein and Turner (1991), Spurgeon (2001), and Turner (1995). 2 For references to and discussions on oral histories and narratives, see Ames and Maschner (1999), Archambault (2006), Atwater (1992), Kii’iljuus and Harris (2005), Kirk and Daugherty (2007), and Nang King.aay ‘uwans (2005). 3 As Q. Mackie et al. (2011, 93) point out, sea level change on Haida Gwaii at the end of the Pleistocene, between 11,000 and 9,000 radiocarbon years ago, was on the order of 5 centimetres a year for two millennia. “The camp in which a person was born would be in the lower intertidal zone when they died; their grandparents’ camps would be fishing spots or reefs.” 4 This vegetation consisted of mainly grasses (Poaceae), sedges (Cyperaceae), horsetail (Equisetum sp.), dwarf willow (Salix sp.), and sage or wormwood (Artemisia sp.) (Fedje, Josenhans, et al. 2005, map, 30; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005). 5 Along with the pine and spruce, researchers identified mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana), various ferns (e.g., maidenhair fern, Adiantum aleuticum; lady fern, Athyrium filix-femina; licorice fern, Polypodium glycyrrhiza; and possibly spiny wood fern, Dryopteris expansa), and flowering plants (e.g., green alder, Alnus sinuata; crowberry, Empetrum nigrum; valerian, Valeriana sitchensis; sage; and willow) (Barrie et al. 2005; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005). 6 In reviewing these histories, I have attempted to provide general adjusted calendar dates, using conversion tables provided by Fedje and Mathewes (2005) to approximate a date of “years ago” – that is, approximately the calibrated radiocarbon date (BP), based on carbon-fourteen measurements, with an addition of about fifty years. Most dates in the archaeological and palaeoecological literature are expressed in years before the present (BP), with a reference date of 1950 CE, the year selected as the marker date symbolizing “present.” Some (e.g., Ames and Maschner 1999) have used calendar dates (i.e., from the Christian calendar, years BC and AD). Since my interest here is in broad comparisons and trends, citing approximate and relative times is appropriate, but unless precision is specified, the reader should consider these dates to include a wide margin of error. Additionally, as noted by Moss, Peteet, and Whitlock (2007; Moss 2011), many of the published data rely upon older radiocarbon chronology. More precise dating is now available through accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) carbon-fourteen ages, in which minute amounts of organic materials can be aged more accurately. Please consult the original and most recent sources (e.g., Moss 2011) to ensure the highest level of precision in dates. 7 This coastal route was proposed decades ago by palynologist Calvin Heusser (1960) and then by archaeologist Knut Fladmark (1979, 1986) and others, but it has received renewed attention and been brought into clearer focus by Erlandson (2002), Erlandson, Moss, and Des Lauriers (2008), Erlandson et al. (2007), E.J. Dixon (1999), and other recent scholars (Fedje and Mathewes 2005; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005), including those focusing on genetic evidence (Reich et al. 2012). 8 Languages, like species, change at different rates, depending on many factors, such as degree of isolation versus interaction with other language groups, degree

Notes to pages 43–51  |  519

of conservatism in a speech community, and possibly environmental change or continuity. 9 Fire may also have served, even in very early times, as a tool of communication among scattered groups of people, for signalling at nighttime or through smoke columns where people were camping that gave an indication of the size of a group. Likewise, knowing how to light and burn a fire that did not reveal a group’s location or using fuel that cooled quickly and did not leave many traces might at times have helped to avoid hostilities. 10 Meltzer (2009, 117–21) presents a nice overview of the Monte Verde site, including the deliberations and skepticism over its antiquity. He notes that of around seventy-five plant species whose remains were found near the surface of the watersaturated site, about a third had been charred from cooking, about a quarter had been imported to the site from the Pacific Coast, and over half are still used by the local Mapuche Indigenous peoples as food, for medicine, or in construction. He suggests an age for the surface of the site of around 12,500 BP. 11 Today, these algae, particularly species of Pyropia (Porphyra) and Macrocystis pyrifera, are known to have been important to Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples (O’Clair and Lindstrom 2000; Turner 1995, 2003a). 12 For example, people migrated across water from Indonesia to Sahul (Pleistocene Australia–New Guinea) over 40,000 years ago (Connell and Allen 2004; Roberts, Jones, and Smith 1990). Archaeologists have found evidence of seafaring peoples residing in the Ryukyu Islands near Japan over the last glacial period, between about 35,000 and 15,000 years ago – people who were travelling up to 140 kilometres at a time from island to island. Nearly 35,000 years ago, in Japan, people brought obsidian to Honshu from a small island over 30 kilometres distant. That in Late Pleistocene times these travels extended, intentionally or accidentally, around the Pacific Rim to the Kurile Islands, to southern Beringia, and farther south along western North America seems completely plausible. 13 In earlier strata of this same cave, archaeologists discovered the femur of a brown bear, from about 35,000 years ago, a black bear tibia older than 40,000 years, and seal bones dating to about 17,000 years ago, indicating a habitable coastline over this time period (Heaton n.d.), presumably with availability of fish and other food attractive to humans, as well as to bears and seals. 14 Charcoal is a significant source of data for understanding past plant use – but it is rarely identified in archaeological projects (Dana Lepofsky, pers. comm., 2011). 15 The chemical signatures of Mount Edziza and Suemez Island are similar, raising some doubts about the origin of the obsidian at the On Your Knees Cave site (Moss 2011). 16 The underwater search for evidence has already met with some success, with the retrieval of an early glassy basalt tool tentatively dated to about 11,400 years ago (10,000 BP) from a targeted site over 50 metres below sea level off the coast of Graham Island on Haida Gwaii (Fedje, Christensen, et al. 2005; Fedje, Josenhans, et al. 2005; Lacourse and Mathewes 2005; Q. Mackie et al. 2011). Already, too, some artifacts have been retrieved through oil drill cores from the Bering Sea floor (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). 17 The sparsity of very early sites from the southern part of the Northwest Coast, Moss (2011) suggests, may well be because of the high geological activity of the region, as well as fluctuating sea levels, which would have obscured some of the evidence of human occupation.

520  |  Notes to pages 52–7

18 Also recovered were the bones of frogs, snakes, ducks, and muskrat, all species indicating that the locality was probably a wetland with associated shorelines even back when the mastodons roamed. In one of the ribs of the mastodon was embedded a piece of bone over 7 centimetres long, bluntly pointed at each end. If this small piece of bone protruding from the mastodon’s rib is, as some suspect, a spear point, it is the earliest evidence for human occupation of this region of the coast. A flaked cobble spall was found in association with the bones. According to Q. Mackie et al. (2011) and Moss (2011), however, the cultural origin of this site is not widely accepted. 19 There is also a possibility in the case of Pacific crabapple, for example, that people themselves introduced plants to the North American continent from Asia. Routson (2012; Routson et al. 2012; see also Robinson, Harris, and Juniper 2001) found that Malus fusca is a genetic outlier in North America and that its closest relatives, from which it has been separated for only about 10,000 years, are in China and central Asia. Its entry onto the North American west coast, therefore, seems to parallel that of humans, and the two migrations may be linked. 20 For example, analyses of late-glacial sediments from a small depression on southern Moresby Island, Haida Gwaii, at West Side Pond (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005), revealed the presence in ancient sedge tundra strata (around 16,800 years ago) of a number of herbaceous species, with known uses as edible species for present-day Haida and other First Peoples: cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum), lupine (Lupinus spp.), fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium), and dock (Rumex sp.) (Turner 1995, 2004a). The tundra was replaced over the next few hundred years with other potentially edible and useful species – crowberry (Empetrum nigrum), willows (Salix spp.), and ferns – followed over the next couple of millennia by lodgepole pine and then alder (Alnus crispa) and spruce (Picea sitchensis or its hybrids), all trees with edible inner bark. Farther north, at a site at Cape Ball, two other species – alpine bistort (Polygonum viviparum) and Alaska plantain (Plantago macrocarpa) – occur in the early record, along with various other dryland and aquatic species (Lacourse and Mathewes 2005). 21 The floats of bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) are single and large, with the smooth, greenish-brown leafy fronds attached to the top of the float like a head of hair. In giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), the elongated fronds are spaced along the length of the central stipe, each attached by a small basal float. Giant kelp fronds have a bumpy texture and finely serrated edges. 22 Many portions of the coastline that would have been available to and settled by the earliest peoples are now drowned under the ocean or obscured by vegetation due to fluctuating sea levels. In the southern part of Haida Gwaii, for example, areas that were at the edge of the ocean between 14,500 and 10,500 years ago (12,200 BP to 9,400 BP) are now under water, whereas shoreline areas from about 10,000 to 5,800 years ago (8,900 BP to 5,000 BP) are now stranded up to 15 metres above the modern shoreline and have long since been covered by deep forest (Fedje and Christensen 1999; Fedje, Christensen, et al. 2005; Fedje, Josenhans, et al. 2005). For a relatively brief time around 9,500 years ago, and again within the past 2,000 or 3,000 years, shorelines in this region were around the levels they are today. 23 Kennewick Man’s bones showed a high percentage of marine derived biomass in his diet (almost 70 per cent of the protein), probably steelhead or salmon. 24 “The Dalles” actually refers to an area of two rapids just upstream of the city and continuing to just downstream of Celilo Falls, which were located just downstream

Notes to pages 58–79  |  521

25 26 27

28

29

30 31

of Wishram, Washington. This entire stretch of productive fishing sites, including many archaeological sites, on the Columbia River is now under the waters of Lake Celilo, the reservoir behind The Dalles Dam, which was completed in 1957. Another, similar early site is at the Kettle Falls fishery, over 1,100 kilometres by river from the coast, dating to about 9,000 years ago but now covered by Grand Coulee Dam. Similar technologies continue right through the Late Holocene, with many earth ovens dating to between about 4,500 and 2,000 years ago (Lepofsky 2004; O’Neill, Connolly, and Freidel 2004; Peacock 1998; Thoms 1989). For example, a collection of several dozen early twined sandals from Fort Rock Cave and nearby sites in south-central Oregon represents the earliest known basketry from the entire region, dating to the Early Holocene, from more than 10,000 years ago to no later than about 9,200 years ago. These ancient “Fort Rock–style” sandals, twined with a Z-twist weft (typical of Great Basin basketry), are undecorated and most commonly made of shredded sagebrush bark (Artemisia tridentata), with a few made of tule stems (Schoenoplectus sp.) (Connolly and Cannon 1999; Connolly and Barker 2004). Gradually, about 9,500 years ago, the Fort Rock–type sandal was superceded by other types. The pollens of western redcedar and yellow-cedar are very similar; possibly both species showed similar trajectories of entering the region from the south following the Pleistocene, although ultimately western redcedar, along with western hemlock, was more successful in dispersing into the wet regions of the Interior Plateau (the Interior Cedar-Hemlock Zone). Nevertheless, yellow-cedar may have arrived in the far north much earlier than western redcedar; at one site in the outer Prince of Wales Archipelago, an L-shaped implement of yellow-cedar has been dated to about 5,000 years ago (Moss 2011). Rock carvings of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic designs occur here and there along the coast, sometimes in quite inaccessible locations, and are seldom easily dated (Ames and Maschner 1999). Some may have been created in the Mid Holocene, as reflected in the wear from wave action and in the widespread consistency of form and design (MacDonald 1976). Lundy (1976) notes a Columbia River stone sculpture, dating to around 6,500 years ago, of an early style that has spread over a great distance and that may have persisted for a long time on the Northwest Coast. These early style rock carvings, such as the outlined faces, occur on the Columbia, from Portland and upstream past The Dalles, but are seen most commonly on the northern coast – for example, up the Nass River as far as Gitwinksihlkw, up the Skeena to Kispiox, along the Douglas Channel in Gitga’at territory, along the Bella Coola Inlet and Valley, and on the Fraser River as far inland as the Lytton-Lillooet region (ibid.). A number of sites in Alaska show this transition in their layers of occupation (Bielawski 2007), as do the Graham Tradition sites on Haida Gwaii (Q. Mackie and Acheson 2005). According to Moss (2011), that numerous and extensive large shell middens have been documented mainly from the Late Holocene may be, at least in part, due to sea level changes that obscured earlier middens rather than simply reflecting the cultural substitution of shellfish at times when salmon were scarce. Dana Lepofsky (pers. comm., 2011) also points out that the large size of shell midden deposits noted by Ames and Maschner (1999) and others could be a reflection of increasing and more sedentary populations, with more people consuming more shellfish and

522  |  Notes to pages 79–83

32 33

34

35

36

37

38

39 40

depositing more shells, resulting in higher soil pH, which created conditions that were more suitable for shell preservation and therefore led to higher visibility of shell materials – a sort of chain of circumstances. These factors are not necessarily unrelated to each other but need to be considered carefully in any attempts to explain what is seen in the archaeological record. Other food fish included dogfish and rockfish, and people also hunted deer, harbour seal, porpoise, and possibly sea otter. As pointed out by Dana Lepofsky (pers. comm., 2011), however, the dearth of faunal materials such as salmon bones and shell from the earlier layers may be a result of poor preservation rather than lack of use. The more shells and bones that are deposited, the greater their preservation because they tend to increase the soil’s pH. Namu is the most southerly of early coastal microblade sites, although there are microblade sites contemporary with Namu at the base of Mount St Helens, in southern Washington (Ames and Maschner 1999). A microblade fragment was also found at the Milliken site in the Fraser Valley, from deposits dating back more than 9,000 years (Lepofsky et al. 2004). Two very early Stó:lō dwellings, at Xá:ytem, dating to between around 5,500 and 5,000 years ago, were cut into a terrace slope but had rectangular footprints and shared many elements with nineteenth-century Coast Salish plank houses (Lepofsky, Schaepe, et al. 2009). Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2005), recounted that, in her grandmother’s time, the women would roll rocks heated in an outside fire into the pithouse through the women’s side entrance so that they could keep themselves warm without any smoke. Possibly this practice originated very early and may account for a lack of hearths within some of the early dwellings. Some mat lodges, especially more recent ones, were as much as 120 metres long. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark described a dwelling at the mouth of Potlatch Creek in Nez Perce territory that was nearly 50 metres long and housed “at least” thirty families – probably a mat lodge. Further downriver, near Celilo Falls, they saw pithouses, each around 6 square metres, sunken over 2 metres into the ground, and covered with bark. Apparently, both mat lodges and pithouses were used simultaneously (cited in Kirk and Daugherty 2007). In some locations, such as at the village of Wakemap, or Nixlúidix, about 100 kilometres up the Columbia River, coastal-style cedar plank houses were constructed together with interior-style pithouses and mat lodges, at least at the time Lewis and Clark descended the river in 1805. Although little is known about the structures and dwellings of these early people, this is due in large measure to a lack of archaeological evidence; we can assume that people were living and working in built shelters, not just rockshelters and caves, although such structures may have been smaller and less durable than later dwellings. See also evidence cited in Ames and Maschner (1999), K.J. Brown et al. (2008), Hebda (1995), Moss, Peteet, and Whitlock (2007), Nicholas, Wollstonecroft, and Baptiste (1997), and Nicholas, Bonneau, and Westfall (forthcoming). Pithouses, or more accurately, “in ground” houses, may have been the first type of permanent dwelling structures on the Northwest Coast as well. Ames (1996) suggests that the early shell middens on the coast may actually have been produced by pithouse dwellers at the time before rectangular cedar houses became common. However, Dana Lepofsky (pers. comm., 2011) cautions that more data would be required to confirm this. She suggests that the “in ground” houses identified in some coastal sites may actually have been forms of early shed-roofed houses.

Notes to pages 84–7  |  523

41 Dana Lepofsky (pers. comm., 2011) reminds us that the location of these extensive middens may well relate, in part, to the use of shell as construction fill in order to create landscapes on which to build houses. They may represent, at least to some extent, engineered landscapes. 42 Analyses of human bones from coastal sites dating to between about 6,000 and 1,500 years ago show that between 90 and 100 per cent of proteins in bone were derived from marine sources on the coast, although these analyses do not distinguish between protein of fish and that of sea mammals (Ames and Maschner 1999). The enhanced productivity of coastal ecosystems may be an outcome of a more or less stabilized coastline (ibid.; Moss et al. 2004), resulting in more diverse and productive coastal, estuarine, and tidal marsh ecosystems. In turn, the increase in resource abundance would have helped to promote the population growth and cultural complexity that typified the Northwest Coast cultural area (Ames and Maschner 1999). Moss (2011), however, cautions that there was much variability in coastline change from region to region and, therefore, that generalizations must always be balanced with the recognition of exceptions. In addition, sea level changes may have obscured evidence of earlier shell middens in some cases. The interior peoples also exploited salmon and other riverine resources but apparently less so in the earlier part of the Late Holocene than in the latter part, at least in the northern Interior Plateau area. Isotopic analysis of two skeletons near Clinton from about 5,000 years ago show that marine protein in their diets (from migrating salmon) accounted for just under 40 per cent of their total protein intake (Nicholas Wollstonecroft, and Baptiste 1997; Stryd and Rousseau 1996). Salmon fishing on the Columbia River began to intensify by about 6,800 years ago, significantly earlier than salmon intensification in the northern Interior Plateau. 43 This is not to say that these artifacts were not present from earlier times; in many cases, evidence for them was simply not sought (Dana Lepofsky, pers. comm., 2011). 44 As suggested in a previous note, yellow-cedar may have moved northward faster than western redcedar, as it was apparently being used for implements in the Prince of Wales Archipelago some 5,000 years ago (Moss 2011). 45 Digging sticks were among the artifacts identified at the Monte Verde site in southern Chile, dating back to the Pleistocene (Dillehay et al. 2008). Furthermore, the ancient use of “roots” such as onions and camas, as well as of clams, suggests that digging sticks have similarly ancient origins. 46 Some digging sticks are reversible, being sharpened at both ends, so that if they become dull during digging, as well as being sharpened, they can be reversed end for end, giving longer life to the implement. For these, digging stick handles are usually designed to be slipped over the end or are fixed onto a digging stick to provide extra leverage. 47 As noted previously, Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2005) suggested that it was common for people to heat rocks in fires outside of the pithouse and then bring the hot rocks inside to heat the house, without having to cope with the smoke of a fire. 48 The timing and causes of social inequality in the middle Fraser Valley region, including at Keatley Creek, are still under debate (see A.M. Prentiss et al. 2007). As with many such situations, social inequality (indicated archaeologically by features such as differential accumulation and distribution of wealth items in households) is best explained by a combination of factors. 49 References to burning in order to enhance berry production include M.K. Anderson (2009), Boyd (1999b), Deur (2009), Johnson (1999), Kimmerer and Lake (2001),

524  |  Notes to pages 89–97

Lepofsky (2009b), Lepofsky, Lertzman, et al. (2005), Mack and McClure (2002), Minore (1972), Peacock and Turner (2000), Turner (1999), and Turner, Ignace, and Ignace (2000). 50 The taxonomic status and nomenclature for this species are confusing since there are several different species formerly in the genus Scirpus, now in the genus Schoenoplectus. Schoenoplectus americanus (Pers.) Volkart ex Schinz & R. Keller (syn. Scirpus olneyi A. Gray), or Olney’s three-square bulrush, is the species (called “sweetgrass” or, in the Nuu-chah-nulth area, “three-square”) and is apparently the one used in contemporary times for basketry. A related species, American bulrush, or common “three-square” (Schoenoplectus pungens [Vahl] Palla), was formerly but erroneously called S. americanus Persoon and is part of the “Scirpus americanus complex” (Klinkenberg 2013). It may also have been used by weavers, but it has blunt stem edges, and Adolf Ceska (pers. comm., 2001) was told in 1972 by basket weavers harvesting Olney’s three-square bulrush in the Ocean City area of Washington that this latter species (S. pungens) was “useless” for weaving. Nevertheless, S. pungens is the species identified by Ts’msyen biologist and scholar Teresa Ryan (2000) in her detailed thesis about “sweetgrass.” 51 These included shellfish (butter clams, littleneck clams, cockles, mussels, chitons, abalone, limpets, other gastropolds, barnacles, and sea urchins), salmonids, and other fish (halibut, flounders, rockfish, Pacific cod, herring, lingcod, sea perch, greenlings, sculpins, pricklebacks, and dogfish). 52 Bird remains included those of loon, grebe, albatross, northern fulmar, storm-petrel, cormorant, ducks (such as scoter), bald eagle, gulls, pigeon guillemot, rhinoceros auklet, tufted puffin, Cassin’s auklet, marbled murrelet, common murre, crow, Steller’s jay, robin, and hermit thrush. 53 Publications that relate to Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį include Beattie et al. (2000), Dickson and Mudie (2008), Dickson et al. (2004), Hebda, Greer, and Mackie (2011), K. Mackie (2008), Mudie et al. (2005), Pringle (2002), and M.P. Richards et al. (2007). 54 DNA studies and research by museum conservator Kjerstin Mackie and colleagues (see Speller et al. forthcoming) confirmed that Arctic ground squirrel (Spermophilis parryii ssp. plesius) was the main component of the robe, with moose sinew, moose thongs, and an unidentified other animal for a “collar.” Some areas of the robe had apparently undergone repair, using sinew of humpback whale and blue whale and, potentially, of mountain goat. In addition, a bag made of beaver skin, moose sinew, and moose thong components was found in the ice next to his torso. 55 These pieces were originally and mistakenly identified as chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) (see Troffe et al. forthcoming). 56 The significance of the limestone particles in his digestive tract is that they indicate his general route and direction of travel from the coast since the Chilkat drainage contains limestone features and the Tatshenshini does not (Alexander Mackie, pers. comm., 2011). 57 Forensic entomology results showed no colonization by carrion-associated insects, which normally happens very quickly, within hours, indicating that he was likely covered by snow immediately following his death (Alexander Mackie, pers. comm., 2011). 58 Unfortunately, as pointed out by Dana Lepofsky (pers. comm., 2011), flotation was not used to retrieve plant remains, so much was lost in the way of seeds and other nonartifactual plant remains that would have given us an even better picture of people-plant relationships at Ozette.

Notes to pages 101–8  |  525

59 Also found were 11 complete canoe paddles and many fragments, nearly equally divided between three wood species (Pacific yew, bigleaf maple, and red alder); 35 large harpoon shafts of yew wood; 15 intact bows and 26 additional bow parts, nearly 80 per cent of which were of yew, the remaining ones being of western redcedar, bigleaf maple, and a few other species; 15 clubs carved of yew wood and 2 clubs carved of crabapple wood; and numerous small game paddles, all but one made of western redcedar, including some apparently made from parts of old kerfed boxes. There were also gambling pieces, carvings, tool handles, portions of cedar-wood looms, spindle whorls of bigleaf maple, and weaver’s swords made of yew, flowering dogwood, or bigleaf maple. 60 These relationships became even stronger in later projects like Sunken Village and Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį, and today Indigenous peoples have become major participants and, in some cases, leaders in all aspects of archaeological work (see Nicholas 2010). 61 For example, the Ainu and other Indigenous peoples of eastern Asia share the use of several liliaceous bulbs in common with northwestern North American peoples, such as Allium species, Erythronium species, Fritillaria camschatcensis, and Lilium species (Dai Williams, pers. comm., 2012; Strecker 2007; Thoms 1989). 62 This elaboration of people’s technologies and lifestyles included food harvesting, innovations in processing and storage technologies, the development of more extensive and more permanent dwellings and settlements, enhanced artistic creativity, and increasing the extent and sophistication of trade networks. 63 This enhanced status is reflected, for example, in the quality of goods and valuables accompanying burials. 64 Dana Lepofsky (pers. comm., 2011) cautions that the “stored salmon economy” may be, at least in part, an artifact of the size of salmon versus smaller fish like herring. These smaller species may well have been equally or more important but not as prominent as salmon in archaeological contexts in which the relative size of remains can determine to what extent species are measured. Research by S.K. Campbell and Butler (2010) supports the conclusion that salmon use, although extremely important and continuous for over 7,000 millennia, was not actually intensified but simply sustained. Chapter Three 1 This story is from the Massett dialect of Haida; the Skidegate dialect name for Raven is Xuyaa. 2 The Ts’msyen, or Sm’algyax, name for the bush, sgan łaaya, follows the Ts’msyen pattern (with sgan meaning “tree” or “bush”) rather than the Haida pattern of łaayaa łq’a.aay (Massett dialect) (with łq’a.aay meaning “bush” or “branch”). 3 My friend Barbara Wilson (Kii’iljuus) (pers. comm., 2012) from Skidegate knows of other instances of language exchange between the Haida and Ts’msyen, and she observed that many Haida songs are borrowed from the Ts’msyen because their language (called Sm’algyax) sounds beautiful. 4 The Ts’msyen (Coast Tsimshian) name for soapberry is ʔas, and the other names in the Ts’msyenic (Tsimshianic) family follow closely: Nisga’a and Gitxsan ʔis and Kitasoo ʔás (Compton 1993b; Johnson 1997; Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority 2001; H.I. Smith 1997; Turner 1974, 2004a; Turner and Burton 2010). 5 The two other languages in the Ts’msyenic family, Nisga’a and Gitxsan, however, have their own set of names for this plant, unrelated to the łaayaa etymon (group

526  |  Notes to pages 109–19

of related words): sbiks (Nisga’a) and sbikst (Gitxsan). However, Nisga’a plant specialist Irene Seguin (pers. comm., 2012) noted that highbush cranberries mixed with grease are called łaayi in Nisga’a. 6 Highbush cranberries are usually cooked slightly and then stored under water and served at feasts, usually with whipped oulachen grease. 7 Just north of Skidegate, for example, at Miller Creek, two highbush cranberry patches were owned by a woman named Xaal Sgunee, who was the grandmother of Hazel Stevens’s and Emma Wilson’s father (John Enrico, pers. comm., 2000; Turner 2004a). Near Hartley Bay, on Gribble Island, is a big patch owned by Gitga’at Eagle chief Ernie Hill Jr. His grandfather Ambrose Robinson, who was of the Blackfish clan, had inherited the harvesting rights to this patch from an elderly Eagle man whom he had helped during an illness. After Ambrose Robinson died, the ownership reverted to the Eagle clan through Ernie Hill Jr (Turner and Thompson 2006). 8 Annie York also provided the Nlaka’pamux “proper” name, which is different again: q’əpq’əpkwlé (referring to the berries) and q’əpq’əpkwleh-éłp or q’əpq’əpkwlé peł múyx (for the bush). This name is intriguing for its apparent relationship to hazelnut. The name for the berries refers to the click-clicking sound that the flat seeds make when chewed. The same root occurs in the Proto-Salish term for hazelnut, q’ap’xw or q’ap’xw (“[hazel]nut”), as seen in the Comox name for this nut, q’əp’xwim (“make a crunching noise”), as well as in the term q’əpxw and variants, meaning “to crunch (when chewed)” (Kuipers 2002), a term with a meaning similar to that of the major and more widely distributed Salishan term, derived from Proto-Coast-Salish tł’əl (“to crackle, pop”). 9 I took a plant’s naming in three or more languages as an indication of its significant overall cultural salience or recognition. Selections from this listing are presented in appendix 2; the entire inventory is posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091). 10 These species include exotic plant products such as beans (Phaseolus spp.), domesticated species such as potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) and carrots (Daucus carota), and weedy species such as lambsquarters (Chenopodium album) with names in three or more languages. Many of these introduced plants and plant products are named after similar or reminiscent indigenous species. For example, rhubarb (Rheum sp.) is named after dock (e.g., Rumex aquaticus var. fenestratus) in several Indigenous languages, and potato (Solanum tuberosum) appears to have been named after wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) in a range of languages. The various names for potato and turnip are provided in appendix 3, and the broader database of introduced species names is posted on the University of Victoria’s D-Space (http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091). 11 I also identified an additional approximately 230 species with names in only one or two language or major dialect groups. However, because of the limited data reflected in these names, with few exceptions, I haven’t attempted to include them in my discussions here. 12 The list is complicated by being compiled from works with many different writing systems, or orthographies, which, with the help of Aliana Parker, I have standardized (see “Note on the Writing System Used in This Book” and appendix 2 for details). The terms also represent varying levels of correspondence of the Indigenous botanical names to biological or scientific species and genera. In some cases, too, there are missing details of the analysis of the names and possible misidentifications, reflecting variable botanical and linguistic expertise of the original documenters. I have attempted to retain any uncertainties indicated from the original sources in order not to imply a greater level of accuracy than actually exists.

Notes to pages 119–22  |  527

13 Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven (1973) maintain that biological names are based mainly on our perceptions of “discontinuities in nature” – categories or classes of plants, animals, or fungi that show obvious morphological (or, for animals, behavioural) differences and similarities. Our systems for organizing these categories are predominantly hierarchical, based on contrasting sets of things at the same conceptual level, or rank, that are organized within increasingly more general categories. Berlin and his colleagues maintain that humans everywhere are likely to develop similarly structured classification systems and that this is an intellectual pursuit of all of us – part of our wired-in cognitive processes. The scientific enterprise of biologists in developing scientific systems of classification and naming, or biological taxonomy, with an ultimate goal of naming and categorizing every biological species in the world, is an offshoot of our compelling need to conceptually organize, or classify, the objects that have meaning for us. 14 Scientific taxonomy is built on distinct rules of naming, or nomenclature – with the use of binomial names denoting genus and species – and on across-the-board names for established ranks within the strictly hierarchical system: phyla, class, order, family, and so forth. The fundamental organizational rationale underlying scientific biological classification is the desire to reflect evolutionary relationships – the genetic closeness or distinctiveness between various kinds of organisms. “Folk” classification systems, in contrast, reflect more of a day-to-day need simply to communicate about plants and animals known or encountered in people’s lives. Some of these systems are very complex and sophisticated, being embedded within a wider context of beliefs and social practices, but there are no hard-and-fast rules or criteria, nor is there a requirement to be definitive by naming every different organism everywhere. 15 However, the English folk, or common, name for the plant, “skunk-cabbage,” is applied to at least one other species, eastern skunk-cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), a plant in the same family but distinctive enough botanically to be classified in a different genus. The name “skunk-cabbage” also links these species with yet another plant, namely “cabbage” (Brassica oleracea), which is biologically completely unrelated but which also has large leaves. 16 An example from northwestern languages is the term for broad-leaved plantain (Plantago major), which is named from an association with skunk-cabbage in both Haida (laanaa hlgunga [Skidegate dialect], “village skunk-cabbage”) and Kwak’wala (gwíxsa k’ik’eʔukw, “looks like skunk-cabbage”; or k’ík’eʔugwis, “skunk-cabbage on ground”) (see appendix 2). These terms do not necessarily mean that either cabbage or broad-leaved plantain is considered to be “a kind of ” skunk-cabbage in any hierarchical association, only that broad-leaved plantain is reminiscent of skunkcabbage for some Indigenous peoples. 17 These are plant names of “generic” rank sensu Berlin (1992). 18 These species are sometimes distinguished by their respective colours: dall-xil-sgid (“red rain leaves/medicine”) for red columbine and dall-xil-gułał (“blue rain leaves/ medicine”) for blue harebell (Massett dialect) (Turner 2004a). 19 An example in English is the name “yam,” which, depending on their experience, people commonly apply to two different tuberous roots, one in the genus Dioscorea and the other in the genus Ipomoea (also known as “sweet potato”) – reflecting yet another case of cross-naming. In New Zealand, another, completely different tuber, Oxalis tuberosa, originally from South America, is also called “yam.” 20 An example is Upriver Halkomelem spáalxw or spáalxw (cf. píil, “bury, buried”) (Galloway 1982).

528  |  Notes to pages 122–4

21 This name is related to the Comox name xákwu and to the Nlaka’pamux name hékwuʔ. 22 These terms correspond to k’umaq’q’a and gístem in Kwak’wala for the same parts. A similar situation exists with the Ditidaht names for the edible giant horsetail (Equisetum telmateia) and its smaller relative common horsetail (E. arvense). In this case, the name baʔax applies to the sterile, or vegetative, shoots, and t’uuxwsiip applies to the edible fertile shoots. (The latter term apparently derives from a Proto-Salish term, t’unxwn or t’unxw, which also applies to cattail [Typha latifolia] in some Salishan languages.) Similarly, in some Wakashan languages, such as Nuu-chah-nulth, there are different names for salal (Gaultheria shallon), depending on whether one is referring to a fruiting bush (called y’am’apt in Hesquiaht, after the berries, y’am’a) or to a nonfruiting bush (called łayipqsmapt in Hesquiaht, after the leaves, łayiipt). 23 The referent of “blackberry” as a plant name changes depending on the region. In northern regions, Inuit and other locals use the term “blackberry” for Empetrum nigrum, a low shrub known elsewhere as “crowberry” (Andre, Karst, and Turner 2006; Karst and Turner 2011). 24 One example, the Massett Haida name “rainflowers,” has already been mentioned. Another would be the terms applied to running clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum), translating as “deer’s belt” in various languages. 25 An example is Sechelt t’elíqw (the berries) and t’elíqway (the plant) (cf. the Central Salish root t’iliqw, “strawberry”) (Kuipers 2002). After domesticated strawberries were introduced to the region, they were generally incorporated into the “wild strawberry” term, sometimes with a differentiating modifier, such as “white man’s,” added to the name. 26 In the case of kə́l’wet, the cognate form of the word in the neighbouring Stl’atl’imx Lil’wat (Pemberton dialect) simply means “medicine.” 27 In English, for example, consider the use of the term “plant,” first in its most general sense, as contrasted with “animal,” and second in a more restricted sense, as contrasted with “trees” and “shrubs,” inferring low herbaceous plants. Even professionals in describing vegetation may use such a restricted designation in their inventories: “trees, shrubs, and plants.” 28 Cf. the Central Salish root q’əməs (“mushroom, fungus”) and Proto-Interior-Salish s-mətł’-qin’ and variants (“mushroom”) in Nlaka’pamux (Kuipers 2002; Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger 1985; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). 29 In some American Southwest languages, cottonwood (Populus sp.) is rendered as the most typical or essential tree, and its name is polysemous with the general word for “tree” (Brown 1984; Trager 1939; Witkowski, Brown, and Chase 1981). A somewhat similar situation occurs in Interior Salish languages, in which the Proto-InteriorSalish name for cottonwood, mulx, is applied to “stick” in Stl’atl’imx (mulx) and to “any tall bush” (muyx) in Nlaka’pamux, although in this case, múlx is an alternate name for cottonwood and, as the name for this tree, is borrowed from Okanagan (see database for appendix 2 at http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5091). 30 An example is xil gay dllgins (Skidegate dialect) (“floating-leaves/medicine”) for yellow pond-lily (Nuphar lutea ssp. polysepala) in Haida. Interestingly, the Tlingit word kayanní, for “leaves of berries,” is also a synonym for “medicine” (Thornton 1999). 31 In another example, drawing on Haida terminology, the name xàadas tł’aaq’ujaa (Massett dialect) (“Haida rhubarb”) is sometimes applied to western dock (Rumex aquatilis var. fenestratus), tł’aaq’uus or tł’aaq’uuj (Massett dialect), to distinguish it from the other plant now called tł’aaq’uus or tł’aaq’uuj, namely rhubarb (Rheum rhabarbarum), an introduced garden plant with a similar sour taste (Turner 1974, 2004a). Likewise, in the Ts’msyen (Coast Tsimshian) language, the name for northern riceroot

Notes to pages 125–7  |  529

(Fritillaria camschatcensis), miyuubmgyet (“rice of the people”) (Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority 2001, 180, 245), was probably developed to distinguish this wild plant with rice-like bulblets around its bulb from introduced rice, which is called miyuup. In this case, the original Ts’msyen name for riceroot may have been lost, to be replaced by one that linked it to the new product, rice. The former name may have been similar to those still existing in the related languages, Nisga’a and Gitxsan, in which riceroot is named after its bitter taste (e.g., gasx, “be bitter,” in Gitxsan) (H.I. Smith 1997, 141). 32 The term ʔət’ancho (ʔut’an, “leaves”) also pertains to the introduced species lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), cabbage (Brassica oleracea) (cf. Dakelh [Stuart/ Trembleur Lake]), and lettuce (Lactuca sativa) (cf. Dakelh [Stuart/Trembleur Lake]) (Poser 2008a, 2008b). 33 Nlaka’pamux territory straddles eight different biogeoclimatic vegetation zones, and this access to such diversity may be one reason why the language includes so many different plant names, covering 350 indigenous plant species, many with more than one name (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). In general, the people who have access to the greatest diversity of habitats and ecosystems have higher inventories of species that they name and use compared with those peoples whose territory is less diverse (Turner 1988a). 34 In general, berries or foods that are specified as the food of some animal (e.g., names for black twinberry, Lonicera involucrata; queenscup, Clintona uniflora; and twistedstalk, Streptopus spp.) are not considered to be prime foods for humans and may be considered poisonous (Turner 1997b). 35 These are sometimes called “loanwords.” Artichoke, caraway, coffee, tamarind, and cotton, for example, are terms derived from Arabic, the last term coming into English through a Spanish intermediate name (Sauer 1992, cited in Yang 2005; see also C.H. Brown 1999). 36 Cf. Skidegate Haida kayd (qayd) or kaayd (qaayd), for spruce, also sometimes a general term for “coniferous tree.” Chief Ernie Wilson (Niis Wes) recounted that, long ago (possibly before cedar existed on Haida Gwaii), the walls of people’s houses were made of spruce planks (Barbara Wilson [Kii’iljuus], pers. comm., 2012). 37 A similar semantic shift evidently took place in the Proto-Interior-Salish term t’sałp, for “spruce” (Picea engelmannii, P. glauca), which occurs in the Secwepemc, Okanagan, and Selish (Flathead) languages (Kuipers 2002) and which came to be applied in Nlaka’pamux to the true firs (Abies grandis, A. lasiocarpa) (cf. tł’s-ełp). The circumstances for this change in referent are not known. 38 Cf. Cowichan and Musqueam Halkomelem stth’itsm and Squamish ts’ichn. 39 Cf. Stl’atl’imx s-ts’ə’k’ (“whitebark pine seed”) and ts’k’áz’ (“whitebark pine tree”). The same term may also have been borrowed into Dene (Athabaskan) (cf. Ulkatcho Dakelh k’usts’iz chun and Tsilhqot’in ʔests’i chen for “whitebark pine tree”). Significantly, another Proto-Salish name for hazelnut, q’ap’xw or q’ap’xw, apparently derived from the Proto-Salish element q’əpxw (and variants), meaning “to crunch (when chewed)” (Kuipers 2002), occurs in some eighteen Salishan languages and major dialects, including all seven Interior Salish languages (G. Palmer, Kinkade, and Turner 2003). 40 An example is Gitxsan sgan-ts’ek’ (“hazelnut bush”). The Sm’algyax (Ts’msyen) name for “nuts” in general, wineeym desx or wüneeym desx (see Ts’msyen Sm’algyax Authority 2011), may also derive from this root term. Interestingly, the Nisga’a name for common juniper, ts’ex, may relate to the Proto-Salish term ts’ix (“prickly”). 41 The town of Hazelton on the Skeena is named after this native nut.

530  |  Notes to pages 127–35

42 “Squirrel” is named after this term in some Interior Salish languages (e.g., Secwe­ pemc estsek’, “squirrel”). 43 Cf. Tlingit quwakaan síigi (“deer’s belt”), Haida (Massett, Alaska) k’aad dlajgaa. wee (Massett) and k’áad dlajgáawaay (Alaska) (“deer’s belt”), Oowekyala (Wakashan) w’usigṃ yis qam’ila (“deer’s belt”), Nuu-chah-nulth (Hesquiaht) (Wakashan) t’apw’animʔak muwach (“deer’s belt”), and Comox (Salishan) tem’s qígeth (“deer’s belt”). The names for Lycopodium in Nisga’a, Gitxsan, and Haisla translate as “otter’s belt,” and the Yupik (Chugach) names from different dialects are arłuum qilzaaʔutii (“killer whale’s belt”) and kulzamiim qilzaaʔutii (“sperm whale’s belt”). 44 An example is the use of “Jerusalem” in the common and widely known English name of the root vegetable Helianthus tuberosus, Jerusalem artichoke. This plant, originating in the Missouri Valley region of North America, has no relationship to the city of Jerusalem. The modifying term is evidently a transformation of girasole, the Italian word for sunflower (Helianthus annuus), which is a close relative. In English, girasole has no meaning and is difficult to remember. The sound-alike substitute, “Jerusalem,” however, is better known and easier to recall. Somewhere in the history of the plant, this name shifted both in sound and meaning. A more complicated example is the English name “strawberry,” which many people assume is from “straw” because these berries are conventionally mulched with straw. Both “strawberries” and “straw” actually originate from the same early Anglo-Saxon word, streaw, meaning “to spread out,” because of the way that strawberries, with their long runners, spread along the ground and because straw was “strewn” out across a floor or stable. A link between “strawberries” and “straw” therefore exists, but it goes back to common origins of meaning. 45 These are called “blocked morphemes.” 46 This term was evidently borrowed from, or borrowed into, Dene (Athabaskan): cf. Dakelh (Stuart/Trembleur Lake, Saik’uz) ʔah (“fiddlehead fern”). 47 Cf. Haisla q’ìsina (for the berries) and q’ìy’as (the bush), Heiltsuk q’ísíná (berries) and q’ísm’ás (bush), Oowekyala q’ìsina (berries) and q’ìsm’as (bush), and Kwak’wala q’ísina (berries) and q’ísmes (bush). The Wakashan names possibly relate to the rather rank smell of this plant. 48 Yet another example, involving a semantic shift along with borrowing, is the Kwak’wala general name for dried berry cakes, t’əqaʔ, which was evidently borrowed from Coast Salish (cf. Proto-Salish t’aqaʔ, “berry sp.”) (Kuipers 2002). This term applies specifically to salal (Gaultheria shallon) in Comox and at least ten other Coast Salish languages, as well as in the lower dialects of Stl’atl’imx, Nlaka’pamux, and Cowlitz (a Sahaptan language). Significantly, salalberries lend themselves well to drying in cakes and are probably the most commonly dried berries on the coast (Turner 1995). 49 In turn, as noted previously, the Ts’msyen name for this seaweed may have been borrowed originally from Kwak’wala since the latter term is evidently analyzable as “draped over rock,” according to Kwakwaka’wakw linguist and historian Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (pers. comm. to Amy Deveau, 2011). 50 This term is written as scwicw in the dominant Secwepemc practical orthography. 51 But cf. Koyukon -dzoyh (“curled object, claw”) (L.R. Smith 2008b). 52 Cf. Nisga’a milkst or milks (for the fruit) and sk’an-milkst (crabapple tree), Gitxsan milkst (the fruit) and sganmilkst (the tree), Ts’msyen moolks (the fruit, gen.) and sgənmélik’st or malkst (the tree), and Kitasoo móolks or moolks (the fruit) and sxán móolks (the tree). 53 Examples are Straits Salish (Saanich) tł’əsíp and Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’) tł’əsíip.

Notes to pages 136–43  |  531

54 However, Salishan linguist Dr Timothy Montler (pers. comm., 2009) rejects this derivation and would consider it to be a folk etymology. 55 The associated term in Spokan, tiʔmu-leʔxw (? “spring”), probably derives from the name for skunk-cabbage rather than being a source for the name. 56 Southern Nuu-chah-nulth and Haida are the only major language groups where some variant of this term is not used for this seaweed and its close relatives. 57 The Nuu-chah-nulth apparently did not eat it traditionally, although in later times they sometimes harvested it for sale to Chinese people in Victoria (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). 58 These peoples still harvest immense quantities (up to 300 kilograms or more of fresh seaweed per family per year) and then sun dry it in squares on the rocks or on specially crafted cedar-wood trays. The squares have to be made to a certain thickness and to be turned over halfway through the afternoon so that they will dry completely. After the first drying, a portion of the seaweed is further processed to yield a very highly valued product. People dampen the seaweed with seawater and/ or chiton or clam juice and then press it into square bentwood cedar boxes in layers interspersed with cedar branches or salal leaves. They weigh the layers of pressed seaweed down and leave it for about three days or sometimes longer to “get its flavour.” Some people then take it out and chop it into fine flakes, redry it in the sun, and store it in airtight containers. Some Kwakwaka’wakw leave the seaweed to cure in the boxes for a long period of time, sometimes repeating the compressing process four times (Boas 1921; Turner 2003a). In former times, the Gitga’at Ts’msyen cooked the seaweed with special volcanic rocks heated to red-hot (Ernie Hill, pers. comm., 2009; see also Compton 1993b). 59 Some (e.g., Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 2009) have suggested that people originally used this seaweed medicinally before they started to use it as a food, and there is also a Haisla and Ts’msyen narrative that identifies its original use as medicinal (Turner 2003a). 60 Cf. Straits Salish (Saanich) skaw’səl’ł or sqéwthl, Halkomelem (Quw’utsun’) sqáwthl or sqawítheł and variants, Squamish skauésetl, Klallam sqáwts, Samish sqáwts, Lushootseed sqáwts and variants, Stl’atl’imx sqawts, Snchítsu’umshtsn (Coeur d’Alene) sqigwts or sqígwts, Spokan sqáqwtsn, and Selish (Flathead) sqáqwotsən. 61 Another, related species, S. cuneata, is much more common in the interior, but its tubers are very small, relative to those of S. latifolia, and therefore unlikely to have been sought in any quantity. 62 Botanical/environmental information includes general distribution of the species, primary vegetation zone, and total number of major vegetation zones where it has been found. For the cultural use summaries, I consulted the use entries from Moerman’s (2003) ethnobotanical database and selected the numbers of specific uses documented for northwestern North American language groups. This database provides a practical measure, based on Moerman’s detailed literature reviews, of the versatility and relative intensity of cultural use for each species. Notably, Moerman did not consult unpublished sources in compiling his database, nor does the database cover recently published literature (e.g., Turner 2004a), but as a general indication of a plant’s overall utility in the study region, it serves the purpose well. In the area of linguistic attributes, as well as the total number of languages in northwestern North America having names for the species, the table provides a summary for each species of the numbers of names in each language family (or other grouping) and the numbers of cognate forms within each, as well as notations for terms that transcend language families through borrowings and diffusion.

532  |  Notes to pages 144–55

63 However, a more detailed examination of all species in the database on which appendix 2 is based, especially looking at those with names transcending language families, would be required to demonstrate this trend definitively. 64 E-flora BC shows one collection site on its map, as well as a few coastal sites in Alaska (Klinkenberg 2013); I have seen it growing, with abundant fruit, along the shoreline just southeast of Anchorage. 65 Nonetheless, Hul’qumi’num plant expert Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim) recognizes four distinct varieties of saskatoon berries on southeastern Vancouver Island, based on habitat, size of bushes, and relative size of berries. 66 These varieties include sm-moolks (“real crabapples”), a small, tart typical variety; moolks sigawgáaw or moolksa k’aw-k’aw (“crow’s crabapples”), a sweet, reddishcoloured variety; gasasii (“long legs”), a long-stemmed variety; and buʔuxs (“dice”), a large, squarish variety (Marjorie Hill, pers. comm., 2006; Turner and Thompson 2006; Wyllie de Echeverria 2013). 67 These species include amabilis fir (Abies amabilis), Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum), red alder (Alnus rubra), saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia), red columbine (Aquilegia formosa), paper birch (Betula papyrifera), bunchberry (Cornus canadensis, C. unalaschkensis), spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa), fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium), common horsetail (Equisetum arvense), wild strawberries (Fragaria spp.), salal (Gaultheria shallon), skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus), Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca), devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhiza), cottonwood (Populus balsamifera), bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum), red laver seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae), gray currant (Ribes bracteosum), Nootka rose (Rosa nutkana), wild raspberry (Rubus idaeus), thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus), salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis), western dock (Rumex aquaticus var. fenestratus), red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa), soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis), Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia), western redcedar (Thuja plicata), western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), and stinging nettle (Urtica dioica). 68 Similar “plant/tree” suffixes are common in all Salishan and Wakashan languages, as seen in appendix 2 and the database from which it was derived. Every language in the region incorporates some kind of suffix, used together with the name of a berry or other product of a plant, to refer to the whole plant or to denote the plant as a conceptual construct. 69 The Dene (Athabaskans) are linguistically distantly related to the Tlingit and Eyak, from whom they are believed to have separated many millennia ago – 10,000 years ago for the Tlingit and 10,000 to 8,000 years ago for the Eyak (Kari 2010); together these comprise the Na-Dené language family. Unfortunately, the last fluent speaker of Eyak passed away in 2008, and I have not been able to include Eyak in any substantive way in my discussions of ethnobotanical terminology. As noted previously, there is evidence for a linguistic relationship between Dene (Athabaskan) languages and Yeniseian-speaking peoples of central Siberia (Kari and Potter 2010a, 2010b; Vajda 2010). 70 Outside of the study area, seven Apachean and fourteen Pacific Coast languages in three subgroups (one from Washington state, now extinct; the others in southern Oregon and northern California) are recognized, as well as the Subarctic peoples to the north and east, including the Koyukon, Holikachuk, Deg Hit’an, Upper Kuskokwim, Gwich’in, Lower Tanana, Middle Tanana, Dena’ina, Tanacross, Ahtna, Upper Tanana, Hän, Northern Tutchone, Southern Tutchone, North Slavey, Bear Lake, Mountain, South Slavey, Dogrib, Yellowknife, Dene Suline (including Chipewyan),

Notes to pages 165–72  |  533

and Tsúut’ìna (Sarcee) (Kari and Potter 2010a, 10). Others recognize some different divisions between languages and dialects. 71 Within the study area, groups for which systematic botanical vocabularies have been documented include the Tahltan (Turner, Saxon, and Thompson 1997), Witsuwit’en (Johnson Gottesfeld 1994), Dakelh (Carrier) (Carrier Linguistic Committee 2000; Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Kay 1993; Poser 2008a, 2008b), Sekani (Lena Izony McCook, pers. comm. to Aliana Parker, 2012; A. Davis and Tsay Tay Forestry Limited 2008), and Tsilhqot’in (Turner 2004b). Outside of the study area, there are substantive botanical vocabularies for Ahtna (Smelcer, Kari, and Buck 2011), Dena’ina, or Tanaina (Russell Kari 1987), Gwich’in (Andre and Fehr 2000), Dene Suline, or Chipewyan (Marles 1984; Marles et al. 2000), and Slavey (Slave) (Lamont 1977). 72 Northern Dene (Athabaskan) oral traditions (e.g., from the Tutchone, Mountain Dene, Hare, Slavey, and Dogrib) allude to volcanic events equated with White River eruptions (Matson and Magne 2007). 73 There is also oral evidence that the Nicola Athabaskan peoples – who settled farther south in the Nicola River Valley and eventually merged with their Nlaka’pamux and Okanagan neighbours – had descended from a Tsilhqot’in hunting party (Teit 1909). 74 An example is kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi): Nicola thə́ndəx or ténix (Harrington 1941); Tsilhqot’in denɨsh. 75 The Tsilhqot’in plant names were compiled from various sources, mostly from Linda Smith (2008b) and her mother, Helena Myers, as well as from Tyhurst (1984). Most of the names were included in an affidavit I prepared as an “expert witness” in the Tsilhqot’in court case in January 2004 (Turner 2004b), submitted as court testimony in Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia (exhibit 0205) (see Supreme Court of British Columbia 2007). 76 An example is the Ulkatcho word for spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata), for which there is oral evidence of borrowing from Tsilhqot’in. 77 The range of Amelanchier extends much farther north (Klinkenberg 2013); it is named in other Dene (Athabaskan) languages but with terms apparently unrelated to the Tsilhqot’in term, although there is a possible connection with the Kaska name pertaining to “blue grouse.” 78 These tools included bone points for arrows, spears, fishhooks, awls, and blanket pins; bird bone tubes; and bone harpoon heads. Antler wedges remained, but stone artifacts were transformed into flanged, spool-shaped hand mauls, small triangular slate points, thin ground-slate knives, and sawn and polished nephrite adze blades (R.L. Carlson 1976). 79 Borrowed terms can be relatively obvious across languages that are unrelated or very distantly related, but between known related languages, it is not always obvious whether two similar terms are cognate – having developed from a common ancestral form – or borrowed from one language to the other. There may be clues, such as retention of an identifying phoneme or suffix from the original language, but frequently, in borrowing, a term is changed to conform to the norms and conventions of the new language, so the tell-tale traits of a term that might identify it as a word originating from the outside are obscured. 80 I am indebted to Dr Jan van Eijk (pers. comm., 2012) for sharing his knowledge of borrowing. He also pointed out that borrowing usually occurs within related languages, because they are usually most closely located to each other, and that borrowing across languages, especially distant and unrelated languages, occurs through the medium of lingua franca trade languages like Chinook Jargon.

534  |  Notes to pages 172–80

81 For example, this evidently happened with the Proto-Salish word s-ts’ik’, which shifted from hazelnut to whitebark pine as the early peoples encountered the edible nutlike seeds of the latter tree. 82 This happened when the Tsilhqot’in, moving southward and eastward, encountered balsamroot and borrowed its name, ts’ats’el, from the neighbouring Secwe­ pemc, undoubtedly together with associated cultural knowledge of its edibility and preparation. Chapter Four 1 An example of such evidence is the similarity between the acorn-processing baskets of the Sunken Village site on the lower Columbia River and the Jomon-era acorn baskets of ancient Japan, as described in chapter 2. 2 By the time the Lewis and Clark expedition reached Wishram along the Columbia River in 1805, up to one-third or more of the Wishram population had succumbed to disease (Spier and Sapir 1930). For the Secwepemc, as another example, two major smallpox epidemics, in 1862 and 1863, swept through from the Tsilhqot’in. The disease spread east across the Fraser River and through most of Shuswap country and then was transmitted to the Nlaka’pamux and probably the Stl’atl’imx, as well as northward to the southern Dakelh (Carrier). In one of these bands, inhabiting Bear Lake in the Caribou Mountains, only one or two persons survived. The Tsilhqot’in were said to have contracted the disease from the Nuxalk, who were similarly decimated (Edwards 1980; Teit 1909). 3 See also Arnett (1999), Fisher (1992), R.C. Harris (1997), Boyd (1992), and Suttles (1990b). 4 In building Fort Victoria, for example, the Songhees and Saanich Coast Salish were paid a two-and-a-half-point Hudson’s Bay blanket for every forty pickets they provided, each 22 feet (about 7 metres) long and 36 inches (about 1 metre) in circumference (James Douglas, 16 July 1843, cited in Scholefield 1914, vol. 1, 469). 5 “Oulachen” is also spelled “eulachon” or “ooligan.” 6 This region, then known as the New Caledonia and Columbia districts, now comprises British Columbia and northern Washington. The establishment of forts began with one near the present community of Fort St John (in what is now northeastern British Columbia) in the late 1790s and continued with one at McLeod Lake founded by Simon Fraser in 1805, Kootenay House just west of the Rocky Mountains in southeastern British Columbia in 1807, Kalispell House and Salish House in 1809, Spokane House and Fort Okanagan in 1811, Fort Kamloops in 1812, and Fort Alexandria in 1821 (Schulting 1994). Three key forts near the coast were Fort Langley (1827), Fort Simpson (1835), and Fort Victoria (1843), a replacement for Fort Vancouver at the mouth of the Columbia River, which was being taken over by American traders. 7 These forts, and the routes between them, collectively served to preserve British interests and control in the region. After 1821 the Hudson’s Bay Company, having united with the North West Company, had a virtual monopoly on trade in the northern part of the Pacific Northwest but was subject to competition from American interests in the Columbia district, or Oregon territory. Nevertheless, Fort Langley and the other forts held their own with American competitors and oversaw ongoing trade with Indigenous peoples throughout the region, from Vancouver Island to Puget Sound and east to the Rocky Mountains.

Notes to pages 190–202  |  535

8 The Spokan were well acquainted with sweetgrass, in the form of braids, using it for smoking in rituals, mixed with kinnikinnick or Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi) (J.A. Ross 2011). 9 Sweetflag, or “rat-root” (named after muskrat), is a plant with immense cultural value as a medicine among boreal First Nations as well as throughout much of eastern North America. It is “used for everything,” especially for treating colds, sore throats, and congested lungs (Bannister 2006, 35). It is known to have been transplanted along travel and trade routes in many places (M.J. Black 1994; Gilmore 1931; Marles et al. 2000). 10 They accompanied Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra on an expedition designed to resolve Anglo-Spanish conflicts over control of trade along the Northwest Coast. 11 Northwest Coast, or Haida, tobacco (most closely related to Nicotiana quadrivalvis) was being grown and used (but apparently only chewed, not smoked) by the Haida and Tlingit, as well as by the Ts’msyen, who evidently traded for it. And on the southern Interior Plateau, a tobacco known today as Coyote tobacco (N. attenuata) was grown and smoked ceremonially by the Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux, Ktunaxa, and other peoples to the south, with or without other indigenous smoking materials such as kinnikinnick leaves. 12 Kinnikinnick is native to the coastal region and easily available, but previously it was apparently not used by Northwest Coast peoples for smoking. The name “kinnikinnick” is said to be an Algonkian term meaning “smoking mixture.” 13 Other species that were apparently smoked include smooth sumac (Rhus glabra), the inner bark of red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea), and the root of Canby’s lovage (Turner 2009). 14 An exception is wild-rice grown by the Stó:lō, as noted earlier, and the use of various seeds by the Spokan, as reported by John Ross (2011). The Spokan ground the seeds, or grains, of tule and ate them raw or cooked in stews; they also ate yellow pond-lily seeds and the achenes of sunflower (Helianthus annuus), balsamroot, and blanketflower, or brown-eyed Susan (Gaillardia aristata), as well as seeds of some mustards (e.g., Brassica sp. and Descurainea spp.). 15 These included the seeds of species found in the northwestern region whose seeds were not eaten in northwestern North America, such as springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii) and eelgrass (Zostera marina). 16 Her mother, Christine Allen, died in the 1980s at 102 years old. From the late 1800s through the mid–1900s, she witnessed first hand the immense changes her people experienced. Adding these to the experiences of Christine Allen’s parents and grandparents from the early to mid-1800s, Mary Thomas had a direct line of oral history going back to the time of the first European contact. 17 Franz Boas made a three-month trip to the Northwest Coast in 1886, and thirteen more between 1888 and 1931, to undertake ethnographic research, especially with the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples. 18 This was a series of field research trips between 1897 and 1903, financed by M.K. Jesup, who was the president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. 19 For example, among others, see Arnett (1999), Boyd (1990), K.T. Carlson (1997, 2001), Deur and Turner (2005), D.C. Harris (2001), R.C. Harris (1994, 1997), Howay (1914), Hunn, Selam, and family (1990), Fisher (1992), Lutz (2008), McDonald (2003), Ommer et al. (2007), Scholefield (1914), Thornton (2008), and Turner and von Aderkas (2012). 20 Due to appeals and numerous other court cases, however, oral history is becoming increasingly accepted in the courts; see also Daly (2005).

536  |  Notes to pages 203–23

21 In some cases, the Native people became highly successful in their new enterprises and ended up hiring local non-Natives as employees. For example, Father Alexander Diomedi (1843–1932) described the situation for the Snchítsu’umshtsn (Coeur d’Alene) of the Interior Plateau: “In 1881 ... the little tribe raised fifty thousand bushels of wheat and sixty thousand of oats besides poultry, vegetables, and swine. They hired white labor ... They hired a sawmill to provide lumber for building frame houses, and they sawed over a million feet of it. Their roads are good ... One piece of swampy ground has been drained and bridged on several places with a corduroy road between, and all this is the fruit of their own labor” (cited in J.A. Ross 2011, 68). 22 This transformation was observed by Captain George William Courtenay, on board the HMS Constance “at sea,” 12 September 1848, in a letter to Mr William Miller, British consul at the Sandwich Islands (cited in Scholefield 1914, vol. 1, 380). 23 As mentioned previously, many Indigenous people became active participants in the transformation of the landscape. Not only did people acquire horses very early on in the fur trade era, but over time many also became cattle ranchers and farmers and participated fully in the new forms of economic production, including raising cattle and other livestock and cutting and drying wild hay or planting hay crops like alfalfa and timothy grass (Turner and Brown 2004). 24 Shortly after his emigration, Willie Duncan established a Christian community, Metlakatla, near the present site of Prince Rupert and encouraged those people who followed his strict Christian beliefs to separate from the others and move there. Then, in 1887, because of disputes with the Anglican Church and a desire to move his flock away from the influences of non-Christians, he relocated his followers to New Metlakatla in Alaska. The Kitselas and Kitsumkalum never went with the other tribes when they formed the main village at Metlakatla Passage (McDonald 2003, 13). 25 The Hesquiaht also obtained soapberries on occasion from the Nuxalk of Bella Coola when they met at the canneries (Turner and Efrat 1982). 26 Stl’atl’imx elder Edith O’Donaghey also knew about this medicine; one of the Sahaptin names for oceanspray is taxts’xt-pamá tawtnúk (“diarrhoea medicine”) (cited in Hunn, Selam, and family 1990). 27 Use of sweetgrass for smudging is well known in the Blackfoot Sun Dance ceremonies. However, smudging with other plant materials evidently extends far back in time in places west of the Rocky Mountains. Furthermore, the Nlaka’pamux, Ktunaxa, and other First Nations of the Interior Plateau have long traded for sweetgrass braids with the Blackfoot. David Moody of Bella Coola described the long-time ceremonial use of sweetgrass by Nuxalk healers as well (Sam Moody [his son], pers. comm., 2006; Turner 1973). 28 See accounts in Boyd (1999b), Minore (1972), Kimmerer and Lake (2001), J.A. Ross (2011), Trusler and Johnson (2008), Turner (1999), Weiser (2006), Weiser and Lepofsky (2009), and White (1980, 1999). 29 Examples include Elsie Claxton (pers. comm., 1998), Samuel Sam (pers. comm., 1999), and Mary Thomas (2001). See also Jacks (2000), Fisher (1992), C. Jones and Bosustow (1981), Haggan et al. (2007), Kake (1989), McDonald (2003), J. Nelson (1990), L.R. Smith (2008b), Turner (2005), Turner, Gregory, et al. (2008), and Turner, Thompson, et al. (1990). 30 In one group of about a dozen teenaged Indigenous students from the Victoria area who attended a summertime field outing in 2008, only one or two recognized red huckleberries (Vaccinium parvifolium), a common and delicious indigenous fruit, as being edible; most were suspicious of them.

Notes to pages 227–58  |  537

Chapter Five 1 However, Ames and Maschner’s (1999, 120) generalization that “On Vancouver Island, people maintained gardens of Pacific silverweed [Argentina egedii] and springbank clover [Trifolium wormskioldii], while farther north, people collected kelp [? Macrocystis] and eel grass [Zostera marina]” is not entirely accurate since the root gardens they refer to were maintained all along the coast, eelgrass was eaten by Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth on Vancouver Island, and peoples of the northern coast collected far more types of plants for food than simply eelgrass and kelp (Deur and Turner 2005; Turner 1995, 2004a). 2 Teit (1906b, 348), for example, wrote of the Tahltan, “Roots and berries are not found in the same quantity and variety as farther south and consequently form a much less important part of the food supply than among southern tribes.” 3 The changes in foodways that have occurred since the first explorers and traders entered the region, followed by the settlers, by colonial government policies, and most recently, by trends in the globalization of foods, as well as the impacts these changes have had on Indigenous people’s health, are discussed in chapter 4. 4 In addition, the inner bark of western hemlock was eaten by Northwest Coast peoples, and the young bough tips, rich in vitamin C (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991), were nibbled as a hunger suppressant (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). 5 The dormant season begins when the seeds have matured and the leaves start to die back and continues until the spring when the new shoots start to appear above the ground at the beginning of the growing season. 6 Traditional use of root vegetables in the study region seems generally to parallel their use in Eurasia. For example, at Całowanie, a major Palaeolithic and Early Mesolithic site on the North European Plain dating from about 11,000 to just over 8,000 BP, charred remains of Sagittaria and Polygonum species were documented (Kubiak-Martens 1996). In particular, a number of liliaceous species were used by peoples of northeastern Asia, including Japan, Korea, and Kamchatka (see Thoms 1989). 7 Here, remains of hearths and earth ovens are common, often occurring with fragments of ground stone possibly used for grinding and pounding roots and other plant foods. At the Long Tom Valley site west of Eugene, Oregon, intensive use of earth ovens for roasting camas was apparently occurring between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago. The earliest occupations of the Long Tom River site produced a different feature, within a residential area: a linear trench about 1 metre wide and 3.5 metres long, which contained remnants of camas bulbs, acorns, and hazelnuts but little rock. Possibly this trench was used to dry, rather than roast, the bulbs and nuts. Remains of camas, acorns, and hazelnuts are also reported from other early sites along the Long Tom River and in the Willamette Valley (Lepofsky 2004; O’Neill, Connolly, and Freidel 2004). Significantly, too, Thoms (2009) notes that there were charred camas bulbs in a large earth oven feature from central Texas dating to about 8,200 years ago. 8 Clams and cockles were commonly processed for storage by first steaming them in earth ovens using hot rocks and seaweed or other vegetation and then skewering them on sticks of oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor) or other wood and barbecuing them or smoking them until dry, when they could be stored in baskets or cedarwood boxes or strung on long strings and used for trade (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1998; Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2011; Turner and Hebda 2012).

538  |  Notes to pages 264–80

9 A few of these earth ovens contain remains of vegetation surrounding the food in the pit and remains of the food items themselves (Pokotylo and Froese 1983). 10 Although some people still harvest and cook camas, onions, and other “root vegetables” today, most of our knowledge of their use and preparation comes from the past; hence I use mostly the past tense in this description. 11 Wapato starch content, for example, is around 55 per cent of its dry matter by weight (Garibaldi 2003; Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Suttles 1955). 12 A large portion of the edible roots in the southern Interior Plateau are species of Lomatium, many of which do not extend in range into British Columbia, although they were apparently sometimes traded north (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Hunn and French 1981). 13 Tsilhqot’in families still travel to Potato Mountain to camp, sometimes for several weeks, in the early summer, just when the snows have almost melted away. The men hunt deer and fish in the high lakes, and the women dig súnt’íny and later pick mountain blueberries (Vaccinium caespitosum) and whitebark pine cones to roast for their seeds. Formerly, women also dug and pit-cooked large quantities of yellow glacier lily bulbs, balsamroot, and nodding onions (Mellott 2010; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). 14 As noted previously, although few species are documented for the southern coastal region, this is probably due to a sparsity of information rather than an actual reduction of root vegetable use. 15 In making this calculation, horse-chestnuts were used as proxies for camas bulbs, being about the same size. 16 John Ross (2011) reports that, in times of food scarcity in winter, Spokan women would break the ice of ponds and wade into the water to collect the stores of wapato that muskrats had laid up for winter. 17 Present in the vicinity of the wapato patch were associated upland food-processing and residential areas (Bernick 2007, 16), likely indicating intensive and ongoing seasonal wapato production. 18 Digging sticks are widely known and apparently quite ancient. It is likely that some form of root-digging stick may have been used by the earliest peoples entering North America since they were part of the repertoire of implements found in the 14,600-year-old Monte Verde site in Chile (see chapter 2). 19 They were steam-cooked for at least three hours, while layered with whitebark pine bark and boughs, fireweed, wild strawberry plants and runners, and other plants (L.R. Smith 2008b). 20 He used a similar technique for steaming clams and cockles (pers. obs., 2011). 21 The name is also conceivably related to the Nuxalk word qalxm (“dig fern roots”), said to be derived from the Proto-Coast-Salish term qalx (“digging stick”) (Kuipers 2002). 22 Ida Jones’s recipe for pit-cooking has been followed many times, both in pit-cooking experiments and at community feasts and educational events all up and down the coast (Nutritional Healing Safety Committee 2009). 23 As noted, some earth ovens in the past were frequently reused – simply cleaned out, with the extra charcoal and rocks scattered around the edges and more fuel, rocks, vegetation, and food added as required – a good strategy for saving time and materials (Peacock 1998, 2008). 24 The sweet taste was due to the conversion of inulin in the onions to fructose, as noted previously.

Notes to pages 280–93  |  539

25 These are botanically variously known as drupes, pomes, aggregate fruits, and accessory fruits, as well as true berries, but all are included here under the general term “berries.” 26 These trenches may have also been used, as they have been in historic times, for drying fish and meat (Cheryl Mack, pers. comm., 2008; Lepofsky 2004). 27 Before use, skunk-cabbage leaves were usually slightly wilted over the fire to make them more flexible, and their thick midribs were trimmed off. 28 A rockshelter site dating to around 3,000 years ago at South Umpqua Falls, Oregon, is a good example; both pine seeds and hazelnuts were found there, as well as rose hips, both charred and uncharred (Lepofsky 2004). 29 The edible tissues are actually a combination of cambium and the secondary phloem tissue derived from the cambium toward the outside of the tree; xylem tissues are not generally included (Dilbone 2011). For simplicity, I refer to the edible tissue here as “cambium.” 30 Other species used for their edible inner bark by certain cultural groups in the study region include amabilis fir (Abies amabilis), subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa), bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum), red alder (Alnus rubra), western larch (Larix occidentalis), whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), and white pine (Pinus monticola), but use of these species was not as widespread (Dilbone 2011). 31 Note that in this description people were evidently girdling the trees and harvesting bark from virtually the entire trunk rather than just sections; this would have killed the trees but would have been more efficient for harvesting. 32 For example, from just north of the study area, the local Iñupiaq word for mushroom in Kotzebue, Alaska, means “that which causes your hands to come off,” and the people never ate mushrooms (A. Jones 1983, 144). 33 Owls themselves are often associated with ghosts, death, and “magic.” 34 California First Peoples also ate certain types of mushrooms, including American pine mushroom (M.K. Anderson 2005). 35 Samples harvested by Edith O’Donaghey were identified by mycologist Dr Scott Redhead, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-food Canada, Ottawa. 36 In May 2002, for example, one extended family picked more than twenty-four of these large sacks. In May 2008, in about an hour of picking, three young Gitga’at men picked a total of five sacks, which together produced thirty-nine squares (about 45 to 50 square centimetres) of dried seaweed. Another indication of the extent of the seasonal seaweed harvest on the coast was provided by Gitga’at elder Annetta Robinson (pers. comm., 2008; see also Turner and Thompson 2006), who described how, growing up in Kitkatla, she had helped her mother to make about 400 cedarwood seaweed-drying trays – enough to dry about forty “50-pound” sacks of fresh seaweed. A good seaweed picker can fill three or four 50-pound sacks in an hour, and each sack will produce about ten squares of dried seaweed (pers. obs., 2008). In 2008 Annetta still had about eighty cedar seaweed trays, which she loaned to others to use as well. Another Gitga’at family interviewed in 2003 had twenty-four buckets, each 25 to 30 pounds (about 11 to 14 kilograms), of undried seaweed in their freezer. The year before, they said, they had sixty buckets. 37 Douglas-fir sugar is no longer common, and few have reported seeing it within the past few decades. Reasons suggested for its absence range from changing climate to its being consumed by introduced honeybees (see Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). 38 As discussed in chapter 3, however, many of the Indigenous names for Labrador tea in particular incorporate borrowed English or French words, an indication that its

540  |  Notes to pages 294–316

use for making a beverage tea may be relatively recent, probably originating with fur traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company who had adopted its use from Cree and other eastern First Peoples. 39 The Automated Similarity Judgment Program places the age of Proto-Salish at 4,876 BP (Cecil Brown, pers. comm., 2009). Some of the food species with ancestral terms in Proto-Interior-Salish have evidently been used for at least 3,000 years (dating to 3,254 BP). 40 In Australia, for example, roasting pit use paralleled that of northwestern North America, with earth ovens used in particular to cook root vegetables, especially those containing inulin as a primary carbohydrate, including species in the same families as pit-cooked inulin roots in North America, namely the lily family (Liliaceae) (e.g., Camassia and Allium) and the aster family (Asteraceae) (e.g., Balsamorhiza and Cirsium) (Gott 1983, 1999). 41 Eggs of ducks, coots, geese, swans, gulls, oystercatchers, sandhill cranes, grouse, and even robins are known to have been eaten by various groups. Pit-cooking eggs was mentioned in at least one other narrative, a Nlaka’pamux story of Coyote and his son, in which Coyote followed some women hunting eggs, who “made an earth oven and baked the eggs saying ‘they will be cooked in the morning.’” The women had put several hundred eggs in the oven and had more in the baskets. Coyote, who had disguised himself as a stump and his son as a broken branch on the stump, snuck in and ate up all of the eggs (Teit 1912, 310–11). A somewhat parallel story of pit-cooking comes from the Ts’msyen narrative “Adventures of Txamsem,” in which Raven (Txamsem), as a young man, had been abandoned and was seeking food from many different sources. In one episode Raven made a pit on the shore below a huge stump. He filled the pit with hot rocks and covered these with skunk-cabbage leaves. Then he put four seals in the pit to cook, covering them with more hot stones until they were done. But in the end, the big stump ate the cooked seals (told by Emma Wright of the Gitlaxdamks to William Beynon in 1954, cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 22). 42 Since ancient times, caves were also commonly used for storing dried food and other goods, and sometimes cache pits were dug in the floor of caves. For example, McGregor and Squirt Caves near the mouth of the Palouse River in Washington contained numerous storage pits in their floors. McGregor Cave had over thirty pits of various ages. These pits were generally bowl-shaped, some were over a metre across, and some were still partially lined with bundles of grass and sedge, sagebrush bark, wood, flat stones, or matting. In McGregor Cave caches were the remains of dried eels, fish vertebrae, and river mussel shells, as well as the residue of rabbit. One small food storage cave, Hole-in-the-Wall, overlooking the Columbia River, needed a ladder to access it (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). 43 This particular site (EeRb 140) shows evidence of earlier occupations, with a marked increase in reliance on riverine resources, especially salmon, over the time of occupancy. Significantly, the increasing use of salmon was contemporaneous with a shift to a semisedentary lifestyle associated with riverside pithouse villages (Stryd and Rousseau 1996; Wilson and Carlson 1980). 44 For example, in one experiment in which different woods were immersed in seawater for a year, and then tested for marine fungi colonization, the only wood that had no fungal growth was western redcedar (James Markham, phycologist, pers. comm., July 2011).

Notes to pages 319–26  |  541

45 Crabapples and other fruit stored under water would soften but remain quite palatable, tending to become sweeter the longer they were kept (Turner 1995; Port Simpson Curriculum Committee 1983). 46 These fermented eggs, also called “stink eggs” or salmon egg cheese, were considered a great delicacy on the central and northern Northwest Coast but had to be made – and served – with extreme care or else they could cause food poisoning, which has often proved fatal (see Kake 1989; Port Simpson Curriculum Committee 1983; Turner and Thompson 2006). 47 An example of this type of use is from Lil’wat (Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc) elder Margaret Lester of Mount Currie (pers. comm., 1984), who recalled a woman from her community who once fed her family almost exclusively on tiger lily bulbs cooked as soup when she had no other food available. These bulbs, which are somewhat peppery or bitter, are normally used more as a condiment, mixed with other foods. Another is pine cambium. As John Ross (2011, 242) notes of the Spokan, “tree cambium is a starvation food in late winter and early spring when food supplies were depleted.” Ross (ibid., 333) also notes, “There were accounts of how in the past, during times of inadequate food supply, women would dig for camas roots in known areas even after the ground had frozen and covered with snow.” 48 Some of these, such as pond-lily rhizomes (Nuphar lutea ssp. polysepala), said to have been eaten by the Tsilhqot’in (Robert Tyhurst, pers. comm., 2004), would have been bitter-tasting, and others, like the roots of chocolate tips (Lomatium dissectum), would have been potentially toxic, especially if eaten raw, but were used out of desperation. 49 Rose hips are also known as starvation food to the Nez Perce (A.G. Marshall 1977), Okanagan (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980), and other peoples, and they are particularly notable because they often remain on the bushes over winter and are therefore available when few other foods can be found. 50 In general, the leanest times, both on the coast and in the interior, were in the early spring, before the salmon and trout started to come up the rivers and when travel was difficult because of storms or ice breakup. 51 The Okanagan name for cactus, sxwiyínaʔ, is said to mean “packing one’s food along” (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980), but it may be derived from the ProtoInterior-Salish word xwəy (“sharp”) (Kuipers 2002). 52 Examples in this category of animals’ foods are fruits of black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata), waxberry (Symphoricarpos albus), and twistedstalk (Streptopus spp.), although some regard waxberry as deadly, and some consider twistedstalk fruits to be edible, calling them “watermelon berries” (Turner 1997b). 53 This girl was a twin, the daughter of Charlie West, who was a primary ethnographic consultant for archaeologist and ethnographer Harlan I. Smith. 54 The close relationship between food, medicine, and toxic plants is addressed in chapter 7, on medicinal plant use. Chapter Six 1 Two species are candidates for use in mat making: hardstem bulrush (Schoenoplectus acutus) and softstem bulrush (Schoenoplectus tabernaemontani; syn. Schoenoplectus validus). The former grows about 100 to 300 centimetres tall, the latter about 50 to 200 centimetres tall. A third, less common species is Schoenoplectus heterochaetus, but it is considered quite rare (Adolf Ceska, pers. comm., 2001; Klinkenberg 2013). For

542  |  Notes to pages 326–46

purposes of this book, I will assume that Schoenoplectus acutus (syn. Scirpus acutus), being the largest, is the usual species from which mats are made. 2 Tule stalks are normally 2 to 3 metres in length, but when growing in the shade, they will grow taller than 3 metres (J.A. Ross 2011). 3 Tules and cattail leaves collected when they were still green would shrink, and upon drying they became brittle and would crack when bent or manipulated, whereas the postfreeze tule and cattail remained more flexible (J.A. Ross 2011). 4 For these woods, usually the older, gray-barked canes were selected over the fresh, new, brown-barked canes because the young ones tend to split easily (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 1998; Bates, Hess, and Hilbert 1994). 5 Told by Emma Wright of the Gitlaxdamks to William Beynon in 1954 (cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 306–7). 6 In the early 1970s Nuxalk elder David Moody pointed out a large, old western redcedar tree in the Bella Coola Valley that had a still-visible stem of this maple embedded in the trunk at shoulder height. He explained that a common way of felling trees for the Nuxalk was to tie a long piece of maple branch or stem around the tree and ignite it. It would burn away for days and days, gradually eating into the tree trunk and felling it. The tree we examined had for some reason remained standing and was only partly burned through (Turner 1973). 7 Told by John Tate of the Gispaxloats to William Beynon in 1954 (cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 210). 8 Told by John Sky to Swanton (1905, 181). 9 At the Lachane site these wooden digging sticks were recovered in saturated peat, part of a suite of over 400 perishable wooden and fibre objects, dating back as much as 2,500 years, found between two house platforms: box parts, bowls, labrets, wedges, handles, basketry, and cordage (R. Inglis 1976). 10 Bigleaf maple wood is also well known as a good material for spindle whorls (Friedman 2005). 11 Animal fat and other animal products would also have been available as fuel. 12 In the Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc Interior Salish language, there is a special name for Pacific willow (Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra), xwuʔl’-az’, which translates as “firedrill-plant” or, more recently, as “match-plant” since “firedrill” and “match” have become polysemous terms (s-xwuʔl’), reflecting a modern semantic shift to a new technology (Turner 1974). The Upriver Halkomelem term for this willow, xéltsepełp, probably also means “firedrill-plant” (Galloway 1982). Bow drills for starting fires were evidently not used in northwestern North America. 13 A number of Interior Salish names pertain to the cinder conk fungus. The Okanagan name for this fungus is stiʔíkw (“burning coal”), a term evidently related to the northern Secwepemc term tíkwen’kten. Another Secwepemctsin name is welmín (cf. welentéke, “to ignite”) (Marianne Ignace, pers. comm., 1998). Yet another name from this language, used by Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2002) from the eastern Secwepemc area of Salmon Arm, is púxwstł’ye (cf. púxwem, “to blow with the mouth”), with a related form in Stl’atl’imx, pəxwp. 14 This fungus is well known as a fire starter in the northern regions of Canada as well, and is also used medicinally (L.M.J. Gottesfeld 1992b). 15 Some people say that willow and cottonwood, too, will taint the food if it is used for roasting or smoking, yet others use it as a preferred wood (Turner 1998; see also Friedman 2005 for a discussion of fuels). 16 Gitga’at elder Chief Johnny Clifton explained that although amabilis fir wood splits well, people didn’t even bother to burn it in the old days because it doesn’t really

Notes to pages 346–51  |  543

provide any heat. People who didn’t really know their fuels might burn this, he said, and then wonder why their house wasn’t getting hot. On the other hand, he said that Douglas-fir, which is not common in the Gitga’at territory, is a good, hot-burning fuel. Western redcedar, he said, is good for starting a fire but sparks too much and burns too quickly to be the main fuel. Hemlock is a good wood for banking the fire; it is slow burning but a little pitchy. Spruce is considered a good general fuel. Yellow-cedar is sometimes used, but it sparks too much. Red alder is the very best – and to some, the only wood – for smoking food because it doesn’t make the food being smoked taste bitter. Alder is a valued clean-burning general fuel for the stove as well. People do not normally burn yew wood or crabapple wood, according to Johnny Clifton (cited in Turner and Thompson 2006), although some people use crabapple wood for smoking fish on Haida Gwaii (Turner 2004a). 17 The wood and inner bark (phloem) are produced by the vascular cambium. The inner bark is comprised of secondary phloem, which transports nutrients only in its first year and then dies but still protects the living tissues of the tree. Some of the secondary phloem cells take on an additional meristematic role and become the cork cambium, which produces cork cells. These, mixed with some of the nonfunctional older phloem, form the outer bark of trees. 18 One of these immense harpoons was hanging on the wall at the home of John Thomas’s mother, Ida Jones, and stepfather, Chief Charlie Jones, in the Pacheedaht community of Port Renfrew, and examples can be seen at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria and the Makah Museum at Neah Bay. 19 This name contrasts with the more common names for cascara, which refer to the use of the bark as a laxative medicine. 20 For example, remains showed that over fifty bentwood cedar boxes were in use in Ozette site households, evidently for cooking and for storage of water and equipment (Croes 2003; Friedman 2005). 21 Since no early totem poles have been recovered from early archaeological sites, it is difficult to determine their antiquity (Ames and Maschner 1999). 22 In the Interior Plateau, for example, Teit (1909) reported that the Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux were using the metal handles of kettles procured from the Hudson’s Bay Company to fashion tools, including drills and gouges for incising on antler, bone, and wood. 23 Bull kelp stipes tend to become stiff and brittle when dry, but they rot when kept wet for any period of time. When “cured” or treated with oil, they retain more flexibility but still need to be dried for storage and then soaked before use. 24 It is no coincidence that the Nuxalk name for “water hose” is the same as the name for “bull kelp” (Turner 1973). 25 Leslie Main Johnson cited Gitxsan consultants of archaeologist and ethnobotanist Harlan I. Smith (1997) as the source of information on spreading dogbane fibre. She has prepared dogbane fibre herself and has seen photographs of dogbane dip nets in the Canadian Museum of Civilization. 26 Ditidaht elder John Thomas noted, however, that this process can chafe the skin on one’s leg, so twine makers, at least at Clo-oose, used a fine talc of mussel shell dust to alleviate the irritation. Carvers grinding the large California mussel shells for knives and chisels would save the powder produced and keep it in a small woven trinket basket for the women to use when making twine (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). 27 Tepper (1991) shows a beautiful photograph from the archives of the Canadian Museum of Civilization of a Nuxalk woman spinning nettle fibre using a hand-held spindle.

544  |  Notes to pages 352–73

28 Chilkat blankets and designs are also a prerogative of some Fort Rupert Kwakwaka’wakw, descendants of George Hunt, whose mother, Mary Hunt (Ansnaq), was Tlingit, the daughter of Chief Tongass from the southern coast of Alaska. 29 Sandbar willow was even more widely used for cordage and basketry by California Native Americans (M.K. Anderson 2005). 30 The Tsilhqot’in name for this grass, nughwɨshi-tł’ugh, translates as “soapberry grass,” and the Interior Salish names are derived from Proto-Salish t’aqw (“to lick”) (Kuipers 2002), evidently also referring to its use in preparing soapberries. After the soapberries were dried, they could be stored away together with the grass, and then, when people were ready to soak and whip the soapberries, the “timbergrass” served as a whipper, to be removed readily after the soapberries where whipped up. 31 For tule, at least, when the stems are pulled at the right stage, they will release easily and cleanly from the parent rhizomes. Not only does harvesting at this time not harm the plants’ ability to grow the next year, but some harvesters have also observed that patches of cattail and tule that are harvested routinely actually grow better than those that are not. 32 The number of elements (tule stalks or cattail leaves) used by the weaver determined overall dimensions, which could be 2 by 4 metres or more. 33 In fact, the oldest known wooden art carving from the Northwest Coast is actually the handle of a mat creaser dating to between 2,800 and 2,600 years ago. This remarkable implement, with a painted handle, features two crested birds, probably pileated woodpeckers, touching beaks (Ames and Maschner 1999). Its presence indicates that the craft of mat making extends well back in time on the Northwest Coast, and judging by the artistry shown on the implement, it was a prestigious and valued activity. 34 As a grandmother in her seventies and eighties, Mary Thomas (2001) herself recreated these mats, trays, baskets, and bags to demonstrate the techniques to her own children and grandchildren. 35 Although John had not been back to Clo-oose for forty years, he still remembered, when he went back, exactly where the patches of these plants were along the Cheewhat River, growing together with another weaving plant called t’uxt’ux (“threesquare,” Schoenoplectus americanus), which his mother and grandmother used as the foundational material in the closely twined trinket baskets that are famous on the West Coast of Vancouver Island and beyond (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). 36 According to John Ross (2011) the Spokan sometimes used introduced flax (Linum usitatissinum) fibre in their cordage. 37 Weaving materials like cedar bark or cherry bark could be dyed black by burying them in black, mucky soil for several weeks or months. More recent techniques are immersing them in water with rusty nails or in a rusty can or else using aniline dye or shoe colouring. 38 Resins are sticky, translucent materials secreted by special tissues of trees and other plants as a response to external wounding. They are not soluble in water and tend to harden on exposure to air. Gums are water-soluble polysaccharides that also harden with exposure to air. 39 John Ross (2011) notes that the Spokan used the peeled stems and roots of this coltsfoot as a poultice or to treat minor cuts, boils, or sores. 40 John Ross (2011) reports that the Spokan used the felt-like mycelium from a larch, or tamarack, fungus for diapering. 41 Note that care must be taken with these plants, especially when they are fresh, as they both have toxic properties that can cause harm to the skin and lips, in the case

Notes to pages 373–83  |  545

of cow-parsnip, or can cause cyanide poisoning, in the case of elderberry (Turner and von Aderkas 2009). 42 For whistles, sometimes a reed of bitter cherry bark was inserted (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). 43 This game, which teaches children to mask their emotions, is very similar to the Haida game called doxsinaay or doxsina, in which I participated at Skidegate in the summer of 2007, but the Haida version doesn’t use flowers as a focus. 44 Wolf lichen was also dipped in water and used as face paint by the Secwepemc and other Interior Salish peoples (Teit 1909). 45 Generally, basket weavers sought them in the spring, before the flower heads had emerged from the ensheathing leaves. For the Mount Currie Lil’wat (Stl’atl’imx), the blooming of the wild rose (Rosa nutkana) signified the right time to gather the grass stems for basketry (Lantz and Turner 2003; Turner 1992a). 46 As described previously, the bark was blackened by burying it for several weeks or months in dark organic mud in swampy ground or else, more recently, by soaking it in a rusty tin can or a can containing rusty nails, which hastens the oxidizing process. The inner bark of cedar can be coloured black using the same methods, as was common along the coast, to create patterns in cedar-bark mats and baskets (Teit 1909; Turner 1998; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). 47 This fungus was also evidently used for protection. Emmons (1911) noted that the Tahltan protected the skin from bites of insects and from sunburn in snowy conditions by smearing the face thinly with suet from the goat, sheep, or caribou and then puffing over it with the finely charred powder of a hemlock fungus growth. 48 Alutiiq and Unangan (Aleut) peoples still construct shelters that might reflect some of the earliest Beringian styles (Bielawski 2007). 49 These cobble rings occur in groups of from three or four up to two or three dozen, but the dwellings they supported may not all have been used simultaneously (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). 50 There are examples of pithouses more than 20,000 years old in Siberia and 9,000 or more years old in Japan. In the Aleutian Islands there are pithouses dating back about 8,500 years, and in the continental region, pithouses of only slightly younger age – around 7,500 to 5,500 years old – have been documented from the high mountain basins of southwestern Wyoming (Ames and Maschner 1999). Pithouse traditions continued in Alaska until relatively recently. For example, between about 3,000 and 1,000 years ago, the Riverine Kachemak fished on the Kenai River, with seven pithouses situated along an ideal driftnet fishing site (Bielawski 2007). Lepofsky, Schaepe, et al. (2009), working in the Fraser Valley region, found evidence of houses at Xá:ytem in the Mid Holocene, dating back about 5,500 and 5,000 years, that had upright posts and stakes and a rectangular footprint cut into a terraced slope. They suggest that these structures show more similarity to the later Coast Salish cedar plank houses than to pithouses. 51 For example, pithouse villages have been well documented at Keatley Creek and many other sites along the middle Fraser and Thompson drainages, as well as along the Columbia River. 52 Several pithouse reconstructions, such as those at the Secwepemc Museum and Heritage Park on the Kamloops band lands at the confluence of the North and South Thompson Rivers in British Columbia, have demonstrated just how much skill, effort, time, and material are required to build just a single, small pithouse.

546  |  Notes to pages 384–8

53 The distinctive rock at the site is an ancient Stó:lō Transformer stone. 54 The earliest well-documented Northwest Coast plank house village is from the Paul Mason site, situated in the Kitselas Canyon about 160 kilometres from the coast. Archaeologists discovered twelve rectangular house depressions, ten of them arranged in two rows overlooking the Skeena River, dating to about 3,000 years ago. There were also hearths and exterior pit features associated with this site. Village sites from Prince Rupert Harbour also date to this time period (Ames and Maschner 1999). The houses in these settlements tended to be constructed in rows, all facing the same direction – river, lake, or ocean – as linear villages. One of the best documented early plank houses from the southern part of the coast is a large rectangular dwelling at the Palmrose site on the northern Oregon coast, which shows evidence of multiple rebuilds and reoccupations (Ames and Maschner 1999). 55 Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1806) described a lodge – apparently a mat lodge – at the mouth of Potlatch Creek in Nez Perce country that was over 60 metres long and housed some thirty families. 56 An example is the Alpowa site, situated at a river crossing along a major trade route near Clarkston in southeastern Washington, a place that shows a long sequence of human occupation. Twelve house depressions were investigated here, ranging in age from over 4,000 years to just over 1,000 years old. One house, which was probably a mat lodge and estimated at around 1,300 years old, had left an oval depression about 10 metres long and about 30 centimetres deep (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). 57 For example, Secwepemc elder Christine Edwards used to go up the sidehill behind Sahhaltkum village, where she would build a cedar-bark shelter beside a grove of cottonwoods surrounding a spring. Here she would stay for long periods of time while digging roots and picking berries (Kennedy and Bouchard 1988). 58 On the coast, people sometimes used dugout canoes for steaming or sweat bathing, placing large quantities of seaweed like sea wrack (Fucus spp.) and aromatic plants like yellow-cedar boughs (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis) into the canoe, heating these materials with red-hot rocks, and having a person who was sick or had rheumatism lie on the boughs, to be covered by a blanket to hold the steam in (Boas 1966). 59 The name Gitga’ata, for example, of the Hartley Bay Ts’msyen people, means “people of the cane,” in reference to their former use of poles to guide their canoes along the Quaal River near their original village of “Old Town” on the north side of the Douglas Channel (K. Campbell 2005). 60 Some Nuxalk from many generations ago evidently also knew how to make skin canoes (McIlwraith 1948). 61 Some people preferred to use Engelmann spruce bark for these canoes, whereas others used the outer bark of western redcedar or white pine. 62 In fact, the majority of the plant materials required for fishing derive from the terrestrial environment. Thus, although Northwest Coast peoples are renowned for their marine-based economies, it has been the forests and other terrestrial habitats of their territories that have allowed people their maritime lifestyles (Whelchel 2005). This reliance of communities on a substantial land base for their survival is contrary to the assumptions of many – including the colonial officials who saw fit to exclude immense tracts of land from coastal First Nations’ reserves on the assumption that they did not really “need” them and were not using the land or its resources (D.C. Harris 2001). 63 In the origin story of the Tlauítsis (Kwakwaka’wakw), it was said that Nō´mas (OldOne) was the first man to have made fishing lines of kelp in order to catch halibut,

Notes to pages 389–98  |  547

and “consequently the Tlauítsis were also the first ones to employ such lines” (Boas 2002, 422). 64 Wolfsbane (Aconitum spp.) was used as a fish and whale poison on Kodiak Island and evidently in the Aleutian Islands, north of the study area, as well as by Kamchatka peoples, the Ainu in Japan, and peoples of China and elsewhere in Asia (Bisset 1976; Heizer 1938). 65 Whyac was famous for its black ducks, which were exchanged with the people of Clo-oose for halibut (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). 66 The wooden tips of digging sticks at the Pitt Polder wapato site, described in chapter 2, date to about 3,500 years ago. Those from the Lachane site in Prince Rupert Harbour date to about 2,500 years ago (R. Inglis 1976). Other digging sticks of comparable age have been identified from the Oregon coast and Columbia River areas. 67 A number of digging stick handles of elk antler were part of a rich assemblage dominated by bone and antler tools recovered from the Par-Tee site at Seaside, on the northern Oregon coast, a shell midden site occupied between around 2,000 and 1,000 years ago (Losey n.d.). These handles were drilled with a central hole, and several had incised decorations near their ends. Similar digging stick handles, deeply incised with geometric designs, were found at the Palmrose site in coastal Oregon. Another site with digging stick handles is Squirt Cave near the mouth of the Palouse River in Washington, a seasonally used site from about 2,000 to 500 years ago where implements (including a spool wound with Indian-hemp twine) had been cached (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Lepofsky 2004). Celia Nord (pers. comm., 2009), who has studied burial objects from Interior Plateau archaeological sites, suggests, “From preteen until life’s end, a woman may have made, used, cared for, decorated, and been buried with the same antler digging stick handle.” 68 As noted previously, digging sticks of other woods, including amabilis fir and hemlock (Tsuga sp.), are also known archaeologically. 69 Teit (1900, 1909) reported that Nlaka’pamux digging sticks were about 60 to 75 centimetres long, whereas Secwepemc sticks were considerably longer, at 120 centimetres. According to elders Ike and Adeline Willard, however, the size of Secwepemc digging sticks was not standard but varied according to the depth of roots being dug (cited in G. Palmer 1975a). John Ross (2011) confirms this for the Spokan. 70 Other weaving materials identified as basketry elements from this site include splints or withes of western yew and splints and roots of Sitka spruce. The wood splints were split longitudinally, often with the light-coloured inner splints woven in decorative contrast with the darker, curved outer splints. 71 Twined baskets of Sitka spruce root were made by the Haida and Tlingit on the Northwest Coast, and coiled baskets of Engelmann and white spruce or their hybrids were made by the Tsilhqot’in and other Dene (Athabaskan) peoples in the central interior (Turner 1998). 72 A similar method was used by the Tsilhqot’in and other Dene (Athabaskan) peoples to make coiled spruce-root baskets. 73 In a pattern known by some as “the wedding dress” syndrome, museum collections often overrepresent certain objects, usually featuring the more “special” and higherstatus items over the more mundane objects, which are often more ubiquitous and widely used and therefore, one could argue, actually of greater significance. 74 The young mountain traveller, from the discovery called Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį, had a spruce-root hat of a Tlingit style with him when he perished at the headwaters of the Tatshenshini River in far northwestern British Columbia about 300 years ago,

548  |  Notes to pages 400–11

suggesting, along with other evidence, that he had close connections with the coast (see chapter 2). Chapter Seven 1 The list of medicinal applications for yarrow seems endless. Yarrow tea is said to stimulate the appetite (Ubill Hunlin, pers. comm., 2004). Women, in particular, used this plant. They drank a tea of the plant as a blood purifier. They chewed the leaves at childbirth to produce sweating and drank a stronger solution to heal the uterus after giving birth (Gunther 1973). Occasionally, too, a strong decoction of the leaves and stems was drunk as an abortive (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). In fact, Indigenous people throughout the study area relied on yarrow as a healer. They chewed on yarrow leaves or drank yarrow tea to treat colds, coughs, sore throats, tuberculosis, blood conditions, stomach aches, and body aches. They macerated the leaves and flowers to make a poultice for sores and wounds – like the severed thumb – and plastered the boiled leaves on rheumatic limbs used to reduce fever, or they used the leaves as a chest poultice for colds, coughs, and bronchitis, as well as in a wash for sore eyes. People also applied the chewed leaves to burns, abscesses, boils, swellings, and sprains, sometimes heating them for use as a poultice (Boas 1966; Gunther 1973; Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; G. Palmer 1975b; J.A. Ross 2011; H.I. Smith 1928; Turner 1973; Turner and Bell 1973; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). If the leaves and tops died back in wintertime, people would dig the roots and use them for similar purposes (H.I. Smith 1928; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). 2 In British Columbia it occurs in sixteen different biogeoclimatic vegetation zones, with the highest frequency in the Interior Douglas-fir Zone (including the heart of Nlaka’pamux territory, where it was used in healing the severed top of a thumb in the account beginning this chapter). 3 On the east coast of North America, for example, the Mi’kmaq (Micmac) use yarrow to make a tea for curing colds by inducing a sweat. In addition, they use the plant, dried and powdered finely, to cure swellings, bruises, and sprains (Wallis 1922; see also Arnason, Hebda, and Johns 1981). 4 Medical historian and classicist Alain Touwaide (pers. comm., 2007) undertook surveys of the medical treatises of the ancient Mediterranean region from the fifth century BCe to the second century CE. A few thousand plants are known to have been used altogether, but he found that the bulk of ancient prescriptions – formulas made with many ingredients – tended to use the same subset of plants, about fortyfive to sixty common species, all of which were edible garden species, such as garlic, parsley, leek, flax, cauliflower, and oregano. 5 The food-medicine linkage is recognized in mainstream society by a class of products called “nutraceuticals,” which are health foods or derivatives from foods that have recognized health benefits, such as blueberries and cranberries (Vaccinium spp.) for their antioxidant properties and for alleviating and preventing urinary tract infections, Omega–3 fatty acids for their benefits to the heart and circulatory system, and dietary fibre in bran cereals for its aid in digestive tract function. 6 Notably, thiophene E is a strongly active compound with potentially harmful effects if people consume it in any quantity. Since experiments in cooking the roots have shown that thiophene E is not broken down by heat, one might be concerned that

Notes to pages 416–31  |  549

it will be present in the pit-cooked taproots used for food. However, once the outer bark-like covering is removed from the roots after pit-cooking, antibacterial activity diminishes to undetectable levels. Thus cooking evidently draws the pitch out of the edible portion and onto the inner wall of the bark, which is not consumed. Furthermore, the biological activities of thiophenes are light-mediated, or photodynamic, and in Bannister’s experiments, thiophene E showed negligible activity in the absence of ultraviolet light. Evidently, it would have been most effective as a topical antibiotic when applied to skin that was exposed to sunlight, with its ultraviolet rays. 7 Cf. ts’el (“bitter”), reduplicated in the root’s name as tsé+ts’e (“all over bitter”), with the suffix -elq (“stick-like”). 8 The groups included in the survey, spanning five language families from both the Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau regions, were those for which details about the use of these plants had been documented in the literature. 9 The survey did not include medicines used only externally but focused on those actually consumed in some form. 10 Mary said her father never went to see a dentist in his entire life; any time he had a toothache, he treated it with this medicine. 11 The words are frequently referred to as “prayers” by Boas (1930), although Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith explained that the original Kwak’wala word used by Boas’s consultants is better translated as “words of praise and thanks” (Sewid-Smith and Dick 1998; see also Mary Thomas 2001; and Turner and Hebda 1990). 12 Furthermore, it must be noted that these categories reflect only one classification scheme that could be applied to medicines, illnesses, and medicinal plants themselves. However, they seem to match, at least in general terms, the divisions used in discourse about treatments with herbal medicines, as well as categories in various databases, and they also align generally with the different modes of preparing and administering medicines (e.g., Johnson 2006; Moerman 2003, 2009; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). 13 Infusions are prepared by steeping the plant materials in boiling water, as in making tea, whereas decoctions are prepared to varying strengths by boiling the plant materials in water for a period of time. Decoctions are usually considered to be stronger, with higher concentrations of the medicinal ingredients, than infusions. The time allowed for boiling and steeping also affects strength. 14 These seeds, or fruits, of Lomatium nudicaule, which have a strong celery scent, are called q’əxmín in Straits, Halkomelem, and several other languages. They are regarded as one of the most powerful medicines of Coast Salish peoples (Boas 1890) and are also used by Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Interior Salish peoples. Not only were they chewed to treat colds and sore throats, but they were also used as a smudge or incense to fumigate houses and “drive away ghosts” and bad spirits, as well as burned in the traditional First Salmon ceremony. For headaches, the seeds were inhaled like smelling salts, or sometimes a poultice was placed on the head. Q’əxmín was formerly well known as a treatment for tuberculosis, a disease that came to have epidemic proportions among First Peoples of British Columbia. Today, the seeds are valued as a medicine for colds, as a means to enhance the voices of singers, and as a powerful ceremonial incense and smudge (Turner and Bell 1971, 1973; Turner and Hebda 2012; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). 15 See http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=PLMA2 (accessed 27 June 2013). 16 Interestingly, almost all of the Salishan names for this plant, as well as the Witsuwit’en and Ts’msyen, associate it with frogs. (Wild lily-of-the-valley is also named

550  |  Notes to pages 433–45

after “frog” in Ts’msyen and some other languages.) In at least two Dakelh dialect names, it is called xəzbənt’an (“pus-cover-leaf ”), in reference to its use to treat boils and skin infections. Three other languages (Ditidaht, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Haida) use names connecting this plant to its much bigger look-alike, skunk-cabbage. 17 Mabel Joe explained that women generally did not take medicines during their pregnancy, that there was no known remedy for “morning sickness,” and that generally women were very careful what they ate and what they were exposed to during pregnancy. 18 Creeping snowberry (Chiogenes hispidula) has a wintergreen flavour and contains salicylic acid, which is potentially dangerous if too much is taken. 19 A similar name is used by the Fraser River Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc, who are said to have borrowed it from the neighbouring Secwepemc. 20 Secwepemc elder Garlene Dodson (Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming) used these words for the plant; her mother used it routinely. For sore knees and old broken bones that ached, she applied a hot, concentrated decoction of the roots or the whole plant, soaked in a towel. This solution was also used as a wash for deep wounds, even cuts down to the bone. It is very strong and potentially dangerous if taken internally, but a teaspoonful or so was administered with broth to treat colds and pneumonia, or one gargled with a little bit of it for tonsillitis or placed a small amount of it directly on the tooth for a toothache. It was also used to treat impetigo in children (often contracted from residential school) and, as a very mild solution, to treat acne in teenagers. A woman after childbirth would bathe in it frequently to help heal tears or sores. One had to be extremely careful with this medicine; too much of it could be harmful. 21 They gathered the roots of chocolate tips in quantity, roasted them in a fire until warm, and then crushed them. They dug a trench in the house beside the fire and placed hot rocks in the bottom, followed by a layer of dirt and then the crushed mass of roots. The patient rolled down into this and was covered with a robe. He remained there until the “bed” cooled, and usually he was cured (Elmendorf 1935–36; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). 22 Buttercups (Ranunculus spp.) and other members of the buttercup family, such as anemones (Anemone spp. and Pulsatilla spp.), clematis (Clematis spp.), false bugbane (Trautvetteria caroliniensis), and meadow-rue (Thalictrum spp.), contain varying quantities of an acrid, blister-causing juice that yields a highly irritant yellow oil, protoanemonin, produced in the plant through the enzymatic breakdown of a glycoside, ranunculin. 23 Some Haida call this plant daktaa xilga (Skidegate dialect) (“doctor leaves/medicine”), from English “doctor,” indicating a possible borrowing of this practice from Europeans, who also used it (the Czech word for buttercup means “blistering”) (Prieto et al. 2003; Turner 1984). It seems unlikely, however, that the entire spectrum of counter-irritants from plants in the buttercup family used in Indigenous healing practices across the area originated with European sources. 24 In the Interior Plateau, Okanagan children were taught not to handle the little sagebrush buttercups (Ranunculus glaberrimus) that bloom early in spring among the sagebrush. As well, there is a Nlaka’pamux story, “The Hunter and the Wolf,” about a wolf who taught a hunter how to use this plant as an arrow poison (Teit 1912, 378). 25 The poisonous quality of false hellebore is due to the presence of a spectrum of alkaloids that act on the heart and nervous system (Turner and von Aderkas 2009). 26 False hellebore was often used to wash hunting and fishing gear in order to bring luck in hunting, and it may have also served as a poison for arrows and, later, bullets.

Notes to pages 446–9  |  551

27 Betulinic acid, a natural derivative of betulin, curtails the growth of skin cancer (melanoma) cells and has been explored as a potential treatment for skin cancer since the early 1990s (Krasutsky 2002). 28 A location in Ktunaxa territory is known as “Tobacco Flats,” after this plant. 29 Some residues from pipes and stone bowls from the Keatley Creek pithouse village site, however, did not show any nicotine or other deposits one might expect from tobacco use (Hayden 1997). 30 This tobacco was said from one account to have been introduced to Haida Gwaii from a tobacco tree in “Stickeen” country (Dawson 1880, 152). However, it seems to have been known from Stikine country only recently. Emmons (1911) noted that tobacco was unknown to the Tahltan and their neighbours until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was introduced by the Tlingit, who got it from Europeans. The Tahltan did not smoke the tobacco but, like the Haida and Tlingit, mixed it with powdered burned clam shell and charred tree bark, reduced the mixture to a paste, and then rolled it into pea-sized pellets. A pellet was placed between the lower lip and the gum and sucked, with occasional spitting. He said that the “nicotine plant,” which was cultivated among the Tlingit, was evidently brought up the Stikine River and planted in small garden patches at the old village of Tutchararone, near the mouth of the Tahltan River. It was used with food at mortuary feasts. 31 The name “kinnikinnick” is an Algonkian word for “smoking mixture.” There is still some question about the antiquity of smoking by coastal peoples. There is a Proto-Salish term, manəxw or manəx, that means “to smoke (tobacco),” and the Nuxalk name for kinnikinnick, milmilixwłp, derives from this term. Furthermore, both the Ditidaht and Makah names, buubuukw’qtł’apt (“burned centres plant”) and qwishaa (“smoke”) respectively, evidently refer to smoking. Either these terms are recent in derivation or smoking is an older practice on the coast than is generally recognized. 32 Far to the north of the study area, the Yupik and Inuit peoples of Alaska and northern Canada apparently burned cinder conk fungus (Inonotus obliquus), which they called iqemik (“chew-ash”), and added the ashes to chewing tobacco and snuff to give it an extra “kick” (Ager and Ager 1980). This use apparently originated with Indigenous peoples of the Bering Sea coast and Kamchatka or possibly with Russia, where cinder conk fungus is called chaga (Strecker 2007). 33 The use of Ligusticum is described further under the section on aromatic plants. A close relative of Canby’s lovage, called osha (Ligusticum porteri), was a valued medicine of Indigenous peoples farther south, into Colorado and New Mexico and as far south as the Sierra Madre in Mexico (Bye 1986; Bye and Linares 1986). 34 This is probably one of the Artemisia species whose pollen shows up in palaeoecological deposits in Alaska and elsewhere in the North from the Early and Mid Holocene (see Pielou 1991 for the earlier period). It is classed as “amphi-Beringian” in its distribution, occurring in both northeastern Asia and across northern North America (Aiken et al. 2003). 35 These plants represent some of the dominant groups of aromatic plants: members of the cypress and pine families (Cupressaceae and Pinaceae), members of the mint family (Lamiaceae), members of the celery family (Apiaceae), and fragrant flowering plants (Rosaceae and others) respectively. Another broad group of aromatic plants – those in the aster family (Asteraceae) – are represented by yarrow and Tilesius’ wormwood, whose uses have already been described. 36 Juniperus maritima, which grows along the coast of southeastern Vancouver Island, in Puget Sound, and on the adjacent Gulf and San Juan Islands, was recently described

552  |  Notes to pages 450–4

as a species distinct from J. scopulorum (R.P. Adams 2007), although it is similar in form and in its Indigenous uses. 37 Perhaps the best known use of juniper flavouring in European society is in making “gin,” which is named after the French or Dutch words for juniper: genièvre or genever respectively. 38 The “berries” are modified cones since juniper is a gymnosperm. Also, juniper is a dioecious plant, with the male and female reproductive structures separated between individual trees or shrubs. 39 The Sahaptin used Juniperus occidentalis in similar ways, namely to treat colds, coughs, fevers, flu, venereal disease, kidney ailments, and digestive tract ailments (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990). Common juniper (Juniperus communis) was used similarly by many groups, including in areas where J. scopulorum does not occur (see table 7-3). 40 Another, similar species, northern licorice-root (Ligusticum verticillatum [Hook] J.M. Coult. & Rose ex Rose), occurs in Idaho and Montana and may have been used by the Spokan and other peoples within its range. 41 The root is said to be best to dig in August, when the flowers have died back, according to Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1995). 42 For this purpose, it is burned and the smoke is blown on the patient. It was especially important during the winter dances, where it was used to “revive” singers who had gone into a trance and were, for ceremonial purposes, considered “dead.”  43 Some people call this plant “Indian marijuana” because it was smoked and had the effect of causing sleepiness, particularly in children (Mary Thomas and Aimee August, pers. comm., 1992). 44 Mints (Mentha spp.) are renowned for their pleasant, cooling, “minty” scent and taste. As well as for a beverage tea, they are used in many culinary products and creations and in flavouring everything from chewing gum to toothpaste and even hair shampoo. They are also considered to be nutraceuticals, having carminative properties (aiding digestion), and are applied in many herbal medicine preparations. Peppermint (M. piperita) and spearmint (M. spicata) are the best known. 45 Interestingly, however, some people did not use field mint, even when it was present in their territories. For example, Leslie Main Johnson (1997) notes that mint and several other common medicinal plants (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, Salix spp.; and Chimaphila umbellata) were apparently not used by the Gitxsan. 46 For example, grand fir (Abies grandis) and lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) were used as dermatological aids, red alder (Alnus rubra) and bitter cherry (Prunus emarginata) as respiratory aids, Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca) as eye medicine and a general tonic, and cascara (Frangula purshiana) as a digestive tract aid. 47 The exception was June plum, or bird cherry (Oemleria cerasiformis), whose use was apparently quite restricted. 48 As well, pine (Pinus spp.) bark (or pitch) was used by at least 41 groups, cascara (Frangula purshiana) bark by 32, oak (Quercus spp.) by 28, elderberry (Sambucus spp.) by 28, alder (Alnus spp.) by 27, true fir (Abies spp.) bark or pitch by 26, crabapples (Malus spp.) by 25, poplars (Populus spp.) by 23, dogwoods (Cornus spp.) by 22, devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus) by 21, hemlocks (Tsuga spp.) by 21, and willows (Salix spp.) by 20. 49 These groups included Anishinaabe, Iroquois, Menominee, Mik’maq, Penobscot, Potawatomi, Paiute, Shoshone, Tewa, Cherokee, Secwepemc, Dakelh, and Sekani. 50 A similar preparation, mixed with oulachen grease, was used as a hair perfume and tonic (H.I. Smith 1928, 14).

Notes to pages 454–61  |  553

51 Elsie Claxton’s friend Violet Williams used another medicinal mixture, which contained the barks of four different trees, to treat stomach ailments, ulcers, and other internal problems (cited in Turner and Hebda 1990, 2012). Farther north, the Gitxsan prepared a similar medicine containing multiple ingredients from forest trees and shrubs, which they called “wood medicine” (Johnson 1997, 45; 2006). 52 One exception, from the American Southwest, is the discovery of copious quantities of pollen of three medicinal plant species in coprolites, or fossilized human faeces: creosote bush (Larrea tridentata), willow (Salix sp.), and Mormon tea (Ephedra sp.) (Reinhart, Hamilton, and Hevly 1991). 53 The Makah and Ditidaht names for devil’s-club relate to one of the few technological uses of the shrub, namely for making fish lures (cf. Ditidaht ʕayxwqwapt and q’uuquy’aatskapt, referring to two types of lures).

554  |  Notes to pages 462–6

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge Volume two

M c Gill-Queen’s Native and Northern Series (In memory of Bruce G. Trigger) Sarah Carter and Arthur J. Ray, Editors

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

When the Whalers Were Up North Inuit Memories from the Eastern Arctic Dorothy Harley Eber The Challenge of Arctic Shipping Science, Environmental Assessment, and Human Values Edited by David L. VanderZwaag and Cynthia Lamson Lost Harvests Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy Sarah Carter Native Liberty, Crown Sovereignty The Existing Aboriginal Right of Self-Government in Canada Bruce Clark Unravelling the Franklin Mystery Inuit Testimony David C. Woodman Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1841 James R. Gibson From Wooden Ploughs to Welfare The Story of the Western Reserves Helen Buckley In Business for Ourselves Northern Entrepreneurs Wanda A. Wuttunee For an Amerindian Autohistory An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic Georges E. Sioui Strangers Among Us David Woodman When the North Was Red Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia Dennis A. Bartels and Alice L. Bartels From Talking Chiefs to a Native Corporate Elite The Birth of Class and Nationalism among Canadian Inuit Marybelle Mitchell Cold Comfort My Love Affair with the Arctic Graham W. Rowley

14 The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7 Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council with Walter Hildebrandt, Dorothy First Rider, and Sarah Carter 15 This Distant and Unsurveyed Country A Woman’s Winter at Baffin Island, 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

1857–1858

W. Gillies Ross Images of Justice Dorothy Harley Eber Capturing Women The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West Sarah A. Carter Social and Environmental Impacts of the James Bay Hydroelectric Project Edited by James F. Hornig Saqiyuq Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women Nancy Wachowich in collaboration with Apphia Agalakti Awa, Rhoda Kaukjak Katsak, and Sandra Pikujak Katsak Justice in Paradise Bruce Clark Aboriginal Rights and Self-Government The Canadian and Mexican Experience in North American Perspective Edited by Curtis Cook and Juan D. Lindau Harvest of Souls The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632–1650 Carole Blackburn Bounty and Benevolence A History of Saskatchewan Treaties Arthur J. Ray, Jim Miller, and Frank Tough The People of Denendeh Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories June Helm The Marshall Decision and Native Rights Ken Coates

26 The Flying Tiger Women Shamans and Storytellers of the Amur Kira Van Deusen 27 Alone in Silence European Women in the Canadian North before 1940 Barbara E. Kelcey 28 The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher An Elizabethan Adventure Robert McGhee 29 Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture Renée Hulan 30 The White Man’s Gonna Getcha The Colonial Challenge to the Crees in Quebec Toby Morantz 31 The Heavens Are Changing Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity Susan Neylan 32 Arctic Migrants/Arctic Villagers The Transformation of Inuit Settlement in the Central Arctic David Damas 33 Arctic Justice On Trial for Murder - Pond Inlet, 1923 Shelagh D. Grant 34 The American Empire and the Fourth World Anthony J. Hall 35 Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay Stuart Houston, Tim Ball, and Mary Houston 36 Uqalurait An Oral History of Nunavut Compiled and edited by John Bennett and Susan Rowley 37 Living Rhythms Lessons in Aboriginal Economic Resilience and Vision Wanda Wuttunee 38 The Making of an Explorer George Hubert Wilkins and the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1916 Stuart E. Jenness 39 Chee Chee A Study of Aboriginal Suicide Alvin Evans

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Strange Things Done Murder in Yukon History Ken S. Coates and William R. Morrison Healing through Art Ritualized Space and Cree Identity Nadia Ferrara Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing Coming Home to the Village Peter Cole Something New in the Air The Story of First Peoples Television Broadcasting in Canada Lorna Roth Listening to Old Woman Speak Natives and Alternatives in Canadian Literature Laura Smyth Groening Robert and Francis Flaherty A Documentary Life, 1883–1922 Robert J. Christopher Talking in Context Language and Identity in Kwakwaka’wakw Society Anne Marie Goodfellow Tecumseh’s Bones Guy St-Denis Constructing Colonial Discourse Captain Cook at Nootka Sound Noel Elizabeth Currie The Hollow Tree Fighting Addiction with Traditional Healing Herb Nabigon The Return of Caribou to Ungava A.T. Bergerud, Stuart Luttich, and Lodewijk Camps Firekeepers of the Twenty-First Century First Nations Women Chiefs Cora J. Voyageur Isuma Inuit Video Art Michael Robert Evans Outside Looking In Viewing First Nations Peoples in Canadian Dramatic Television Series Mary Jane Miller Kiviuq An Inuit Hero and His Siberian Cousins Kira Van Deusen

55 Native Peoples and Water Rights Irrigation, Dams, and the Law in Western Canada Kenichi Matsui 56 The Rediscovered Self Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice Ronald Niezen 57 As affecting the fate of my absent husband Selected Letters of Lady Franklin Concerning the Search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

1848–1860

Edited by Erika Behrisch Elce The Language of the Inuit Syntax, Semantics, and Society in the Arctic Louis-Jacques Dorais Inuit Shamanism and Christianity Transitions and Transformations in the Twentieth Century Frédéric B. Laugrand and Jarich G. Oosten No Place for Fairness Indigenous Land Rights and Policy in the Bear Island Case and Beyond David T. McNab Aleut Identity Tradition and Modernity in an Indigenous Fishery Katherine L. Reedy-Mascher Earth into Property Aboriginal History and the Making of Global Capitalism Anthony J. Hall Collections and Objections Aboriginal Material Culture in Southern Ontario, 1791–1914 Michelle A. Hamilton These Mysterious People Shaping History and Archaeology in a Northwest Coast Community Susan Roy

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Telling It to the Judge Taking Native History to Court Arthur J. Ray Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada Echoes and Exchanges Edited by Anna Hoefnagels and Beverley Diamond In Twilight and in Dawn A Biography of Diamond Jenness Barnett Richling Women’s Work, Women’s Art Nineteenth-Century Northern Athapaskan Clothing Judy Thompson Warriors of the Plains The Arts of Plains Indian Warfare Max Carocci Reclaiming Indigenous Planning Edited by Ryan Walker, Ted Jojola, and David Natcher Setting All the Captives Free Capture, Adjustment, and Recollection in Allegheny Country Ian K. Steele Before Ontario The Archaeology of a Province Edited by Marit K. Munson and Susan M. Jamieson Becoming Inummarik Men’s Lives in an Inuit Community Peter Collings Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America Nancy J. Turner

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America

Volume two The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews

Nancy J. Turner

McGill-Queen’s University Press | Montreal & Kingston | London | Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 ISBN 978-0-7735-4380-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-8539-3 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-8540-9 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the McLean Foundation. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Turner, Nancy J., 1947–, author Ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge : ethnobotany and ecological wisdom of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America / Nancy J. Turner. (McGill-Queen’s Native and northern series ; 74) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: Volume one. The history and practice of indigenous plant knowledge – Volume two. The place and meaning of plants in indigenous cultures and worldviews. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4380-5 (v. 1 : bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4380-5 (v. 2 : bound).– ISBN 978-0-7735-8539-3 (v. 1 : ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8540-9 (v. 1 : ePUB).– ISBN 978-0-7735-8539-3 (v. 2 : ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8540-9 (v. 2 : ePUB) 1. Indians of North America – Ethnobotany – Canada, Western. 2. Indians of North America – Ethnobotany – Canada, Northern. 3. Traditional ecological knowledge – Canada, Western. 4. Traditional ecological knowledge – Canada, Northern. 5. Indians of North America – Ethnobotany – Northwestern States. 6. Traditional ecological knowledge – Northwestern States. I. Title. II. Series: McGill-Queen’s Native and northern series ; 74 E98.B7T87 2014   581.6’3097

C2014-900602-0 C2014-900603-9

Set in 10/13 Gentium Plus with Sina Nova, Cyntho Pro, and Cyntho Slab Pro Book design and typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital Botanical illustrations by Hein Nouwens/shutterstock.com, based on Meyers Konversations-Lexik, 1897, and Brockhaus Konversations-Lexik, 1908

Co n t e n ts

Volume One Figures and Tables ix Preface and Acknowledgments xv Note on the Writing System Used in This Book xxxi 1 Introduction to the Book: Ethnobotanical and Ethnoecological Knowledge across Time and Space 3 Part One | History 2 Into the Past: Ancient Relationships among People, Plants, and Environments 43 3 Reflections on Plant Names in Understanding the History of People-Plant Relationships 117 4 Change, Loss, and Adaptation of Plant Traditions 191 Part Two | Development 5 Plants as Food: Development, Diversity, Dissemination 263 6 Plant Use in Technology over Time and Space 335 7 Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions 415 Appendix 1: Major Sources of Information for the Book 467

Appendix 2: Names of Selected Native Plant Species in Indigenous Languages of Northwestern North America 473 Appendix 3: Names of Two Introduced Plants (Turnip and Potato) in Indigenous Languages of Northwestern North America 507 Notes 515 Volume Two Figures and Tables ix Preface xiii Part Three – Integration and Management 8 Moving for the Harvest: Seasonal Rounds and Plant Knowledge 3 9 Cultural Institutions Related to Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Practice 51 10 Trade and Exchange: Sharing Plant Products and Ethnobotanical Knowledge across Geographical and Cultural Space 101 11 Management and Sustainability of Plant Resources and Habitats 145 Part Four – Underlying Philosophy 12 Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge 231 13 Worldview and Belief Systems in Ethnobotanical Knowledge Systems 297 14 Ancient Pathways and New Pathways for Retaining and Renewing Botanical and Environmental Knowledge Systems for the Future 351 Notes 413 References 441 Index of Plant Species 503 General Index  513

viii | Contents

F i g u r e s a n d Ta b l e s

Figures 8-1 Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata), called súnt’iny, from Potato Mountain, in the territory of the Xeni Gwet’in Tsilhqot’in 10 8-2 Mary Thomas with her birch-bark baskets (Betula papyrifera) (photo by Robert D. Turner) 12 8-3 Wild rose (Rosa acicularis) 21 8-4 Botanie Valley, a high-elevation valley in Nlaka’pamux territory, a renowned gathering place and multi-use harvesting site – a “cultural keystone place” 25 8-5 Rachel, Max, and Morgan Hill of Hartley Bay, picking edible seaweed in May 2011, near their spring harvest camp at K’yel 36 9-1 Agnes Edenshaw-Yeltatzie-Jones, sister of Florence Davidson and daughter of Isabella Edenshaw, Haida, of Massett, preparing łii.ng (spruce roots) for weaving, 1971 (photo by Robert D. Turner) 60 9-2 Ethan Dundas of the Gitga’at Nation with wild blueberries he has picked, at Hartley Bay, BC  65 9-3 Mary Thomas’s willow-bark doll, like those her grandmother used to make for her when she was a little girl (photo by Robert D. Turner) 66 9-4 Gitga’at elder Colleen Robinson, an expert at seaweed preparation, demonstrating how to dampen the edible seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae) in

preparation for pressing it into cedar-wood boxes, one stage in complex seaweed processing 75 9-5 Gitga’at elder Helen Clifton of Hartley Bay, BC , holding one of the cedarwood seaweed-drying trays that Annetta Robinson brought with her when she moved to Hartley Bay 82 10-1 Black huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum) and Cascade bilberries (V. deliciosum), two prime edible berries of the Coast Mountains 102 10-2 Soapberries (Shepherdia canadensis), a prime Xaxl’ep resource of the Fountain Valley, BC (photo by Robert D. Turner) 103 10-3 Bundle of Indian-hemp fibre (photo by Robert D. Turner) 127 10-4 Bundles of peeled, split, and dried western redcedar roots, ready for trade, along with dyed cherry bark and basket-making awl and knife, belonging to Margaret Lester, Lil’wat basket maker, Mount Currie, BC  130 10-5 Seeds of “Indian celery” (Lomatium nudicaule), widely known as q’əxmín (and variants of this term) 132 11-1 The Kingcome River estuary, BC , site of the Tsawataineuk root gardens of the family of Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), showing Adam Dick with a group of Tsawataineuk community members and students from the University of Victoria 146 11-2 Lil’wat basket maker Margaret Lester digging roots of western redcedar for her baskets in 1984 near Mount Currie, BC  152 11-3 Willow (Salix sp.) along the Columbia River, BC , with branch cut by beaver, showing the resprouting of long, slender withes just below the cut 160 11-4 Mallets made of yew wood (Taxus brevifolia) 195 11-5 Small sprouts, called gágemp (“grandfather”), produced by the bulbs of northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis) 202 11-6 Crabapple tree from Robintown “orchard garden” showing partially cut top 211 12-1 Bunchberries (Cornus canadensis) at the base of a cedar snag 248 12-2 Orb spider weaving its web, said to have been the inspiration for the original fishing nets, according to a number of origin stories 253 12-3 Oval-leaved blueberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium) 265 12-4 Giant horsetail (Equisetum telmateia) (photo by Robert D. Turner) 267

x  |  Figures and Tables

12-5 Swainson’s thrush, known as “salmonberry bird,” whose singing is said to ripen the salmonberries and other berries all along the coast (photo by Glenn Bartley) 276 12-6 Salmonberries (Rubus spectabilis) of dark, red, and golden colour forms 277 12-7 Black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii), sqwel’íp in Okanagan, hanging from western larch (Larix occidentalis) (photo by Robert D. Turner) 279 13-1 Ts’ilʔos (Mount Tatlow), in Xeni Gwet’in Tsilhqot’in territory, who used to be a bad-tempered man according to Tsilhqot’in traditions 311 13-2 Qw’əqw’íle (desert parsley, or hog-fennel, Lomatium macrocarpum), an edible root that was said to be the father of one of the Salishan Transformers, Child-of-Hog-Fennel 313 13-3 Trillium (Trillium ovatum), called “sad flowers” (chaachaawaʕs, “sad ones on the ground”) in Ditidaht 316 13-4 Stoneseed (Lithospermum ruderale), used by Okanagan and others to invoke rain during droughts 318 13-5 Running clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum), said by some to bring bad luck if handled 320 13-6 Devils’-club (Oplopanax horridus), highly respected and widely used in healing and for spiritual protection 322 13-7 Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) flower, one of the blossoms featured in the Hanaksiala Flower dance (Compton 1993b) 332 14-1 Haida dugout canoes, on the beach at the Haida Heritage Centre at Kaay Llnagaay, Skidegate, BC , in 2008 394 14-2 Grouse dancer, during the performance of the Atlágimma (Spirits of the Forest) dance under the authority of Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) in May 2010 (photo by Robert D. Turner, reproduced with permission of Kwaxsistalla) 398 14-3 Diana Smith, Nisga’a elder, in a Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a (Nisga’a House of Wisdom) ethnobotany course in 2012, holding a sample of northern riceroot on a fieldtrip to Gingolx at the mouth of the Nass River, BC (reproduced with thanks to Deanna Nyce, director of Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a) 399

Figures and Tables  |  xi

Tables 8-1 Examples of seasons named after plants 16 8-2 Examples of plants as traditional phenological indicators for Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America 18 8-3 Examples of seasonal round patterns of coastal and interior peoples 29 10-1 Plant resources known to have been traded among Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America 121 11-1 Measured or estimated rates of harvest for indigenous plant resources of northwestern North America 168 11-2 Quantities of plant resources harvested by Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America 172 11-3 Techniques and approaches applied by Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America to maintain and enhance plant resources 179 11-4 Plant resources managed and sustained through various means by Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America 183 12-1 Examples of plants or plant products employed in “everyday” activities and applications, as referred to in Indigenous narratives of northwestern North America 236 12-2 Examples of plants or plant products featured in “actor” roles, as well as in an array of supernatural or magical roles, in Indigenous narratives of northwestern North America 260 12-3 Examples of plants or plant products having magical or supernatural qualities as reflected in Indigenous narratives of northwestern North America 268 13-1 Examples of plants related to traditional beliefs of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America 301

xii  |  Figures and Tables

P r e fac e

This is the second of two integrated volumes on how knowledge about plants and environments has been acquired, transmitted, and adapted, over time and space, by Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America. People have travelled through and made their homes in this amazingly diverse region for thousands of years – possibly 14,000 years or longer – since the Pleistocene times when most of the land and much of the coastline were smothered by vast expanses of ice. Since these ancient times, many different peoples have learned to survive here, using their skills and ingenuity. Inventing, modifying and diversifying, exploring, experimenting, practising, and sharing, they not only subsisted across times of immense change but also created rich and rewarding lives for themselves, lives strong with social bonds, with artistic expression, with ritual and ceremony, and with enduring relationships with other species – the plants and animals of their territories. They developed an immense knowledge of, respect for, and appreciation for these species, fostered not only by need but also by bonds of kinship, recognizing the lives of these entities as being parallel to and as important as those of humans. Throughout the millennia, people have interacted with and integrated their lives with these species, such that their oral traditions have often compellingly blended the lives of the plant and animal actors, together with river and mountain personae, into the lives and activities of human actors in ways that defy the “us” and “them” dichotomy of predominant society. One of the most remarkable facets of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and relationships with plants and environments is that there are many congruities in knowledge systems across linguistic, cultural, geographical, and temporal boundaries. These similarities include common origins of many plant names,

which evolved or were borrowed from some central ancestral form, common methods and tools for harvesting and processing plant foods and materials, and common themes in narratives told by peoples living at great distance from each other. A fundamental focus of these volumes, then, is to try to better understand how peoples’ systems of knowledge, practice, and belief – their Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems – have been developed, disseminated, and adjusted and how they have evolved across the great landscapes and seascapes of northwestern North America. What did people bring with them? What were their legacies? How did old and new ideas and practices combine and shift? How did languages develop and reflect the nuances and changes of different environments and cultures? As a follow-up question, it is equally important in these times of global declines in biodiversity and cultural diversity to ask what lessons can be learned from this understanding that can be applied in maintaining and sustaining this type of knowledge, both for the benefit of those who first developed it and as a significant part of the common heritage of all humanity. Volume 1 of this book provides the background and context for the study, examining the historical aspects of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge in the area. Plant names are presented and discussed in detail because they can give many clues about the history of relationships and sharing of goods and ideas between and among different groups, both linguistically related and linguistically disparate. Changes effected by European newcomers – traders, settlers, missionaries, government officials, and industrialists – to Indigenous peoples’ lifeways, languages, and knowledge systems are also described, providing insights into the ways that new knowledge and new circumstances may be accommodated in cultural systems, as well as the ways that knowledge can be transformed or lost. The last three chapters of volume 1 focus on three major categories of plant use – food, materials, and medicine – setting the stage for the more integrated and transcending approaches in this second volume. There are so many strands and so many themes to be recognized and addressed that the task is daunting. Most of these will never be fully deciphered, but even the clues offered in the evidence presented can give some significant insights and lessons. Hopefully, too, some of the examples revealed in this research will identify new areas and directions of inquiry. Ultimately, the lessons point to immense and sometimes overwhelming complexity, to entire shifting, transforming, and evolving systems choreographed simultaneously by the landscapes, the life forms, and the human spirit, all connected in an endless and magnificent dance. My efforts to understand and describe these trajectories of ethnobotanical knowledge have been a work of intense fascination and enjoyment over a span of four and a half decades. The Indigenous botanical and cultural experts who have been my teachers and guides on this journey are people who have truly lived surrounded by and interacting with the plants of their environments in

xiv | Preface

the context of their own languages and cultures. They have actually participated in harvesting the root vegetables, inner bark of trees, wild greens, and other wild foods that are little known at present, and because of this, they are like open windows to knowledge otherwise shrouded in dim vestiges of people’s collective memories. Ida Jones of the Ditidaht, Dr Margaret Siwallace of the Nuxalk, Florence Davidson of the Haida, Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) of the Kwakwaka’wakw, Elsie Claxton of the Saanich, Annie York of the Nlaka’pamux, Sam Mitchell and Edith O’Donaghey of the Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc, and Mary Thomas of the Secwepemc are such people. Many more are acknowledged by name in the preface to the first volume. As children and youths, and even into adulthood, all of them participated in traditional plant harvesting and processing and learned the applications of plant resources under the guidance of their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives. Although they did not know each other, they all shared the common experience of a deep and abiding relationship with their home place, and they have all felt the heartbreak of environmental degradation and the accompanying cultural losses. Witnessing these losses, and being convinced of the value of their own teachings, all of these individuals have attempted to strengthen, renew, and pass on their knowledge and experiences to younger generations. I sincerely hope that, in writing these two volumes and highlighting the richness and importance of their teachings, I have done them justice and have honoured them. I would like to dedicate this work to all of the Indigenous teachers and environmental knowledge holders, to those who have benefited from their teachings, and to those of generations to come who will be able to understand a little more clearly the vitality and fundamental significance of their ancestral knowledge.

Preface | xv

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Part three

Integration and Management

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8 Moving for the Harvest: Seasonal Rounds and Plant Knowledge

A whole bunch of us would go up … on top of the mountain, way up high, close to the snow line, by horseback every year … for a few days, three of four days or a week, mainly to pick huckleberries [Vaccinium membranaceum]. These berries are ripe in August, and that’s when people would go up … We got huckleberries, and dug roots while we were up there, wild potatoes [Claytonia lanceolata], wild onions [Allium cernuum], whatever we could find up there on the mountain. The men would hunt too … I haven’t been up there since I was young, but that used to be a tradition in the olden days … They’d gather [glacier lily bulbs], a whole bunch of tiger lily bulbs … that black moss [black tree lichen] … We’d bring down six or eight baskets [large coiled cedar-root pack baskets] with pack horses … baskets and sacks of mountain potatoes … They also dried cow-parsnip roots for medicine. (Edith O’Donaghey, cited in Turner 1992b, 418)

Introduction Edith O’Donaghey, a Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc elder, was born and raised at Shalalth on Seton Lake, nestled in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia. The mountain where she went as a child with her family and other family groups, called Mission Ridge, was above their village. Although the trips Edith described took place around the late 1920s, the actual pattern of travel to different destinations within a people’s territory over the course of a season would have been established probably millennia ago – in fact, possibly as early as when people first existed in the region. Furthermore, travelling from place to place in an annual cycle for resource harvesting was a widespread practice over the entire

area, both on the coast and in the interior, in the north and in the south. This cyclical movement to different points around the landscape over the course of the seasons was essential to acquire the diverse resources that people needed for survival, not only food but various materials and medicines as well. The travels were also simply part of a way of life. The “seasonal rounds,” or patterns of seasonal movement and seasonal residence – camps are considered “home,” too (R.E. Ignace 2008) – within and across diverse geographic and ecological areas, reflect and embrace the complex systems of knowledge and practice that integrate all of the different aspects of peoples’ lifeways: harvesting food, gathering wood and using fire for cooking and landscape modification, constructing shelters, making and using canoes, honing skills in basketry, in making fishing gear, and in pit-cooking, harvesting and administering medicines, observing animals of all kinds, recounting stories and sharing conversations using all of the specialized vocabulary that goes with the innumerable species encountered and used, teaching children and youth, exchanging products and ideas with neighbours, learning how to care for and manage the land, and all of the other place-based activities that are part of a culture. Furthermore, these seasonal rounds are typical of tribal peoples and all those peoples around the world who depend on seasonal harvesting, from the Highlanders of Scotland and the Saami of Finland and Norway to the Indigenous peoples of Australia (Ommer and Turner 2004; Prober, O’Connor, and Walsh 2011). In this chapter, I discuss the role of seasonal rounds and their relationship to plant harvesting and ethnobotanical knowledge. Like Edith O’Donaghey, many elders of recent generations remember their seasonal trips to the fish camps along the river, the seaweed and halibut camps on the ocean, and the hunting, berry-picking, and root-harvesting camps in the mountains, as well as their fall fishing and estuarine root garden destinations, with great fondness and nostalgia. Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994) recalled an experience from her childhood that was quite similar to that of Edith: I guess I was quite small yet when I went on one of those trips … but I can still remember quite a bit of how we camped up there. There was just sort of more or less in the open stars type of camping … I must have been around about four or five years old … There’d be quite a few [families] – like my dad, he had brother-in-laws and he had people that he knew – they would take packhorses and go up to collect – and not only that, they would do hunting and drying meats. They had big family units; there’d be quite a few people would go up in one trip … Around something like [twenty to thirty people], always big family units moved about and working together, which was always fun.

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These seasonal rounds would have varied over time, with changes in technologies, such as the introduction of the horse or, later, of motorized vehicles, including automobiles and motorboats. Nevertheless, the essence of the activities and functions has endured – for some people, right up to the present day. For example, the Stl’atl’imx still descend in early summer to the rocky confines of the Fraser Canyon between Lillooet and Pavilion to harvest the spring salmon and early sockeye salmon runs, and many still travel into the mountains later in the summer to pick huckleberries and to hunt. On the northern coast, many members of the Gitga’at Nation of Hartley Bay still move for a few weeks in May to their traditional seaweed-halibut spring harvest camp at K’yel on Princess Royal Island, and then in the late summer, they travel to “Old Town” at Gitgiata Inlet on the north side of the Douglas Channel to harvest and smoke their winter supply of chum, sockeye, and coho salmon and to pick blueberries, crabapples, and highbush cranberries (Turner and Thompson 2006). These trips are now made by fishing boat or speedboat rather than by cedar dugout canoe, and people sometimes preserve their fish, seaweed, and berries in freezers, with the help of electric generators, rather than sun drying or smoking all of it right away. But the basic purpose of the trip remains the same: to acquire the necessities of life and enhance food security, while strengthening social bonds and reinforcing and passing on to younger generations the knowledge and experience needed to survive and thrive in a people’s territory. The Nature of Plant Resources Plant resources include not only the different types of food produced by plants but also the various types of material they provide – such as wood for fuel and construction, sheets of bark and fibrous materials for basketry, and tree pitch for glue and caulking – and the medicines they furnish for treating illness and injury and for health maintenance. As recounted in previous chapters, these resources are derived from hundreds of different species, many of which produce different products from the same plant. Thimbleberry, for example, yields edible green shoots in the springtime, sweet edible berries in the summer, and from spring through fall, large soft leaves that can be used as makeshift containers, as a lining for berry baskets and berry-drying racks, and as a wrapping for food when pit-cooking. Year round, insect galls are produced on the stems of thimbleberry, which are burned and used as medicine by some people (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Western hemlock is another example of a multipurpose plant. In late spring, it yields edible cambium and inner bark, and in spring and at other times, it provides soft-needled boughs for harvesting herring eggs, lining food storage pits, ritual scrubbing, and other purposes. Hunters can use its young branch tips, rich in vitamin C, as an emergency hunger suppressant.

Moving for the Harvest  |  5

Throughout the year, the bark can be harvested and used as a dye and tanning agent and as a medicine for internal bleeding, and the wood can be employed as a fuel, especially for banking fires overnight. Many other plant species are similarly versatile, being used for different purposes at different times of the year. As noted in chapter 7, there is a high degree of congruency between plants used for food and those used for medicine. The same could be said for plant foods and plant materials. In fact, using a plant species in multiple ways is more the rule than the exception. Species Distributions

Each plant species has its own pattern of distribution and abundance, based on a range of factors related to environmental history, modes and vectors of dissemination, ecological requirements, and tolerances and interactions with other species. Phytogeography is the study of patterns and processes of plant distribution: where plants occur, why they occur there, and in what combinations or vegetation patterns they occur (Klinkenberg 2013). Recognizing these patterns of plant distribution in terms of the species used by First Peoples is essential to understanding patterns of human settlement and movement, as well as patterns of plant use. Many culturally important plants, like lodgepole pine and yarrow, are widespread across the landscape and occur virtually over the entire study area. Others are much more restricted in their distribution, and most have specific ecological requirements that limit their ability to survive in many habitats. Thus, even in regions where they are known to exist (as shown on distribution maps, for example), they tend to occur in patches or in linear zones or to be dispersed sporadically, based on their own particular ecological tolerances and patterns of growth and dissemination.1 Although a species may occur in a number of different vegetation zones, it usually predominates in just one or two of these. Not even ubiquitous weedy species like dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) occur universally on the landscape. One of the major determinants of overall distributions of plants in northwestern North America today is the area’s geological history, particularly the time of the Pleistocene glaciation, when virtually the entire area was scoured, with only a few locations, or refugia, remaining ice-free and able to support plant (and animal) life. Some of these ice-free regions were in the north, in the area of the Beringian land bridge and northeastern Asia, for example. Some were scattered along the Pacific Coast in sites on Haida Gwaii, on the Brooks Peninsula, and in areas now covered by ocean since sea levels are considerably higher today than during the last ice age. There were also some mountain peaks, or nunataks, in the interior not covered by ice, and there was evidently a long, ice-free corridor between the two major continental ice sheets running along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, at least during the late Pleistocene.

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The only other ice-free area in the study region during the last glaciation was south of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, in parts of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, as well as farther south, in Oregon, California, and the Great Basin (Pielou 1991; see also chapter 2). All of the trees, shrubs, and other plants that make up the vast forests, the interior grasslands, the wetlands, and the subalpine parklands from Alaska to the southern extent of the ice sheets – and all of the animals these ecosystems support – established themselves in this area originally from one or more of these ice-free regions (Pielou 1991). Some species entered the deglaciated region from the north, some from the west, and many others from the south. Some colonized the area more rapidly and spread farther than others, and some flourished and dominated while others declined over time or became sporadic and infrequent, perhaps less able to compete with more aggressive species. Major changes in climate and geological events over the intervening Holocene period have also determined past and present distributions of species. Apart from their ability to spread into a given environment and to survive and reproduce within it, plant species vary widely in their growth and reproductive patterns, as well as in the quality and productivity of their fruit, bark, or other useful parts. Fruit-producing species, such as saskatoon berry, black huckleberry, chokecherry, soapberry, and Pacific crabapple, may include varieties or populations that produce an abundance of large, sweet, juicy fruits, whereas other populations or individuals of the same species may produce only small, sparse, bitter-tasting fruits. Some western redcedar trees are bushy, with many branches lower down on the trunk, whereas others grow tall, straight trunks with few branches, ideal for harvesting bark strips. Such differences may be based on either genetic or environmental factors, or both – variable responses to moisture, sunlight, availability of pollinators, competition from other plants, herbivory and insect predation, or seasonal temperatures – playing out on different temporal and geographical scales. Much of this variation is recognized by local Indigenous peoples, and some is linguistically encoded in the names for different types and varieties of plants or in the names for places that produce a particular resource of high quality and repute. The lower portions of Glacier Bay, Alaska, for example, are called Shákw Aaní (“Strawberry Land”) in Tlingit, in recognition of the quality and productivity of strawberries (Fragaria chiloensis) to be found there (Thornton 1999). Most species and varieties of plants have an optimal range of conditions under which they will thrive, growing and reproducing at stable and predictable rates, even in the face of some level of disturbance or harvest from humans and other animals. If people are able to use the products of these species without depleting them or, conversely, are able to compensate for any depletion by enhancing their growth, distribution, or productivity in some way, this constitutes sustainable resource use.2 Ultimately, the occurrence, abundance, quality, and

Moving for the Harvest  |  7

productivity of a particular plant resource at a particular place and time, with or without cultural modification, determine its availability. The combinations or complexes of productive, culturally important plant and animal species in a given locality during a given season – along with other environmental factors such as the accessibility of water and a suitable microclimate – are a key to peoples’ settlement patterns and seasonal movements. Variability and Predictability

Aside from the overall presence or absence of particular plant species in a given region based on their overall range and on the preference or tolerance for particular sites or habitats within the range, plants also vary significantly in growth and reproductive capacity from year to year and over cycles of years, as well as due to annual seasonal differences. Berries and fruits in particular seem to fluctuate in productivity from one year to the next; even domesticated apples, cherries, and other orchard crops are known to oscillate in fruit yields.3 Sometimes the productivity of an entire population of a fruit species will be similarly affected, positively or negatively, or sometimes variation will be limited to a given patch or an individual bush or tree. In any case, berries have been called the quintessential patchy resource, and people’s harvesting strategies have to take this patchiness into account (Thornton 1999). Having alternative or backup resource-harvesting sites or fallback species on which to rely when the usual crops fail is part of a group’s overall Traditional Ecological Knowledge system.4 In contrast to berries, edible “root” species tend to be more predictable and reliable in their availability,5 and as discussed in chapter 4, they have often served as a backup resource in times of food scarcity. Even edible roots, however, vary in taste and quality through their growing season (Loewen 1998). With a few exceptions, they are usually harvested either when the plant is in its dormant or early growing state and has not yet flowered (e.g., bitterroot and nodding onion) or after it has flowered and gone to seed and the leaves have started to die back (e.g., camas, Camassia spp.; and silverweed, Argentina spp.). Other resources, such as edible red laver seaweed, eelgrass, and cow-parsnip, may vary in their optimal time for harvest or in the duration of the time that they are considered edible, depending on local weather conditions or on longterm climatic conditions (Turner and Clifton 2009), but they tend to be available and predictable in places where they grow and in their overall harvest season from one year to the next. One of the most variable and unpredictable of all food substances in the Interior Plateau is Douglas-fir sugar, mainly comprised of a trisaccharide, melezitose, produced by some interior Douglas-firs. Under extremely rare conditions (particularly during stretches of hot, dry summer days) and in specific sites (usually north-facing upland slopes, with high soil moisture), this sugar is exuded from

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the tips of the fir needles, forming crystalline deposits resembling globs of icing sugar all over the boughs of the tree. A number of Nlaka’pamux elders remembered seeing and/or tasting this sugar, which was never predictable enough to be more than an occasional confection, brought home by hunters and other travellers in the high country, but relished when they had the chance to taste it (Turner 1997a; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990).6 Variation within Species

Almost all culturally used plant species are known to vary in quality from place to place; some localities and habitats are recognized as prime for particular products. For example, Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994) described a particular site where her family used to harvest skwekwíne (Eastern dialect) (spring beauty, or mountain potato) at Skwelkwekwelt (formerly Baldy Mountain, now called Sun Peaks), a location that produced remarkably large corms: I can barely remember one time; I was with my mother and my dad and a bunch of us. Down below [in the valley bottoms around Chase and Salmon Arm], you had to use a digging stick to dig for the roots. Up there, it was like soft moss covering the ground – places you didn’t even need a stick. My mother used to just feel around under the moss and here was these great big potatoes – big as golf balls … You could just feel it, pushing around under the moss [with your bare feet]. It was just something to pick that and fill a gunnysack … When they came back, they had bags and bags of the vegetables on the packhorses. Similar highly productive sites were known for yellow glacier lily, desert parsley (Lomatium macrocarpum), tiger lily, balsamroot, saskatoon berries, soapberries, and almost all of the other major food plant species of the Interior Plateau. These special places, like the Tlingit Glacier Bay strawberry site mentioned earlier, are sometimes named for the plants that thrive there. The Secwepemc name for Salmon Arm, Sxwseméłp,7 for example, is said literally to mean “soapberry plants”; people came by canoe and boat from all around the lake and beyond to harvest soapberries there (Mary Thomas 2001). In Tsilhqot’in territory is a mountain called Tsinuzchéd (Potato Mountain), famous for the density of its spring beauty, or mountain potatoes, called súnt’iny (figure 8-1) (Mellott 2010; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). It is said in Tsilhqot’in origin narratives that the wild “potatoes” were originally planted there by a woman named ʔeniyud, who had separated from her husband, Ts’ilʔos, and was travelling over toward Tatlayoko Lake; she planted súnt’iny on her way across (L.R. Smith 2008b).8 Many other prime harvesting places have such stories associated with their origins.

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8-1  |  Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata), called súnt’iny, from Potato Mountain, in the territory of the Xeni Gwet’in Tsilhqot’in.

On the coast, too, people travelled considerable distances to obtain the best-tasting cow-parsnip shoots in the spring, even though other cow-parsnip plants could be found closer at hand. Some people have noted that cow-parsnip shoots growing in the shade are milder tasting and therefore harvested in preference to those growing in the bright sun.9 Salal berries, thimbleberries, highbush cranberries, Pacific crabapples, camas, springbank clover, and Pacific silverweed all had their favoured harvesting places in Pacific coast environments, locations where they were known to be prolific and of highest quality. People visited these special harvesting localities year after year, sometimes generation after generation (Bouchard and Kennedy 1990; Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Kuhnlein, Turner, and Kluckner 1982; Turner and Kuhnlein 1982, 1983). Not just food plants but other kinds of plant resources as well vary in quality and productivity according to where they are growing and the environmental conditions under which they develop. Many weavers of cedar bark (Thuja plicata and Chamaecyparis nootkatensis), for example, seek the best bark from trees that are growing somewhat away from salt water, that are well spaced in dense forests on slopes, and that have smooth, unbranching trunks. Cedar roots and spruce roots (Picea sitchensis, P. glauca) are likewise preferred from trees that have few branches low down and that are growing in sandy (not rocky) soil, meaning

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the roots will be long and straight, with few branches or kinks (Turner 1992a, 1998, 2004a). Some basket makers seek western redcedar roots from rotten logs because these roots are especially fine and straight; others look for prime, long roots in sandy soil such as alongside a river or in a sand dune area. The best cedar trees for rectangular bark roofing sheets, for planks, and for canoe making were also known to occur at particular sites, where the trees were not only readily accessible, and the right age and size, but also had the right quality of bark or wood: straight-grained, easily split, and not too brittle. Indian-hemp and stinging nettle also vary considerably in the length and quality of their stem fibres depending on where they are growing: damp, open swales near lakes are considered best for the former and moist shaded forest edges best for the latter. Similarly, cattail, tule (Schoenoplectus acutus), basket sedge (Carex obnupta), and “three square” (Schoenoplectus americanus) have their prime harvesting sites, well known to weavers, and are accessed from these particular places year after year. Medicinal plants, too, are said to vary in quality and therapeutic effectiveness depending upon their location. Sometimes people travelled long distances just to obtain a certain medicine from a special place, even when the same species might be growing closer at hand. As noted in chapter 7, medicinal plants growing at higher elevations were often considered especially strong and potent, compared with populations at lower altitudes (Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). In all, people selected the products they needed based on a combination of factors: seasonal and annual weather conditions, general preferred habitat, specific locations known to produce healthy, productive plants, the known quality of particular populations of harvestable plants in terms of desired traits (fewer branches, smoother bark, larger berries), and even soughtafter features of one part of an individual plant, whether the fruit, the wood, or the roots. Of course, proprietorship of plant resources and harvesting places was also an important consideration (see chapters 9 and 11). A good example of how all of these aspects interact is in Mary Thomas’s (pers. comm., 1994) description of harvesting paper birch bark for basket making: You have to know how to collect that bark, when to get it. You can only gather the birch bark, say, late May, June, and then it starts to stick back. Once it sticks, you can’t get it. So you have to get your supply when it’s ready. And you can’t go and just take bark from any old place; you have to really look for it. And it takes you maybe a whole day of searching to get the right texture. You don’t just take any bark at all. You have to test the tree. Some are very brittle; some are nice and spongy. And you have to look for the right kind of bark. The shorter the eyelets [lenticels], the better, and it doesn’t crack easily. If you get the long eyelets, it will crack [and] your basket is ruined … And you don’t just go and cut any part of the birch tree, you have to know which side to cut it on … [the bark] always

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8-2  |  Mary Thomas with her birch-bark baskets (Betula papyrifera).

splits on the north side of the tree. If you go and look at a birch tree, you’ll notice the one side has the little fluffs all the way up. And that’s the thin part of your bark. So if you cut on the opposite side, you’re going to get that thin part right in the middle of your basket and your basket’s going to be ruined in no time [figure 8-2].

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Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994) also noted that the timing for the birchbark harvest can vary from year to year: “According to the weather the old people would know when to do it [harvest the bark] – it’s been so warm this year [1994] the birch bark might be ready around May” (see also chapter 6). Furthermore, aside from the practical knowledge of where, when, and how to harvest the birch bark, for real success in any enterprise, one must also follow the spiritual protocols, approaching the tree or other plant with gratitude and respect, so that the plant will be generous and giving, taking only what one needs, and never harming the plant unnecessarily (see chapters 11 and 13). Variations in Harvesting

Differences in microclimate and topography within a region or territory influence the growth and maturation rates of species. Sometimes one can go to cooler, shadier locations to find greens, berries, or cedar bark at their prime for harvesting after the same type of resource is finished in other nearby areas. Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) described a site on a particular mountain above Kingcome Inlet in Tsawataineuk (Kwakwaka’wakw) territory, for example, where one could always find salmonberries that were still good to pick in August – a month or more after the berries had disappeared in other locations. Altitudinal differences in ripening times, or times for optimal harvest, are particularly significant in terms of expanding opportunities for harvest. Most culturally important species have relatively wide distributions. Many extend in range from lower elevations to higher altitudes, where their growth and development are correspondingly later (Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). For such species, with respect to the timing of ripening, a vertical change of between 500 and 2,000 metres may be the equivalent of a very wide latitudinal change, such as between the locations of the Fraser and the Skeena Rivers along the British Columbia coast. Roots, berries, and other species are generally ready for harvesting much earlier in the valley bottoms than at upper elevations. In some cases, however, since cooler air may settle in the troughs between mountains, plants growing on the hillsides above the valley bottoms may actually ripen earlier than those of the same species on the valley floor. Any berry picker would be familiar with the patterns of ripening related to particular locations within her territory and take these into account when planning her harvest schedule. McDonald (2003, 54) explains for the Ts’msyen people of the Skeena River, “Just as different environmental and genetic factors contribute to different varieties of wine grapes, mountain berries are affected by their location.” Winnie Wesley taught McDonald that berries are sweeter high “up mountain,” and she called these “mountain berries.” Gitxsan people also gravitate to traditional berry patches halfway up the mountain (Johnson Gottesfeld 1994). For the

Moving for the Harvest  |  13

Nisga’a, too, some of the prime harvesting sites for berries occur at high elevations, as described by one elder: “The berries they get up the mountains are especially valued because of their sweetness and few seeds: [there is] a black berry, like blueberries, called maay’im lax-sgan’ist [“berry of the mountains,” Vaccinium membranaceum] in Nisga’a. They don’t ripen until late September; they’re pretty high up. They are used quite a bit for flavouring the different foods. There are only certain places in the mountains where they are harvested. That’s one of the reasons the people live close to the creeks that come down from these sub-alpine areas” (Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a 1995, 78–9). The ability to harvest from a range of altitudes effectively extends the overall harvest season for a given species or resource. When this expansion occurs for a cluster of species, each with a broad altitudinal range, the advantage of seasonal movement is multiplied, and the stage is set for a patterned migration within a group’s territory from lower to higher elevations (see Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; and A.G. Marshall 1977). In the eastern part of Secwepemc territory, for example, both skwekwíne (spring beauty, or mountain potato) and sxwixw (yellow glacier lily) grow along the valley bottoms and sidehills around Shuswap Lake above Chase and Salmon Arm. The people of Neskonlith, Adams Lake, and Skwlax (Little Shuswap) start digging these roots there in May and June, just as the plants start to produce fruiting capsules and the leaves die back. This harvest is over by the end of June, but then, in late June, July, and even into August, the same types of roots are ready for harvesting at various nearby upper-elevation sites: Neskonlith Meadows, Skwelkwelkwlt, Tod Mountain, Taft Mountain, Mount Revelstoke, Mount Lolo, and others. The ripening of saskatoon berries follows a similar progression. Thus Secwepemc families travelling to these upland places in the summer are able to continue harvesting these roots and berries, along with hunting, fishing, and gathering their special medicines (Turner, Ignace, and Ignace 2000; Mary Thomas 2001). For seaweed and some of the green shoots, harvesting itself can also prolong the time period of prime production of the resource. The Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) at their seaweed-halibut camp on Princess Royal Island sometimes picked two “crops” of edible red laver seaweed from the same sites in the same season. The rocks were picked “clean” of the seaweed in early May, and the first harvest was dried for storage and trade. Then a few weeks later, the alga fronds had grown back and could be harvested again, without evident damage to the longterm productivity of the species since this practice is longstanding, with people using the same sites for many generations (Turner 2003a; Turner and Clifton 2006).10 Similarly, breaking off the young shoots of thimbleberry, salmonberry, and cow-parsnip will trigger the plants’ meristematic tissues, stimulating them to produce more shoots within a few weeks, which can also then be harvested, in moderation, just as in picking asparagus from a garden.

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Seasons and Phenological Indicators

When the range of variability in animal resources is added to that of plants, the complexity around resource availability is even more pronounced. Shellfish, being more or less stationary, except in their larval stage, may show the same types of variability as plants, but there are times (such as during the red tide season in summer) when it is dangerous to harvest them and other times when they do not taste good (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2011). Fish, birds, and game all have their own cycles of reproduction and seasonal movement or migration. Because many of these species are often totally absent from an area, and because they are usually at their prime for hunting or fishing only at certain stages in their lifecycles, their availability is even harder to predict than for plants and shellfish. Everywhere, people have developed signs or strategies to assist them in gauging seasonal changes and in predicting the arrival of, or best harvesting times for, fish, birds, or mammals and other key events related to resource availability. Some of these signs are encoded in various languages in the study region in the names of the seasons (table 8-1), which in turn relate generally to the cycles of the moon. The seasonal appearance and relative position of stars and planets also assist in determining resource-harvesting times, as does, of course, the position of the sun and the relative length of days and nights (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2005; Recalma-Clutesi 2007; Turner, Recalma-Clutesi, and Deur 2013). The timing of events in the lifecycles of plants, called phenology, is a particularly good indicator of environmentally and seasonally determined events related to resource use. Species whose lifecycle stage or condition helps to estimate the timing of other seasonal events and developments are known as phenological indicators, and “traditional phenological knowledge” is an important component of any Traditional Ecological Knowledge system. In temperate regions, plant lifecycles are relatively predictable, with timing responding to factors such as photoperiod and accumulated heat thresholds in the environment. The generally reliable sequencing of the blooming of flowers and ripening of fruits can thus be used to time other concurrent events and to guide human activities like berry picking or fishing. A survey of ethnobotanical and ethnographic literature for phenological indicators in over twenty linguistic groups within the study area revealed well over 140 examples, with about half being direct linkages between the flowering time or other phenological response in one species and the onset of a prominent lifecycle stage in a second species, such as a particular bird, mammal, fish, or fruit (Lantz and Turner 2003). One illustration is the Nuu-chah-nulth recognition of the correspondence between the ripening of the salmonberries and the return of sockeye salmon to their freshwater spawning grounds (Bouchard and

Moving for the Harvest  |  15

Table 8-1  |  Examples of seasons named after plants Approximate month

March April

Language

Name

Chilkat Tlingit

héen taanáx kayaani ‘plants grow underwater’

Stl’atl’imx

płsxwixwm ‘when the avalanche [glacier] lilies start to grow’ (Turner 1998; Turner, Bouchard, et al. 1987)

Squamish

Okanagan

May

kayaani ‘green plants’

Straits Salish (Saanich)

pənexwəng ‘moon of the camas harvest’ (Claxton and Elliott 1993)

Gitxsan

łoxsa maaʔy ‘time for berry picking’

Ts’msyen

Ts’msyen Ditidaht Sechelt

Secwepemc July

pełʔeʔłqten, pesxwixwem ‘digging month,’ ‘time to dig avalanche [glacier] lily bulbs’ (Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming) kiamgam laxmai ‘moon when they pick berries’ (Compton 1993b)

tł’ihapaxpł ‘time of the red huckleberry’ (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983) tem kweekwel ‘salmonberry time’ (Maud 1978d)

płltqaitq’atan ‘time of strawberries’ (Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming)

Gùlanx ‘time for picking salmonberries’ (Compton 1993b)

Squamish

temqw’éləm’xw ‘time of [trailing] blackberry’ (Bouchard and Turner 1976)

Tlingit (Chilkoot) Squamish

September

haʔliʔ làx làʔàsk ‘time for gathering seaweed’

Oweekeno

Secwepemc August

sp’itł’mtn ‘bitterroot’; Okanagan First Roots ceremony held when the bitterroot starts to bend over (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980); Ktunaxa root-digging season also begins with this plant (Hart 1976)

Carcross-Tagish

Secwepemc

June

temtsáʔtsqay ‘when the salmonberry shoots ripen’ (Bouchard and Turner 1976)

Sechelt

Tlingit (Chilkoot)

pełqwelqw’l’t, pełkákaldxmex ‘getting ripe’ (Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming) (saskatoon berries are ready to pick) (Teit 1909, 518) quk’eet ‘berry picking’ (Thornton 2004)

tem t’áqaʔ ‘when the salal berries ripen’ (Bouchard and Turner 1976) tem t’áqa ‘salal berry time’ (Hill-Tout [1910])

kaxwéix ‘highbush cranberries’ (Viburnum edule) (Thornton 2004)

16 | part three – integration and management

Table 8-1 | continued Approximate month

Language

Name

Ts’msyen

kiamgam lax tsa’wast ‘when some kind of late [salal] berries ripen’ (Compton 1993b)

Oweekeno October

Nuxalk

tsakulstaAm ‘moon when there are no more berries’ (Compton 1993b)

siqaalxm ‘time for gathering the rootstocks of spiny wood fern’ (Turner 1973)

Note: No plant references were found for winter months (November to February). Source: Specific references for names are cited in the table. Based on Lantz and Turner (2003).

Kennedy 1990). Other examples are provided in table 8-2. This survey revealed that the ripening of certain berries is one of the most common events to be applied in phenological determinations by Indigenous peoples in the study area. The ripening of a particular berry can both signal other phenological events and be signalled by them, as when the ripening of saskatoon berries is indicated by the blooming of the prickly pear cactus for the Okanagan (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). One of the most widely recognized examples of phenological knowledge that relates to berry ripening is the relationship between the singing of the Swainson’s thrush, or “salmonberry bird” (Hylocichla ustulata), and the ripening of salmonberries. The Tlingit, Haida, Haisla, Oweekeno, Squamish, Nuu-chahnulth, Ditidaht, and Straits Salish all associate the singing of this bird with the ripening of salmonberries (as in the stories and songs of Salmonberry Bird recounted in chapter 12). It is perhaps not surprising that berries should feature so widely in phenological knowledge systems. Berries are a highly valued food yet often require considerable time and effort to harvest, especially because some of the best kinds may occur in distant places. The ability to predict when these berries will be plentiful and at the optimum ripeness can give people a considerable advantage in scheduling their harvest and travelling times. Considering that wild roses (Rosa spp.) (figure 8-3), of all the plant species named by Indigenous peoples in the study region, had the highest frequency of naming (see chapter 3), perhaps it is not surprising that the blooming of the roses in late May and June is a widely recognized occurrence and a primary phenological indicator for a host of different harvesting events, including the ripening of the first wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca) and soapberries of the season, as well as an indicator of the ascent up the Fraser River of the second run of spring salmon, called qel’qásuł (lit. “rose-hip fish”) by the Fraser River

Moving for the Harvest  |  17

Table 8-2  |  Examples of plants as traditional phenological indicators for Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America Plant species

Indigenous group

Role as phenological indicator

Green pond slime (Spirogyra spp.) and common water moss (Fontinalis antipyretica)

Nuu-chah-nulth (Turner and Efrat 1982)

When pond slime and water moss are washed out from the river with the first heavy rains of fall, the coho salmon run is beginning

Lushootseed (Hilbert and Bates 1992)

When the bracken fern starts to sprout and grow, the truly warm days have arrived

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum)

Western larch (Larix occidentalis) Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum) Sitka alder (Alnus viridis)

Okanagan (Ray 1932; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

When the larch needles turn yellow in fall, the female black bears are entering their dens

Okanagan (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

When fir cones shed their pollen, the edible inner bark of ponderosa pine is ready to harvest

Heiltsuk (Compton 1993b)

Catkin ripening indicates that horse clams are ready to harvest

Kwakwaka’wakw (Turner and Bell 1973)

Sap running in maples indicates that edible inner bark of western hemlock and other species is ready to harvest

Flowering of saskatoon berry indicates bitterroot roots are ready to harvest

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)

Nlaka’pamux (Bandringa 1999)

Black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii)

Okanagan (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium)

Nlaka’pamux (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Haida (Turner 2004a)

When cow-parsnip is blooming, the seagull eggs are no longer good to eat

Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)

Comox (Turner 1997b)

When oceanspray is blooming, the butter clams are ready to harvest

Locoweed (Astralagus miser)

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum)

Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)

Okanagan (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Saanich (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1998)

Blooming of locoweed indicates that edible cambium of lodgepole pine is ready to harvest

When black hawthorn berries are ripe in the valleys, black mountain huckleberries are ripening in the high country Blooming indicates that it is time to hunt mule deer

When oceanspray is blooming, the sockeye salmon are starting their spawning migration

18 | part three – integration and management

Table 8-2 | continued Plant species

Indigenous group

Role as phenological indicator

Blue lupine (Lupinus sericeus)

Okanagan (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Blooming of the lupine indicates that it is time to hunt marmots

Prickly pear cactus (Opuntia fragilis) Mock-orange (Philadelphus lewisii) Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)

Sagebrush buttercup (Ranunculus glaberrimus)

Desert currant (Ribes cereum) Coastal black gooseberry (Ribes divaricatum)

Okanagan (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Okanagan (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Nlaka’pamux (Bandringa 1999)

Blooming of the cactus indicates that saskatoon berries are ripening Blooming of mock-orange indicates that it is time to hunt marmots Leafing out of chokecherry indicates that bitterroot is ready to harvest

Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River) (Turner 1992b)

Called “spring salmon eye”; blooming of buttercup indicates the first run of spring salmon in the Fraser River

Nlaka’pamx (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Leafing of desert currant in spring indicates beginning of steelhead trout spawning migration

Klallam (Laurence C. Thompson, pers. comm., 1975; L.C. Thompson and Thompson [1975–80])

Wild rose (Rosa nutkana)

Stl’atl’imx (Pemberton) (Turner 1997b)

Wild roses (Rosa spp.)

Stl’atl’imx (Fraser River) (Turner 1992a, 1992b, 1997b)

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)

Nuxalk (Turner 1973)

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)

Ditidaht (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983)

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)

Nuu-chah-nulth (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983)

When the gooseberries are formed, the spring salmon come

Blooming of wild rose indicates that western redcedar roots and basket grass (Phalaris arundinacea) are ready to harvest

Blooming of wild roses indicates the beginning of the second run of spring salmon, as well as the ripening of wild strawberries and soapberries

When thimbleberry shoots are ready to eat, the edible seaweed is ready to harvest

Ripening of salmonberries means that oval-leaved blueberries (Vaccinium ovalifolium) are ripening

Ripening of salmonberries means that sockeye salmon runs are beginning

Moving for the Harvest  |  19

Table 8-2 | continued Plant species

Indigenous group

Role as phenological indicator

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa)

Nuu-chah-nulth (Bouchard and Kennedy 1990)

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis)

Secwepemc (Turner, Ignace, and Loewen forthcoming)

Blooming of elderberry means that halibut-fishing season has started and that it is time to hunt harbour seals and gray whales

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis)

Stl’atl’imx (Turner 1997b)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica)

Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) (Turner and Clifton 2009)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica)

Nuu-chah-nulth (Turner and Efrat 1982)

Evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum)

Nuu-chah-nulth (Turner and Efrat 1982)

Ripening of soapberries indicates beginning of the sockeye salmon spawning migration

Ripening of soapberries indicates that sockeye salmon smolts are no longer good to eat

Stinging nettle growth parallels that of edible seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae), so you can use nettles to gauge when the seaweed is long enough to harvest

When the nettle shoots are about 10 centimetres high, Pacific halibut fishing will be good

Ripening of berries indicates the beginning of the spawning migration for chum (dog) salmon

Source: Specific references for Indigenous groups are cited in the table. Based on tables in Lantz and Turner (2003).

Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc. These fish have a deep pink stripe along their sides, the colour of the wild rose blossoms, and are said to be fast swimmers (Art Adolph, pers. comm., 2005; Kennedy and Bouchard 1986).11 For the Pemberton Stl’atl’imx basket makers, the time when the wild rose blooms is the best time to harvest cedar roots and reed canarygrass (Phalaris arundinacea) stems, which are carefully cured and then split open and used along with bitter cherry bark for decorative overlay in their coiled cedar-root basketry (Turner 1992a; see also chapter 6). The majority of phenological signals that relate to animal resources pertain to fish. In all, the survey identified eighteen indicators for fish lifecycle events, more than half of which are related to the migrating and spawning of salmon. Other indicators are for when birds’ eggs are ready, the time for clam harvesting, and the time for hunting bears and marmots (see table 8-2). The examples documented in Lantz and Turner (2003) and in table 8-2 are only a few of literally hundreds of phenological indicators known to and used by individuals and communities in northwestern North America. The immense diversity

20 | part three – integration and management

8-3  |  Wild rose (Rosa acicularis). Its blooming around June is a common phenological indicator.

and heterogeneity of the homelands of these peoples – with resources not only separated by great distances over a wide altitudinal range but also varying from year to year in their optimal harvest times and availability as well as in their productivity – have made the development of “proxies” in the form of phenological indicators particularly valuable, potentially saving considerable time and energy, especially when people are seeking less easily seen resources, such as fish. Cultural Habitats of High Significance Ecologically, geographically, and biologically determined variation across a region produces patchiness, zonality, and variation in resources, ultimately

Moving for the Harvest  |  21

resulting in biological diversity on all scales: genetic, within a species or population, or within a habitat and landscape. This diversity is important for people because it gives more options for resources, in terms of both variety and availability. Habitats where significant numbers of culturally useful species occur together, usually because of similar ecological requirements and tolerances, are particularly sought out, especially when the resources in a place are ready for harvesting at about the same time and when these habitats are relatively easily accessed. The diverse habitats and special landforms that produce them are featured in the vocabularies of every language throughout the study region.12 For example, McNeary (1976, 77) recorded distinct Nisga’a names for avalanche track, rockslide, tree blowdown, meadow, swamp, river, stream, lake, cottonwood forest, mud forest, wooden slope, hilly land, mountain, gully, valley, and upstream and downstream areas. Dr Ron Ignace (2008, 5–8) provides a comparable and even more detailed list of Secwepemc place types13 and emphasizes their importance: People can predict what kinds of landforms they will encounter throughout their travels, and what kinds of sources of animal and plant foods, sources of water and shelter, and ecological indicators for all of these they will encounter. For example, as elders explained to us in mapping out these generic landscape terms, you know that a plateau lake will have an outflow, where you usually find trout after break-up in spring. As forest ecologists know, you will find certain plants on the sunny (southwest) side of mountains, others on the moister northeast side. Forested areas in the Plateau will include moist meadows … that will, in turn, provide pasture for horses, a nearby creek and a good overnight camping location. Along the rivers, back-eddies exist in predictable locations near out-croppings and [these] … are the locations for salmon fishing. Some of these habitats – or clusters of adjacent habitats – become special nodes of cultural activity, occupied intensively at times of the year when the greatest numbers of cultural resources are available there. Often these places are situated geographically and ecologically at the intersections, or edges, of two or more different ecological zones – for example, along a coastline or river estuary, at the edge of a wetland or prairie, or at the edge of the treeline in the mountains where one or more creeks are descending through a mosaic of high-elevation woods and montane meadows. By situating themselves in such locations, people gain access to a greater diversity of resources, as well as availing themselves of the best opportunities for travel, shelter, and protection (Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty 2003). A good example is, again, the site of Salmon Arm on the southern arm of Shuswap Lake in Secwepemc territory. As noted previously, the Salmon Arm

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area was known for (and apparently originally named after) its soapberries. But this locale, with its unique combination of wetlands and uplands, also offered a great abundance of other plant resources. In the woodlands, as well as birch, western redcedar, and many other trees useful for shelter and construction, one could find quantities of wild raspberries, saskatoon berries, chokecherries and pin cherries, highbush cranberries (Viburnum opulus), and cow-parsnip shoots. At the estuary of the Salmon River were extensive floodplains, with great patches of wapato (Sagittaria latifolia), water-parsnip (Sium suave), Indian-hemp, and cattail, all of which, as recalled by Mary Thomas (2001), the Secwepemc people would harvest, the first two as root vegetables and the last two as materials. Large cottonwoods along the shoreline provided important animal habitat and prime logs for dugout canoes, as well as shelter and wood for fuel. Salmon River and Shuswap Lake produced abundant fish and waterfowl, including mallards and coots, which were hunted and whose eggs were gathered in season from among the cattail patches at the river mouth. On the benchlands above the lake was once a long slough where people used to pick enormous quantities of trapper’s tea and bog cranberries and where the fragrant, little creeping snowberry (Chiogenes hispidula) grew in abundance. Secwepemc people used to come from all around the territory to harvest these diverse resources. Unfortunately, most of this highly productive area was changed and destroyed by railway and highway construction, dykes and river diversions, cattle grazing, farming, and urban settlement (Garibaldi 2003; Mary Thomas 2001). We can call such special diversely productive places “cultural keystone places” because they are so critically important to peoples’ lifeways. Every Indigenous territory includes such keystone locales, often incorporating permanent settlement areas or long-term seasonal camps. Collectively, as accessed over the course of a year, these places provided virtually the full spectrum of resources people needed for their survival. Sometimes these cultural keystone places were so productive that more than one group would seek them out, either as shared harvesting sites or as destinations where a particular group hosted visiting neighbours who might be given permission to harvest particular resources under the host’s supervision and with some form of reciprocity in place. Some of these places have been renowned gathering centres for diverse peoples. For example, the area around the mouth of the Nass River in Nisga’a territory on the northern coast of British Columbia is famous for its rich oulachen14 fishery and oulachen grease production, as well as for other fish, seafood, crabapples, and a host of other animal and plant resources. This locality is said to have been the homeland for the Tlingit-speaking peoples (Thornton 2008), and it features in many Ts’msyen stories as well (McDonald 2003). The Tlingit recognized a few special and exceptionally fruitful places within their own territory that they called “berry land” – places widely known throughout Tlingit country and beyond. Not only were these places owned, defended,

Moving for the Harvest  |  23

and celebrated by Tlingit lineages, but they were even cultivated through eons using “magic” (heixwa) and other methods, such as pruning, that were intended to enhance the productivity of the berries and other resources (Thornton 1999). Another of these productive resource locales is the lower Fraser Valley, from the Fraser estuary to the Chilliwack region, including an area known as Sumas Prairie, where an immense lake was drained for agricultural purposes in the post–First World War period (K.T. Carlson 2001). Known for its extensive wapato and bog cranberry patches, spawning sockeye, sturgeon, ducks and geese, cedar trees, cattail, and tule, among many other resources, this area attracted people from Vancouver Island and other parts of the coast, as well as from upriver areas. The famous fishing sites of the upper and lower Columbia River were similar magnets for people, not only because they provided fish but also because they were situated within areas of diverse wetland, prairie, and woodland habitats that multiplied available resources. In the Interior Plateau, there are many other examples. One of these is Botanie Valley in the territory of the Lytton band of the Nlaka’pamux, near the confluence of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers (figure 8-4) (Hanna and Henry 1995; Teit 1900; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). This upland valley is famous for its productive root and berry resources, as well as for its game and lake fish. Another key harvesting site where people converged was a place called “Many Roots,” near the Bridge River (at the intersection of Stl’atl’imx, Secwepemc, and Tsilhqot’in territories), which was known for its productive root resources and accessed by all of these peoples (Teit 1906a, 237, 256). Some people refer to such locations as “one stop shopping” places because they provide so completely for life’s necessities. Further examples of such gathering places, and the social outcomes of these areas in terms of sharing knowledge and experience, are described in chapters 9 and 10. Archaeologically, such “cultural keystone habitats” might be indicated by the presence of clusters of assorted and diverse artifacts, the presence of culturally modified trees, evidence of camping and food processing, and the presence of multiple resource species (berries, edible roots, and important wood and fuel species), as well as fresh water. For example, there are some sites in Kingcome Inlet where archaeologist Jim Stafford (pers. comm., 2009) and his colleagues have noted a strong correlation between intensive bark-harvesting sites indicated by numbers of bark-stripped trees and important berry-picking areas identified by local Tsawataineuk Kwakwaka’wakw. The presence of petroglyphs (rock carvings) or pictographs (rock paintings) may also be another indication of cultural keystone habitats, possibly associating these places with spiritual aspects of harvesting. An example is the immense number of carved boulders, with images of fish, humans, and apparent supernatural beings, at a site along the shoreline of Douglas Channel, near the fall salmon-fishing camp of the Gitga’at Nation. At this place, two rivers drain into the

24 | part three – integration and management

8-4  |  Botanie Valley, a high-elevation valley in Nlaka’pamux territory, a renowned gathering place and multi-use harvesting site – a “cultural keystone place.”

coastline, and the whole area is highly productive, not only for different kinds of salmon but also for clams and crabs, geese and ducks, bear and deer, and blueberries (Vaccinium ovalifolium, V. alaskaense), highbush cranberries, and different varieties of crabapples (Malus fusca), some of which were hereditary property of clan chiefs, matriarchs, and their families. There is a rich oral history centred here, and the petroglyphs (some of which are nearly worn away by the ocean’s wave action) provide a considerable time depth for its use and importance as a cultural keystone habitat for the Gitga’at. These centres for diverse culturally important species can shift over time as environmental conditions and interactions among species change. Natural events such as floods, tsunamis, volcanoes, and wildfires can impact species’ distributions, as can human activities such as landscape burning and intensive harvesting. Of course, peoples’ lifestyles and preferences may also change, such that once-important resources may be supplanted by others, and places

Moving for the Harvest  |  25

where these resources occurred may become relatively less crucial for survival, whereas others may take on increasing significance. Nevertheless, many culturally important sites are notably enduring. Following the arrival of Europeans, many of these special locales were appropriated as sites for fur-trading posts and settlements, taking advantage of the same conditions that made these such important resource centres for First Peoples. The routes that people have used to access these resource nodes, or “cultural keystone places,” and resource sites in general are significant in themselves. Many of these routes would have been established and determined by the spatial distribution of the keystone habitats, but they would also have provided incidental access to other resources along the way, as well as opportunities for interacting with other groups of people. The routes also served as conduits for dissemination of products, technologies, ideas, names, stories, and other cultural features, and together they allowed an immense network of travel and exchange over the entire study area and beyond. They included canoe routes along coastlines and inland waterways, winter and spring ice routes, land-based foot trails, and later, horse trails and roads. The trails, many probably originally established by migrating animals, traversed mountain passes, reached across islands and peninsulas, threaded along river canyons, cut across prairies, skirted wetlands, and penetrated dense forests. The entire area of northwestern North America was once criss-crossed with these courses, and many still exist. Some branch off from more major throughways; most connect settlements and campsites. Some serve as long-time trade routes, linking communities and nations; others mark boundaries of discrete territories. Some of the cultural keystone places are situated at a convergence of two or more such routes. Many of these travel routes are obvious, even today, from features along them such as campsites and hearth sites, marked trees, stone canoe runs, and worn-down tracks (Blackstock 2001), whereas others are now overlain by roads and highways or are completely overgrown. The “grease trails,” leading from locations all along the coast and following some of the major river courses into the interior, are among the best examples of routes connecting different resource nodes and regions (see Birchwater and Ulkatcho and Nuxalk elders 1993). These will be discussed further in chapter 10, on trade and exchange. The Ethnoecological Choreography: Seasonal Movements, Time, and Space As already implied, then, virtually all Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America, since time immemorial, have traditionally spent at least a portion of every year travelling and camping in various known sites around their territories, harvesting the variety of foods and other resources they required for survival from the range of habitats encountered. Unlike agrarian societies,

26 | part three – integration and management

where people were relatively sedentary, focusing much of their energy on food production in one area, people who rely on resources from places where they naturally occur have to move to their harvest sites. This movement, however, is not random but cyclical and predictable, within the constraints of weather, tides, seasons, the annual productivity of various resources, and other socially mediated factors. Cycles of time and productivity are integral to Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems, as explained by Nuu-chah-nulth elder Dr E. Richard Atleo (Chief Umeek): “In this way the process of life is acknowledged to be cyclical and reciprocal. The Creator is One and gives to all, and everything in creation gives, each to another. The Creator sends rain to water the earth, which then blooms to provide food for Nature, which in turn provides food for the human, who eventually dies and returns to the earth, which will bloom again to provide food for Nature, which in turn provides food for the human, again and again, in endless cycles” (Turner and Atleo 1998, 113). Throughout the study area, these seasonal movements are a significant feature of cultural ecology, influencing virtually every aspect of people’s lives, from social organization to spiritual beliefs. In terms of food security, having access to a wider diversity of foods from a broader area helps to mitigate the possibility of food scarcity by lessening a family’s or community’s reliance on any one type of food or any one locality. Kwakwaka’wakw clan chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm., 2005, 2006) described the seasonal rounds of his boyhood: The people are busy all through the year when a different season comes along. Herring time, cod time, clam time, all different. Keep you busy. How are you going to live through the winter? What you can eat? And what you’re going to put away for winter. Has to be smoked heavy or sundried … If the fish don’t come, the clam gardens are a backup. Clams, oulachens, ts’ats’ayem [eelgrass], back out [to the coast], up the river … up to the mountains … Two or three families on this island, three to four families on that island. Different spots. They keep looking at the stars, Qwam’a and Alujoy, then they move up the inlet, to get the salmon and smoke them. Then, out to clams, then back up to oulachens. After that, they spread out closer to the seaweed picking, then they move to where there’s lots of berries to make t’əqaʔ [dried berry cakes]. When I was growing up, there was no time. We go to bed when it gets dark … Get up in morning and do the same thing. Often, as described by Adam Dick, Edith O’Donaghey, Mary Thomas, and others who remember these seasonal travels, people would join forces with family members or close friends for harvesting and processing their food. Those who travelled to different sites and had opportunities to obtain different resources

Moving for the Harvest  |  27

would transfer some of their harvest to others through reciprocal sharing and gifting. In northwestern North America, the usual pattern of the seasonal round – established millennia ago – was for people to reside in permanent dwellings and villages during the coldest part of the year. Then, in early spring, they would leave their houses, usually in small family or clan groups, beginning a cycle of movement that would take them to different parts of their territory – from one cultural keystone place to another – before finishing in the late fall back at their winter homes. Over the past century or so, with participation in the wage economy, and more convenient modes of transportation, people have tended to use their home base increasingly, even during the harvesting times, returning for periods of time between their harvesting trips to bring the processed food back for storage and to reconnect with family and friends. Examples of seasonal round patterns of coastal and interior peoples of the study region are provided in table 8-3. Springtime on the Northwest Coast

Along the coast, people headed out from their winter homes, usually around March, to start their early fishing for halibut, the first runs of spring salmon, and many other species: red snapper, cod, herring and herring spawn, oulachen, and flounder. They might also dig clams and harvest crabs, mussels, and other shellfish as available. As noted in chapter 5, early spring could be a time of food scarcity for people, especially if there were storms or heavy snows that prevented travel or suppressed the growth of plants or the movement of animals. However, after a long winter of living mostly on dried, stored food, the prospect of fresh greens and other springtime food must have been a great incentive to venture out. The Haida name for the month of March, xiid gyaas (“laughing goose month”) signifies one of the first signs of the onset of spring, the northward flight of migratory geese. For the Saanich, the chorus of the tree frogs was the sign for people that spring had arrived and that the winter ceremonial season had come to an end; the frog is the “honoured keeper of the sacred seasons” (E. Claxton and Elliott 1993, 27). For those coastal people harvesting oulachens and rendering “grease” from these small oily fish, the eagerly anticipated oulachen season was heralded by the presence of flocks of gulls and seals following the oulachens to the river mouths, and even well up the rivers. If people killed a seal around this time, it might have oulachens in its stomach, a sure sign that the oulachens were starting to run. As Clan Chief Adam Dick noted, a certain alignment of stars was also one of the signs for people to move to the rivers for the oulachen harvest. Construction of oulachen weirs and traps, catching the oulachens, and then rendering the oil were an immense undertaking that required tremendous preparation,

28 | part three – integration and management

Table 8-3  |  Examples of seasonal round patterns of coastal and interior peoples Approximate season/moon

Haida (coastal)

Saanich/Straits Salish (coastal)

Gitxsan/ Gigeenix (Upriver dialect) (interior)

Secwepemc/ Shuswap (interior)

January/ February

hlgidguun (łgidguun) kongaas (‘Canada goose moon’); Canada geese come down to the coast

ngingənə (‘moon of the child’) (~ January); snow is waist deep

kw’ithułoxs (‘ring around the sun/moon’); winter was feast time; families came together; trapping in winter; rabbits snared

February/ March

taan kongaas (‘black bear moon’); bears come out of hibernation

wəxəs (‘frog’ moon) (~ February); time of the baby moon; the short month

pełsqepts (‘spring wind’) (~ March); snow melts in the valleys; steelhead run in the river, and people fished them with torchlights from boats; people travelled to Loon Lake to fish for cutthroat trout

March

xiid gyaas (‘laughing [white-fronted] goose moon’); laughing geese fly north

April

wiid gyaas (‘salmonberry bird moon’); song of the sal­ monberry bird

pəxsisəng (moon of ‘opening hands’; ‘blossoming out’ moon); frogs start to sing

gutk’ułoxs k’utk’ułoxs lasa huʔmal (‘when cottonwood trees snap because of the cold’); stored food depleted; wintering steelhead caught in pools; long arduous trek to Nass estuary for oulachen over the “grease trail”; beaver hunted for meat and pelts

pełtsipwenten (‘cachepit’ month) (~ February); still too cold, and there was no hunting, so the people had to rely on what they had stored in their cache pits

lasa yaʔa (‘spring salmon month’); still early; medicinal plants and barks for

pesłʔewten (‘melting month’); all the snow melts, even in the

/continued

sxwenəł (‘bullhead’ moon); wild geese fly over upon return /continued

‘wiiłaxs or ‘wiiłoxs (‘when the bears sit around in their den before they come out in spring’)

/continued

/continued

Moving for the Harvest  |  29

Table 8-3 | continued Approximate season/moon

April/May

Haida (coastal)

Saanich/Straits Salish (coastal)

Gitxsan/ Gigeenix (Upriver dialect) (interior)

Secwepemc/ Shuswap (interior)

(Swain­son’s thrush) announces that winter is over

from the south

gansgee ’laa kongaas (‘halibut moon’); also known as the month when berries are forming

pənexwəng (‘moon of the camas harvest’) (~ May); blue camas blooms

“wood medicine” gathered; later, greens picked (e.g., “lava berries,” cow-parsnip stalks)

mountains; people hunted in the mountains and gathered fresh shoots from sprouting plants

lasa maaʔy (‘first berries of the season’); First Salmon ceremony; spring salmon fished; bear hunted when emerge from dens

pełʔeʔłqten (‘digging month’) (~ May); people dug edible roots (skwenkwínem, sxwixw, tsets’elq), and gathered inner bark of lodgepole pine; dug basketry roots; went to lakes to fish for rainbow trout

May to early June

June (late May to early July)

chənthəqi (‘sockeye moon’) (~ June); time of warm weather

wa.aay gwaalgee (‘weather is still somewhat cold’) (this is the Haida New Year)

lasa ‘yanja (‘leaves come out’); as sap rises, pine and hemlock cambium gathered; cedar bark for basketry; inner bark of willow and maple gathered

lasa maa’y (‘first berries of the season’); strawberries and soapberries ripen during continued spring salmon fishing

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pełtpantsk (‘midsummer month’); people gathered soapberries, harpooned spring salmon in the river, and trapped spring salmon in weirs in the creek

Table 8-3 | continued Approximate season/moon

Haida (coastal)

Saanich/Straits Salish (coastal)

Gitxsan/ Gigeenix (Upriver dialect) (interior)

Secwepemc/ Shuswap (interior)

June/July

kong koaans (‘great moon’); because the weather becomes warm and food becomes plentiful; edible inner bark is harvested from hemlocks and spruce

chənhənən (‘humpback salmon return to earth’) (~ July); hottest time of year

lasa ‘wiihun (‘fish are plentiful’); saskatoon berries, huckleberries, lowbush blueberries picked in quantity, right after sockeye run

July/August

sgaana gyaas (‘killer whale moon’); when cedar bark is stripped from the trees, it sounds like blowing killer whales

August/

k’iijaas (‘belly moon’); animals begin to grow fat and their bellies get big

lasa lik’l’insxw (‘when the grizzly bears are eating fish’); salmon fishing the mainstay in spring, then sockeye in midsummer; several weeks of intensive berry picking on mountain slopes, where many black huckleberries picked and made into berry cakes for winter w chənk ’aləx lasa sgangwiikw (‘dog/chum (‘groundhog salmon return getting fat’); to earth’) Gitxsan hunt (~ September); them; then leaves turn fish chum/dog colour salmon for their roe; late summer mountain goat,

pełtqwelqw’eltemx (‘getting-ripe month’) (~ July); lots of berries were ripe during this month, e.g. saskatoon berries (speqpeqʔúw’i), strawberries (tqítq’e), and huckleberries (wenéx); people gathered all of them

September

chənthewən (‘coho salmon return to earth’) (~ August); mosquitoes are out

pesqelqlelten (‘many salmon month’) (~ August); people fished for salmon and dried their salmon

pełtemłik’t (‘[salmon are] spawned out’) (~ September); people hunted and dried their meat for winter

/continued

Moving for the Harvest  |  31

Table 8-3 | continued Approximate season/moon

Haida (coastal)

Saanich/Straits Salish (coastal)

September/ October

k’eed adii (‘in-between month’); the month between summer and winter

pəq’əlenəxw (‘moon that turns the leaves white’) (~ October); leaves fall off the tree

October/ November

k’algyaa kongaas (‘ice moon’); first ice appears on rainwater in the canoes

xwəsəlenəxw (‘moon of the shaker of leaves’); everything is put away; too cold to do anything

November/ December

jid kongaas (‘digging month’); bears dig roots to

sch’əlkwesən (‘moon of putting your paddle away

/continued

/continued

Gitxsan/ Gigeenix (Upriver dialect) (interior)

caribou, and marmot hunted by men while women pick berries

lasa sinlaaxw (‘trout are hungry taking to bait, easy fishing’); “early fall”; coho fished; steelhead fished in summer, fall, or late winter

lasa sinlaaxw (continued); cranberries and rosehips picked; spiny wood fern gathered in fall (not considered ready for food use until the green fronds had died back); moss gathered; deer, moose, and bear hunted; medicinal herbs gathered; ceremonial purification undertaken; “wood medicine” gathered lasa gwineekxw (‘cold’); people prepared for winter; many /continued

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Secwepemc/ Shuswap (interior)

pesłwelsten (‘abandoning month’) (~ October); people were still hunting and drying meat and were also trapping and tanning hides; they fixed up their winter homes and their cache pits

pełʔełxwʔułxwten (‘entering month’) (~ November); people entered their pithouses; animals entered their dens to hibernate; people trapped animals at this time

pełteteq’em (‘cross-over month’) (~ December); /continued

Table 8-3 | continued Approximate season/moon

December/ January

Haida (coastal)

Saanich/Straits Salish (coastal)

Gitxsan/ Gigeenix (Upriver dialect) (interior)

Secwepemc/ Shuswap (interior)

prepare for hibernation

in the bush’); the ground is shining, or glistening, from frost or ice

activities (e.g., traps, snowshoes, and snares fixed; firewood gathered)

kong gyaangaas (“cold moon”; lit. ‘standing up [to defecate] month’); because the ground is snowy and cold

sisət (‘elder moon’) (~ December); time for winter ceremonials, making and repairing equipment, etc.

lasa gunkw’ats (‘can’t go far to outhouse’); winter ceremonies; ceremonial purification undertaken with devil’s-club, fasting, and sweathouse use; winter stores eaten

winter solstice month, when the days start getting longer; Shuswap people celebrated and decorated their winter homes

pełʔemetmin (‘stay at home month’) (~ January); land is frozen during this time of year, and people stayed in their winter homes; a lot of work was done at this time (e.g., making baskets, sewing clothing, and making implements for the harvest season)

Note: The groups for which this information was available were also selected to be representative of peoples from the northern coast (Haida) and southern coast (Saanich) and from the northern interior (Gitxsan, Upriver dialect) and southern interior (Secwepemc). Sources: For Haida, see de Vries (2012); for Saanich, see Claxton and Elliott (1993); for Gitxsan, see Wale (n.d.), as sourced by Leslie Main Johnson (pers. comm., 2011); and for Secwepemc, see R.E. Ignace (2008).

cooperation, and supervision by knowledgeable people. For the Tsawataineuk community at Kingcome, Clan Chief Kwaxsistalla (the name of Adam Dick and his ancestors) was the recognized guardian of the oulachen.15 All up and down the coast, especially from the Knight and Kingcome Rivers to the Bella Coola, Kitlope, Kemano, Kitamaat, Skeena, and Nass Rivers, people congregated in the early spring for the oulachen harvest. For many, this was an important social time, when trading and other exchanges took place (Thornton 2008; Thornton et al. 2004).

Moving for the Harvest  |  33

At the mouth of the Nass River, at Fishery Bay, while people were staying at the oulachen camp and rendering the grease, they also harvested large quantities of the rootstocks of spiny wood fern. Traditionally people pit-cooked these root vegetables or else steamed them on the stovetop until they were soft. Once they were cooked, the “fingers” (leaf bases of previous years’ fronds) were peeled and mixed with oulachen grease and sugar. One Nisga’a elder recalled, “We used to get ax (wood fern roots) too … You get it right off the ground, and you have to boil that, and you peel the skin off [from the “fingers” and the core] and that’s really good. You mix it with grease and sugar … Get them by the sack. It’s used for dessert; mix it with new [oulachen] grease and sugar, that’s all. It’s sort of a delicacy” (Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a 1995, 83). In relatively quick succession, over the course of the spring, there was more clam digging and other shellfish harvesting, and people also travelled to their estuarine root gardens to dig quantities of silverweed, clover, riceroot, and other root vegetables, before these plants started to sprout and grow their leaves. The succulent shoots of giant horsetail, thimbleberry, salmonberry, and cow-parsnip also appeared at this time and were harvested – in some cases by the armful – to be eaten fresh, with seal or oulachen oil.16 In the Nass Valley, people also sought the fleshy leaves of “lava berries” (Sedum divergens). During these harvests, the clam gardens and root gardens were also tended and repaired; the root gardens were weeded and cleaned and the clam beds cleared of any rocks or driftwood that had been washed up over the winter. The spawning of the herring was another major event of early spring. Some people relied on the textured fronds of giant kelp17 as an ideal surface on which the herring could deposit their spawn. Other people anchored boughs, or entire young trees, of western hemlock, western redcedar, or other evergreens in the quiet bays where the spawning herring would accumulate, and within a day or two, these boughs would be densely coated with the tiny translucent eggs. The herring were followed by droves of sea lions, seabirds, and even whales, all feeding on these nutritious eggs. The ocean around where the herring spawn becomes a milky blue from the milt of the male herring. The herring eggs can be cooked and eaten immediately or dried for winter. When kelp fronds are used in the harvest, they are eaten together with the herring eggs, whereas if boughs are used, the eggs are cooked with the smaller branches and then peeled off before being eaten. Today the commercial herring fishery has seriously reduced the numbers of spawning herring; there are some places on the coast where the herring haven’t come to spawn for many years. Still, wherever they can get them, people relish herring eggs. Nowadays, like many traditional foods, herring eggs are often preserved by freezing rather than by drying them. The month of April is called wiid gyaas (“salmonberry bird month”) in Haida, the time when the song of the salmonberry bird (Swainson’s thrush) announces the end of winter. The next moon, at the end of April and beginning of May,

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is gansgee ʔlaa [‘laa] kongaas (“month when the berries are forming”), a process assisted by the salmonberry bird’s singing. Bears emerged from their winter dens and might be hunted if people were short of meat or fat. However, it is said that a diet of skunk-cabbage in the spring or salmon in the fall made the bear meat poor eating (M. Kat Anderson, pers. comm., 2009). People also trapped furbearing animals and hunted small game and birds. The Saanich, Ditidaht, and others hunted ducks with long nets of nettle twine strung across narrows in the ocean. Seals and other marine mammals were hunted for meat and oil. Seagull eggs were gathered from rocky offshore islands and cliffs. Around May, when the spring tides were lowest early in the morning, many families travelled to their spring harvest camps to pick seaweed, fish, and gather other kinds of seafood. The Gitga’at spring camp at K’yel on Princess Royal Island, previously mentioned in this chapter (and in chapter 5), provides a good example of the intricate requirements of food harvesting, choreographed to the tides, weather, and lifecycles of resource organisms (Turner 2003a; Turner and Clifton 2006; Turner and Thompson 2006). May, or haʔliʔ làx làʔàsk (“the time for gathering seaweed”), is the usual time when the Gitga’at move from their home village of Hartley Bay to K’yel. Generally, the weather is fine in May on the Northwest Coast, with plenty of sunshine. This is important because the optimal harvestable stage of this seaweed coincides with the occurrence of the low spring tides in the morning, as well as a period of winds coming from the north or northwest, which promotes drying of both seaweed and fish. Gitga’at harvesters (mostly women in the old days) can travel in the early morning out from K’yel by canoe or rowboat, or more recently by skiff or punt, to the rocky shoreline along Campania Island and other neighbouring islands, jump from the boats onto the rocks, spend two or three hours picking seaweed while it is exposed by the low tides (figure 8-5), and then return to K’yel around noon, leaving sufficient time for spreading out the seaweed in squares on the sun-heated bedrock or cedar trays. In mid-afternoon, the seaweed squares are shifted and turned over so that they will be thoroughly dried before sundown. This combination of low tide in the early morning, warm sunshine and winds, and optimal seasonal growth of the seaweed itself is essential for this system to work. K’yel is also a halibut and spring salmon fishing camp. The cutting and drying of the fish also depend on good weather, and the work required for both fish and seaweed is so intensive that they cannot be done at the same time. Therefore, if the men are successful in bringing back fish, seaweed harvesting is usually postponed until the halibut are processed. People accommodated minor variations in the weather by adjusting their days of seaweed harvesting and fishing accordingly. The women would watch the growth of the stinging nettle plants around the K’yel camp as an indicator of the growth stage of the seaweed since it tends to grow at the same rate; if the seaweed season was a little late, this could be determined by the shorter growth

Moving for the Harvest  |  35

8-5  |  From left to right: Rachel, Max, and Morgan Hill of Hartley Bay, picking edible seaweed in May 2011, near their spring harvest camp at K’yel.

of the nettles. Once dried, the seaweed squares are brought back to Hartley Bay, and the women undertake another weather-dependent process for some of their seaweed, namely compressing, chopping, and redrying it, before it is stored away in airtight containers for use as a condiment, soup ingredient, and valued trade good. All around Ts’msyen territory, too, families and clans had their own resource areas, equivalent to the Gitga’at’s K’yel. Different families from Kitsumkalum and Kitselas, for example, had harvest camps for seafood on the lower Skeena River at Port Essington, Ecstall, Gibson Island, Mud Bay, Island Point, Prescott Pass, Eddy Pass, and Baker Inlet. In March people harvested herring spawn at Island Point, and then a little later, there was seaweed picking through Prescott Pass. Crabs, halibut, and salmon were harvested at Gibson Island. Later in the spring (and again in the fall), they would travel upriver to harvest their inland resources (McDonald 2003).18 The Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth were especially fond of the sweet rhizomes of eelgrass, which they harvested around May.19 The coordination of

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tides, season, and weather required for eelgrass harvesting was similar to that required for picking seaweed. Sometimes people walked out to dig up eelgrass in the lowest tide, but as Clan Chief Adam Dick explained, “it’s better to go out by canoe and k’elpax, or twist it up with a long, thin twisting pole in ‘small tide’ because you could wash the sand off when the eelgrass was harvested.” The fresh rhizomes were greatly appreciated and eaten in quantity at special feasts and family meals; “there’s lots of sweet in there, in that [ts’áts’ayem] root” (Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2006; see also Cullis-Suzuki 2007). On southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, people started to go out in May to their traditional territories in small family groups to harvest camas bulbs and other spring-flowering bulbs; the month of May is called pənexwəng (“moon of the camas harvest”) in the Saanich language, although these bulbs could also be dug later on in the summer (E. Claxton and Elliott 1993; Turner and Hebda 2012). Toward the end of spring, as the sap started to rise, coastal people also harvested the edible cambium of western hemlock and other species.20 It is at this time when the cambium is “fat.” People also harvested fibrous barks of cedar and other species for basketry, net making, cordage, and clothing in late spring and early summer.21 The Gitga’at were always careful, however, to wait until after all of the seaweed and halibut had been harvested and dried before they went out to harvest cedar bark. (It is said that harvesting cedar bark first will cause rain and prevent the seaweed from drying.) Many medicinal plants, and especially the tree barks used for tonics, were collected in spring and early summer, to be prepared and used immediately or dried for later use. Devil’s-club bark, for example, was generally harvested at this time, when the spiny outer bark could be scraped off and the inner bark easily peeled away from the wood (Turner 1973, 2004a; Turner and Thompson 2006). Springtime in the Interior

In Secwepemc-tsín, the Shuswap language, the fourth and fifth moons are called peska´pts or pełsqepts (“spring [winds] month”), when there are frequent Chinook winds and the snow starts to disappear, and pesx˘ü´xem (“[little] summer [month]”) or pesxwixwem (“has-avalanche-lily month”), when the snow disappears completely in lower areas. This time – for the Secwepemc and other interior peoples – marked the beginning of the harvest season (Teit 1909, 518).22 Signalled by the blooming of certain early flowers, the songs of particular birds, or the appearance of certain butterflies or other insects, people throughout the Interior Plateau would leave their winter houses in small groups for their camps around their territories. Before the families left their winter homes, Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) recalled, they would clean their houses thoroughly,

Moving for the Harvest  |  37

taking off the turf from the roof to let the interior “air out” and building a big fire beside the house to burn any litter that had accumulated in the house from winter living. People started to dig a few of the edible roots around late February and March. One of the first roots Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) remembered harvesting in the spring was qweqw’íle (desert parsley, Lomatium macrocarpum): “I can remember my grandmother, when the robins first come in, they chirp and just chirp and call each other. Then all of a sudden my grandmother would say, ‘Listen to the robin!’ And you could hear it singing, ‘tu weeee sa – te qweqw’ile!’ [Others say it’s the meadowlark that sings this song.] They have a little tune and they [people] would say, ‘Oh, those root edibles must be ready!’ And that’s when they’d get together and go up the mountain and start digging for that plant.” Mary Thomas also noted how important cow-parsnip and other fresh greens were in the spring after a winter of stored food. Other springtime plants the Secwepemc enjoyed around Shuswap Lake and other wetlands were wapato tubers and water-parsnip roots. Sometimes, too, a few men would venture into the higher country for an early spring hunt, trapping marmots or other small mammals (Teit 1909). If there was a serious food shortage, people would climb up to the mountains in the spring in search of early roots, greens, or black tree lichen (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Usually, however, the families remained in the valleys and along the benchlands until at least the latter part of spring, collecting the lowland roots before they matured and started to flower: balsamroot and its shoots, nodding onions, bitterroot, yellowbells (Fritillaria pudica), mariposa lily, yellow glacier lily, and spring beauty. Sometimes the men would fish near the root-digging grounds. Then, around mid-May, as the snows melted from the mountainsides, people climbed to the higher elevations, following the advancing season and continuing to harvest their favourite root crops: onions, chocolate lily (Fritillaria affinis), spring beauty, and yellow glacier lily.23 Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994) explained: “What they did was they collected the avalanche lily [yellow glacier lily] and spring beauty, sxwixw and sqweqwíne, down in the bottom. When that was completely finished then our people came up to the plateaus. They hunted up here, they picked huckleberries, they gathered more avalanche lilies and spring beauties, and those were brought down to the valley and stored for the winter.” Edible cambium tissues, first of ponderosa pine and then, higher up or farther north, lodgepole pine, whitebark pine, and other species, were harvested in the spring as well (Dilbone 2011). Edith O’Donaghey recalled that her father would return from his hunting trips in the mountains with a bucket of lodgepole pine cambium for the family, and even if he arrived in the middle of the night, everyone would get up and eat it since it was best when eaten fresh (cited in Turner 1992b). Trees that were harvested for edible cambium collection also

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served later as a source of pitch, to be used as a fire starter during wet weather (Johnson 1997). As described previously, birch bark and other basket materials were also harvested in the late spring, as cedar and other fibrous materials were on the coast. It was a busy time, with harvested edible roots and basket materials needing processing and preparation for storage, to be consumed or worked on later in the fall and winter. Summer Resources

In summertime, with its more predictable wind patterns and fairer weather, people all over the area, both on the coast and in the interior, continued with their diverse and intensive harvesting activities and their patterned seasonal rounds. There was, generally, an increased ability for safe travel, both on water and on land, and people moved from their spring harvesting camps to other areas, mainly for fishing, hunting, and berry picking. Greens were becoming too tough, woody, and bitter to eat, and tree cambium became thinner and the tissues more woody with drier weather. Some roots, like camas (Camassia spp.) and glacier lily, however, were at their prime for harvesting after they had flowered and gone to seed (Hart 1976; Loewen 1998). It was also possible to continue to harvest cedar bark and some other basket materials into the early summer months at higher elevations. Mountain travel was common at this time as the snow melted; from the high points of a people’s territory, they could survey their lands, become reacquainted with their sacred places, and reconnect with their ancestors (Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). Along the coast, outlying areas and offshore islands were visited during this time as well. Long-distance trips for trade and reconnaissance were also undertaken mainly in the summertime. Summer on the Northwest Coast

In terms of plant harvesting, berries were critically important for coastal peoples throughout the summer months, and summer travels were often guided by the successive ripening of berries. Starting with salmonberries, wild strawberries, red elderberries, red huckleberries, and blueberries, the berry season progressed to blackcaps and trailing blackberries (both on the southern coast), thimbleberries, currants and gooseberries (Ribes spp.), and salal berries. Skunk-cabbage leaves, commonly used as a surface on which to dry berries, were fully expanded by the end of June and available from wet swampy areas all along the coast. At their campsites, families stayed in simple dwellings, often consisting of a light framework of poles covered with mats. Cooking and food processing were done in the open air. Camps were usually located near a river or lake and with woods nearby, ensuring ready access to water and fuel. Immense quantities of berries would be brought back to the camps, to be cooked up in cedar-wood boxes, or even in small canoes, using red-hot rocks, mashed

Moving for the Harvest  |  39

to jam-like consistency, and spread out to dry, first on one side and then on the other, on overlapping skunk-cabbage leaves set on frames or logs. If the weather was damp, or to keep insects away, the frames were set up on racks over a smoky fire. The dried cakes were then stored away for trading or wintertime use, with usually each kind of berry being kept separate. The Gitga’at and other seaweed harvesters would often process their dried seaweed cakes from the spring, traditionally in June. Helen Clifton (Turner and Clifton 2009, 184) explains, You need to dry it [seaweed] in June. You have to dry it in June, before the grasses really grow long. If the grasses grow long then they retain the dew of the evening. You see, and so the evaporation of that dew is coming … and you’re putting your seaweed close to the ground … So that takes all day to dry. And … you’re moving that seaweed. About every two hours, you will go and … move the seaweed so that it’s turning over … so that it all dries … After the sun starts to set, the seaweed is cooling off now, and before that dew starts again, you gather up the seaweed. The Saanich and other Coast Salish peoples often harvested their camas bulbs in the summertime after they had flowered and gone to seed. They would steam the bulbs in cooking pits and then flatten and dry them after they had been thoroughly cooked (see chapter 5). When the digging was finished, people usually burned over their camas prairies, timing the burns so that the fire would run quickly over the ground, killing back brush and seedling trees but not harming the grasses and bulbs, which were mostly dormant by this time. Another major summertime occupation was salmon fishing, as the various runs of sockeye, chum, and other salmon started returning through the ocean channels to their spawning streams in large numbers in the summer. The Saanich reefnet fishery was fully operational by June, around the time when the oceanspray bushes bloomed. At this time people travelled to their hereditary family reefnetting locations around the Gulf and San Juan Islands, remaining there until August.24 For drying and smoking their salmon, people needed plenty of fuel, as well as wood for salmon spreaders and drying racks. The Saanich held a sacred ceremony to welcome the returning salmon. As soon as the first sockeye salmon was caught in the reefnet, everyone stopped fishing, and a period of prayer and feasting continued for four days to show respect and give thanks to the salmon, who were celebrated as generous relatives. Summer was also a time of family gatherings, visiting between villages, celebrations, and traditional sporting events (E. Claxton and Elliott 1993). August was the time when cattail, tule, basket sedge leaves, and “threesquare” (Schoenoplectus americanus) stems were at their prime for weaving. The Nuu-chah-nulth and Ditidaht were renowned for their finely twined trinket

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baskets of sedge and “three-square,” and they and the Salishan peoples also harvested cattail leaves and tule stalks from the edges of lakes and dried them for mats. People gathered many of their medicinal plants in the summer as well, to be dried and stored for winter. Summer in the Interior

After harvesting roots and other products in the uplands in the late spring, many families in the Interior Plateau would return to the valleys and lowlands for the summer fishing season, heralded by the clicking of the grasshoppers or other local signals. The berry season was also beginning at lower elevations in the month of June.25 Saskatoon berries, wild strawberries, and soapberries were among the first fruits to ripen, to be followed by gooseberries, blackcaps, raspberries, and thimbleberries, with the berry harvest intensifying into July, August, and September, depending on latitude and elevation. Blue elderberries, black hawthorn berries, highbush cranberries, and chokecherries were among the last of the summer fruits to ripen, and they could generally be harvested well into the fall. Hazelnuts also started ripening in late summer, an event heralded by squirrels; as well as people harvesting them directly, these nuts were sometimes gathered, already cleaned of their encasing husks, from squirrel caches. Otherwise, the nuts had to be buried or roasted for a time to remove the husks, which are covered with sharp, prickly hairs. Any mountain trips in the summer had to be carefully coordinated with the runs of sockeye and other fish in the river valleys. Usually, people journeyed to high country immediately after the main sockeye run (see Johnson 1997; and Turner 1992b). At their upland camps, people usually spent several weeks intensively harvesting and processing berries, especially black huckleberries.26 Many baskets of these sweet, juicy, flavourful berries were picked and dried in high-elevation camps. Some elders remember bringing six to eight large pack baskets of dried berries down from the mountains (Johnson 1997; see also chapters 2 and 5).27 Generally, the women and children picked these berries while the men were hunting deer, caribou, mountain goat, marmot, and other animals and fishing in high-elevation lakes.28 As described by Edith O’Donaghey in the quotation that introduces this chapter, people also dug root vegetables at the summertime mountain camps: spring beauty, yellow glacier lily, nodding onion, and tiger lily. Sometimes, too, they found these roots cached in underground stores of voles and other small rodents (Turner 1992b, 1995; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Women would often pit-cook and dry the roots, like the berries, right on site so that they would be lighter and more compact and would keep better for transporting back to the winter villages. Mountain medicines, like false hellebore, mountain valerian, Canby’s lovage, and subalpine fir bark and pitch were also harvested and dried for winter use.

Moving for the Harvest  |  41

At the end of the berry-picking and root-digging season in the mountains, people would often set fire to selected areas in order to maintain clear patches for root species and berries. The burns were undertaken by people who knew just when and how to light the fires, and burning was usually rotated around an entire region over a cycle of several years. The roots – including spring beauty, tiger lily, chocolate lily, and yellow glacier lily – grew much bigger and the berries were bigger and more productive a couple of years after a fire (Johnson 1994, 1997, 1999; Turner 1999). Fall Resources

Fall was another key fishing time in most parts of northwestern North America. The fall runs of coho salmon and steelhead, and especially of the chum, or dog salmon, were extremely important. Chum flesh is not as oily as that of sockeye and other species, so it dries more readily and can be stored without spoilage. People also processed the roe of chum and other types of salmon, burying them in underground pits lined with leaves, or later in crocks, to ferment them (Johnson 1997). Many of the summer activities continued into the fall; as noted previously, some places were known for late-ripening berries of the kinds normally ready in the summertime. There were also the fruits that normally ripened late to be harvested, and many of the root vegetables were at their prime for digging in the fall. Stinging nettle and Indian-hemp stems were also cut in large quantities in late summer and early fall, after the leaves had started to die back. The stems were split and hung up to dry, to be worked and spun into cordage and crafted into nets over the winter. Autumn on the Northwest Coast

For coastal peoples, the fall season began with the first frost appearing on the leaves and the first snows settling on the mountaintops. The cottonwoods and bigleaf maples would change to golden yellow, and there was often a period of clear, cold but sunny weather, which was an ideal time for the last harvesting activities of the season. The chum, or dog salmon – the last salmon to be caught and stored for winter – were sought in their spawning streams. People also fished for cod, flounder, and other ocean species. Deer and elk hunting also increased in the fall, as the animals were in prime condition. Hunters might make a few trips to the outlying islands and into the mountains, and they also hunted geese, ducks, and seals down at the river estuaries. The root gardens were ready for harvesting in the fall, as soon as the leaves started to die back for winter, with the Pacific silverweed leaves often turning bright orange. This was the stage when the roots were said to be good for digging, before the snow set in and the weather got bad. The women would tie the long roots of silverweed and springbank clover in bundles, pit-cook them,

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and then dry them for storage, as well as eating some fresh. The rootstocks of spiny wood fern were also ready to dig in the fall, or throughout the winter as needed, after their green fronds had started to die back (Johnson 1997; Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992). Late-ripening fruits harvested in the fall on the coast included Pacific crabapples, highbush cranberries, bog cranberries, and lingonberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea). Rather than being dried, these fruits were usually stored under water with a topping of oulachen grease or other oil, or they were stored in boxes buried in the ground or set in a cool part of the house. By the end of the season, people were making serious preparations for winter. Plenty of firewood had to be gathered, the houses weatherproofed, and canoes mended. Medicines, food, basket materials, wood for making implements, and fibre for nets and fishing line were all assembled to be close at hand. The men split cedar logs and roughed out canoes to be ready for winter’s work. Autumn in the Interior

Interior peoples spent the late summer and fall alternating between the salmon rivers and the mountains, where the men hunted for deer, moose, and bear, as well as trapping marmots, rabbits, and other small game. The women were busy cutting up and drying the fish and meat and tanning hides. The peak of the salmon season was around the end of August, and by mid-September a good supply of salmon had usually been dried and cached (Teit 1909). Around October people searched for cottonwood mushrooms along the river bottoms and pine mushrooms in the forests, to be cut up and dried for winter. In the mountains, some peoples harvested armloads of black tree lichen, to be pit-cooked or stored raw for emergency use in the winter.29 The cones and seeds of whitebark pine were also harvested at this time from the upper treeline in many parts of the Interior Plateau. Edith O’Donaghey has fond memories of these seeds: Well [in the fall], there were the pine cones [whitebark pine] up there too. My dad used to bring home sacks full from his hunting trips in the mountains … They were awfully messy [pitchy]. Granny used to keep a special pan just for roasting them in the oven … They also dug balsamroots in August and the fall, after the leaves have all died down … My parents used to go up ‘Tit Mountain’ with packhorses to hunt. They cooked the deer right there … And my dad used to go hunting with about six or eight other men and boys … Sometimes they were gone for a week, or ten days or more. (Cited in Turner 1992b, 418) Autumn was also when herbalists gathered their winter supply of tree barks and other medicines to last them through the winter and when people undertook cleansing and purification in preparation for the winter ceremonial season.

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Many other activities took place, from gathering firewood to making snowshoes and repairing traps and snares. Winter Resources

Winter was the time when people took advantage of all of their hard work during the rest of the year, living mainly off of their stores during the coldest, most stormy, and darkest days of the year. By November the weather generally becomes unpredictable and treacherous, with strong winds and cold currents, making travel both difficult and dangerous. “Time to quit hunting and fishing, to pull the canoes up and rest … That’s when you light the fires in the big house” (E. Claxton and Elliott 1993, 27). The birds have migrated south, and the bears are now in their winter sleep. Winter on the Northwest Coast

For many of the Northwest Coast peoples, lighting the fires in the houses signalled the start of ceremonial activities. Winter was considered a spiritual time, when there were potlatches, sacred dances, and initiations, preceded by prayers and ritual bathing at sacred pools and streams. Peoples’ connection with the spirit world was celebrated. Winter was also a time of storytelling, of instructing children and youth, and of recounting and reaffirming histories and traditions. Some harvesting activities were also undertaken even in winter if resources were available or if necessity dictated: fishing locally for cod, halibut, herring, flounder, or trout; hunting for deer or elk; and clam digging and mussel harvesting during the winter low tides. On Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland south along the coasts of Washington and Oregon, “winter huckleberries” (Vaccinium ovatum) could be harvested, sometimes into December, and rose hips and highbush cranberries could also sometimes be found in mid-winter. It was still possible to gather some medicines when needed, and root vegetables could be dug as long as the ground wasn’t frozen. Other winter activities were related to preparations for the next harvest season, such as making and repairing a wide variety of tools and containers necessary for survival, including cordage, twine and nets, spears, bows and arrows, fishing gear, baskets and boxes, cooking utensils, clothing, mats, baby cradles, digging sticks, and canoes and paddles. As weather allowed, people travelled from one village to another for visits and to witness sacred ceremonies, initiations, memorials, and naming rituals. It was a time to focus on social and spiritual connections. Winter in the Interior

For the interior peoples, winter routines were much the same as on the coast, except that there was more snow. The Secwepemc month of November is called pełʔełxwʔułxwten (“entering month”), and this is when people started to settle

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in for winter; the Nlaka’pamux fall season extended a little later (Teit 1909). Hunting and trapping continued over this period, when the deer were rutting and easiest to hunt. Beaver were hunted for their meat and pelts, and rabbits were snared. Sometimes people were able to catch wintering steelhead and trout, and in the mid-winter and spring, there was ice fishing on all of the major lakes. It was still winter when the Gitxsan started their long and arduous journey over the “grease trail” to the Nass River estuary in order to be there for the early spring oulachen harvest (Johnson 1997). Other peoples, like the Ulkatcho Dakelh, also journeyed to the coast to spend the harshest months of the year there with their Nuxalk neighbours, where the weather was milder. Snowshoes, toboggans, and sleds of various types were used to carry loads over the snow and ice, sometimes with the help of dogs. Stored foods – cached in underground pits, in elevated tree caches, or on poles, as well as in baskets and bags or on hanging strings – became immensely important during the winter, and toward the end of the season there was sometimes a period of famine if people had misjudged the required food supply or if stores were damaged or lost. Then people would eat whatever they were able to obtain, including emergency supplies of black tree lichen, rose hips or highbush cranberries frozen on the bushes, and cactus stems, kinnikinnick berries, or blue elderberries and chokecherries buried under the snow. One can imagine how welcome the first signs of spring would be; people would indeed be anxious to get out of their crowded pithouses or wooden lodges and find the first fresh edible shoots (Hayden 1997). Seasonal Rounds, Territories, and Time Depth It is likely that the patterns of peoples’ seasonal movement around their territories have ancient roots. In fact, the territories belonging to different families, clans, communities, and language groups that are known today in many cases probably reflect longstanding connections to different sites and habitats that collectively provided the resources people needed for survival. Once one group established a claim to an area – even a very informal one based on customary use – another group would likely be pressed to set out a claim to other areas. Some of these territorial boundaries are extremely strict; as Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief Earl Maquinna George noted, “There’s a fine line between two nations” (cited in Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005, 151). Even within a family or clan, there were often strict rules about who had use of and control over the resources of a given place. A group who wished its own territory and harvesting areas to be respected would be careful to respect the boundaries of others. But these boundaries would be maintained by peoples’ presence and use of their territories, even if only seasonally. Differences in available resources resulted in different patterns of resource use and different cultural identities. People

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became known for particular products, which were then traded with neighbouring communities or in some cases farther afield – a practice that archaeological records indicate is ancient. Differences in resource use and resource locations, even at the household level, were noted from the millennia-old archaeological remains of the Keatley Creek pithouses (Hayden 1997). Trips from this village to several high mountain sites were indicated from different types of stone and other products. Hayden (ibid.) concludes that these artifacts reflect different seasonal round destinations of households and that camps in the surrounding hills and mountains would have been a part of these peoples’ lives, serving as places for berry picking, root digging, collecting whitebark pine seeds, hunting deer, and processing meat and hides. Similarly, on the coast, Moss et al. (2004) document seasonal use of archaeological sites from the Olympic Peninsula to Alaska for at least four millennia, with varying activities, such as hunting sea mammals, fishing for halibut, salmon, herring, and cod, hunting deer and birds, and gathering seabird eggs along the outer shorelines. Harvesting and processing resources at specialized sites, before moving these products to winter village sites, was a well established pattern, and people were constructing their winter houses to allow removal of the siding and roofing planks by canoe to the spring, summer, and fall camps, leaving only the post and beam frames at the winter villages. The harvesting and processing of salmon have been a major impetus for people’s seasonal movements along the coast for 3,000 years or more, as indicated by the remains of fish weirs and other evidence (Matson, Coupland, and Mackie 2003). On the Skeena River and elsewhere, precontact patterns of residential movement have been well studied. People moved in household and extended family groups to interior territories throughout the tributary valleys of the Skeena watershed in the summer and fall, fishing for salmon, hunting land mammals, and picking berries and digging roots. They smoked, dried, or otherwise processed their harvests and then brought them back to coastal villages where they resided over the winter and early spring. Food stores from the interior thus supplied most of the food people consumed during the winter months on the coast (Martindale 2003). The ability of Northwest Coast peoples to obtain their full year’s food supply within only eight or nine months or less has been a key to their cultural development. Arguably, it has been their intensive harvesting and food storage technologies, combined with their capabilities for travelling to and staying at different harvesting sites – their seasonal rounds – that have allowed their immense success, as reflected in their high population densities, monumental architecture and artistic development, economic and social complexity, occupational specialization, regional and local diversity in economy and subsistence, and strong systems of land tenure, trade, and exchange at the local and regional levels and beyond. Slavery and social inequity may have been part of 46 | part three – integration and management

this equation for success as well, as noted by Martindale (2003), Donald (2003), and others. In terms of historical development of seasonal rounds, Deur (2002b) argues that, although the growth of sedentary villages apparently centred on productive estuarine fishing sites, mainly for spawning salmon, it was an increase in specialized food harvesting and processing that led to the development of small but permanent seasonal resource sites. This development included the expansion of sites for gathering clams, berries, and roots, as well as whale and seal hunting, oulachen grease production, halibut fishing, marine salmon fishing, and so forth. These types of resource specializations are indicated from at least 4,000 years ago. The constellations of outlying harvest and processing sites, together with the primary winter village, thus comprise some of the early evidence for the seasonal round. The archaeological complex at Cattle Point on the windswept southern end of San Juan Island, mentioned earlier in a note as a probable reefnet location, evidently reflects such resource diversification and seasonal occupancy patterns. Not only reefnet fishing but likely also the harvesting and processing of a range of other spring and summertime resources took place here, judging from the broad sloping prairie, lagoons, offshore fishing bank, and relict beach terraces that comprise the locale. Along with a trench over 20 metres long (edged with stone slabs and with a clay-lined fire pit at one end), which may have been related to salmon processing from reefnetting camps, there were numerous roasting pits dating as far back as 2,750 years, as well as hundreds of stone, bone, and antler tools, many postholes, and immense shell middens, indicating a host of diverse resource activities (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Another example of an early multi-use site on the coast is a large midden site situated at the base of a high bluff at West Point, below Seattle’s Discovery Park. Dating from about 5,000 to 700 years ago, the site borders on a wetland and reflects peoples’ access to a wide range of abundant resources: elk, deer, berries, and roots from nearby lands; and mussels, crabs, barnacles, seals, and dozens of types of fish from the ocean and shoreline. It also shows evidence of cooking and processing clams and other foods on a large scale, possibly for later drying and storage (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Interestingly, two labrets at the site indicate contact with people farther north as early as 3,000 years ago. Other trade items include pieces of petrified wood, probably from the Columbia Plateau, and obsidian from central Oregon. Woodworking and carving, basket making, and net making are all suggested by the tools found at the site. The site shows a shift – possibly due to environmental factors like storms, tsunamis, landslides, and sea level changes – from an important multiseason base camp in its early occupancy to a seasonal, less important spring-summer camp by about 1,400 years ago (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). The sophisticated systems of land and resource tenure for which Northwest Coast peoples are well known apparently resulted from an unequal distribution Moving for the Harvest  |  47

of resource species and particular resource-rich habitats across the landscape and seascape. At the same time, however, these systems have helped to promote the sustainable use of resources and harvesting sites through systematic monitoring, enhancement, and control within clan and community-based governance systems (Deur and Turner 2005). A similar relationship between seasonal rounds and habitat maintenance could be argued for the territories, settlements, and resource-harvesting traditions of the peoples of the Interior Plateau and northern regions. For example, a large huckleberry patch in the northern Cascade Mountains might have served seasonal berry pickers for as long as seventy years or more, but such a tenancy would not have been possible if people had not routinely burned these meadows to reduce brush and maintain young, productive wood that would yield the largest, most abundant huckleberries and blueberries (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Lepofsky, Hallett, et al. 2005; Mierendorf 1999; Turner 1999; see also chapter 12). These managed areas would also have benefited bears, marmots, mountain goat, deer, and other game, allowed further diversification of resource use, and facilitated access to and from the area, ultimately transforming them into “cultural keystone places.” General climatic warming between around 2,400 and 1,200 years ago – at once impacting salmon runs by drying river channels and favouring the development of more open habitats, both the high country subalpine parklands and the lower elevation prairies and savannahs – may also have influenced the development of patterned seasonal rounds (see Lepofsky, Hallett, et al. 2005; Lepofsky, Heyerdahl, et al. 2003; Lepofsky and Lertzman 2008; Lepofsky, Lertzman, et al. 2005; Weiser 2006; and Weiser and Lepofsky 2009; see also chapter 2). Conclusions Keith Basso (1996), who spent many years working with Apache Dene (Athabaskan) peoples of the American Southwest, concluded, “Wisdom sits in places.” Indeed, the intersections between space, time, and experience, encoded in language, discourse, and stories, are what make up a people’s collective “sense of place.” In turn, this sense of place can be said to comprise a major and inextricable portion of their cultural knowledge and identity (ibid.; Feld and Basso 1996; R.E. Ignace 2008; A.D. Palmer 2005; Thornton 2008). Secwepemc cultural specialist Dr Ron Ignace (2008, 164) maintains, “What makes us a people is the common knowledge of living in it [shared habitat], knowing and using its landforms and resources, and talking about it in our language.” The wealth of place names in every language, many of them denoting events that occurred at a particular location (some going back to the myth-times of the Transformers), special resource-harvesting sites, or notable landscape features help to connect geographic locations with memory and history, key activities, knowledge of the environment, and the wisdom needed to both use and care for

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the resources essential for people’s lives. As Dr Ron Ignace (2008) explains, place names “anchor our history in the land” (171). “As our people, over thousands of years, learned to use, know, and find their way in the environment during their seasonal rounds, the names for landscape features evoke memories, evoke sentiment for the contours, the smells, the activities associated with the land, and of course the previous generations who experienced that landscape” (176). A very focused example of how places, narratives, activities, resources, and history converge is in the Tla’amen (Sliammon, Coast Salish) story told by Rose Mitchell of Mitlenach Island, a small but richly biodiverse island just off of the central east coast of Vancouver Island: The people living at the head of Toba Inlet heard that the Transformer was coming, so they packed their belongings. Crow, the leader of the people, told them to gather lots of huckleberries, cranberries, wild crabapples, salal berries and wild blackberries. He wove snakes together as berry baskets. Crow’s canoe was changed into a rock, which became Mitlenach Island … It is also because of the Transformer that there are so many different kinds of berries on Mitlenatch today; these are the berries, some of them from the mountains, that Crow had in his basket woven from snakes. (Cited in Kennedy and Bouchard 1983, 105) Indeed, peoples’ lives and cultures truly are “situated” (Nazarea 1999). They result from a blending of place, practice, and time – cycles of time, where seasons and growth cycles recur, activities are reiterated, and generations are repeated, over and over again. A whole constellation of different factors, occurring on different scales of time and space, come into play in determining the ultimate patterns of how peoples combine their experiences, ingenuity, and creativity to maintain themselves using the diverse resources spread across their territories: the presence, abundance, and productivity of particular species and groups of species in particular places at particular times; weather and other environmental influences that allow the harvest, processing, and sometimes storage of available resources; the availability and productivity of other, potentially competing resources; the degree of competition by animals and birds for the same resources; technologies and innovations that might enhance or intensify the exploitation of certain species and products; the ability of individuals and groups to mediate and manage resource productivity; and any number of combinations of these influences. A major factor to consider is the social conditions that might either allow or prevent people’s ability to access, harvest, and process their resources. Social organization, governance and leadership, and territory, along with the unforeseen impacts of illness, death, war, or other human-based occurrences, are immensely important in determining how people’s “situated lives” play out. Social

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organization is also instrumental in the enterprise of knowledge transmission and acquisition. In this regard, Indigenous peoples’ connections to place, including their seasonal movements and use of plant resources, are mediated by the societies and human relationships in which they are embedded, and these factors are ultimately what determine future interactions with place and environment. In the following chapter, I explore the influences of social factors on the application, adaptation, and transmission of ethnobotanical knowledge.

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9 Cultural Institutions Related to Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Practice

“Long time ago, whenever people came back on horseback off the mountain after a hunting trip, they would all start singing. It sounded so beautiful, a dozen people or more on horseback breaking into song, coming down the mountain, coming home.” Away from the travels, the drumbeat emulates the rhythmic sound of the horsehoofs through the ravines. They voice the joy of coming home after a long day, or days of riding and camping. (R.E. Ignace 2008, 163, quoting Secwepemc elder Christine Simon)

Introduction We humans are social animals, and one of the keys to our success as a species has been our strong ties with one another and our ability to apportion our tasks and work cooperatively for common needs, goals, and interests. Indeed, few other species have social systems as complex and highly developed as ours (Sutton and Anderson 2009). Whereas single individuals can harvest and process enough food, fuel, and other resources to keep themselves alive for many years or even a lifetime, the normal way of living is with others. We thrive on spending time with each other, sharing our work, sharing the pleasure of eating, and celebrating our ceremonies, dances, and songs. We seek to engender a sense of belonging and identity, for it brings us pleasure in living – a common voice of joy, as expressed in the introductory quotation from Secwepemc leader Dr Ron Ignace. Our inclination for social behaviour strengthens our ability to diversify our food systems, provides us with mutual protection in numbers, enhances our survival, and facilitates the passing on of knowledge, practices, and beliefs to future generations. In short, our social systems are the basis of our culture,

which can be defined as “the shared ideas, beliefs, values, mores, world views, practices, and information in the minds of human beings” (Ames and Maschner 1999, 30). Just as our general need for the company and collaboration of others is probably encoded in our genetic makeup, so too may genetics explain our propensity to develop social hierarchies and to recognize and gravitate toward leaders – key dominant individuals who can make decisions, map out plans for the future, and make choices aimed at the beneficial survival of the group. Even in so-called egalitarian societies, some individuals, through their hard work, particular knowledge and experience, acquired skills, and natural abilities, or through the sheer strength of their personalities, emerge as leaders: primus inter pares, or first among equals. The processes and protocols for selecting leaders vary from one culture to another, as do the degrees of relative inequity and privilege between leaders and other society members. Nevertheless, it is as “natural” for humans to incorporate leadership into their social structure as it is for wolves, seagulls, and many other species to do so (Pierotti 2008; Pierotti and Annett 1985). The Nuu-chah-nulth (E.R. Atleo 2004) and other Indigenous peoples maintain that their human social system is derived directly from wolves – ancestral totem animals whose “alpha” leaders guide the pack and are responsible for parenting and raising a significant proportion of the group’s offspring. Peoples’ narratives of supernatural beings and animal-people over the ages reflect all of the elements of social organization that were – and in part still are – to be found in more recent Indigenous societies around the study region: talented and hardworking individuals who achieve certain goals through the generosity of others and often through some kind of reciprocal sharing; husbands and wives, each with their own special types of work; children who are resourceful and look to future goals, assisted by their parents and grandparents, both human and supernatural; heroes who undergo hardship and privation to assist their people and their families; chiefs and matriarchs, both bad and good ones, who make choices (bad and good) on behalf of others in their clan or village; slaves who are loyal to those who own them and slaves who escape or betray; celebrations and wars between neighbouring communities; and feasts intended to intimidate and insult others, as well as feasts that honour, praise, and reinforce respectful social ties. Thus social relations have historical and spiritual, as well as biological and ecological, dimensions. The study of how sociocultural complexity has developed in Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau societies of northwestern North America continues to be a major focus of archaeological research (Ames 1995; Arnold 1992; Hayden 1992, 1996; Lepofsky 2004; Matson and Coupland 1995; Moss et al. 2004). It appears that the first migrants entering the region were socially organized mainly in small-scale family groups, travelling over a sparsely populated terrain and setting up single-family or small multifamily camps for periods of time in

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sheltered, resource-rich sites. Even in the Early Holocene, however, there is evidence of wider social and economic ties between communities, possibly based on networks of trade and communication extending over considerable distances (Ames and Maschner 1999; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Koppel 2001; Moss et al. 2004). In terms of ethnobotanical knowledge and practice, both the social character of humans and the stratification and diversification of societal roles, including those of leaders, are, and have been, integral to plant resource use and to the processes of knowledge acquisition, transmission, and adaptation. In this chapter, I explore some of the social aspects of plant use, starting with consideration of the smallest social unit, the family, and the varying roles that family members play in relation to plants and ethnobotanical knowledge. I then turn to an examination of social complexity and how it may have influenced plant knowledge and use. Units of Social Organization The Family or Household Unit

Most human “families,” including those of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America, consist of a man and woman, their children, and often at least one set of grandparents. In cases of polygamy, which was common in this area particularly with men of greater wealth who might have from two to several wives, the co-spouses would likely have lived and worked together. As well as children, a well-off family in the past in many parts of the study area might have one or more slaves whom they had purchased, traded for, or captured in war. Altogether, such a group might range from ten to thirty people (Suttles 1990a, 1990b). Collectively, these are the people who would spend the greatest amount of time together on a day-to-day basis, usually living in proximity, even within multifamily or extended family dwellings, and moving together to resource-harvesting camps during the seasonal round. Thus such a family group can be considered both the basic social unit of societies in the study area and the basic economic unit. The fundamental pattern of living, established in the distant past, was that each nuclear family or basic household group resided within an extended territory and moved as a unit from one site to another over the seasons, sometimes with other, allied families, often camping in temporary mat-covered or wood-covered lodges and returning to a permanent winter plank house or pithouse in a centralized village to spend the winter months (see chapter 8). There were many variations of this pattern. In some cases, the territory would be occupied by a broader extended family, clan, or village group or band, or several households would routinely move together or in close coordination to adjacent areas within a broader territory.

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Over time, new resource species entered the area or existing ones were enhanced, technologies for food harvesting and processing were improved, populations grew, houses became bigger, house construction and modes of transportation became more sophisticated – and social complexity likely increased simultaneously. Even into the early part of the Late Holocene, winter villages both on the coast and in the interior were very small, with only two or three houses together. On the Northwest Coast, it is suggested that pithouses, or “in ground” houses, preceded cedar-wood plank houses and were replaced by the latter over the course of a few thousand years as western redcedar became more and more common (Ames and Maschner 1999; Lepofsky, Schaepe, et al. 2009). Nevertheless, the same general pattern of families and groups residing in one place in the winter and moving around to different harvest sites over the growing season was evidently maintained into the time of European contact. Until the early 1900s in some cases, a typical family unit often lived with a group of other families in proximity or even all together in large dwellings under a single roof. What changed over time were the overall numbers of families dwelling together and community size, both of which generally increased, leading to greater complexity in social institutions and in social arrangements for communal production. Between about 6,000 and 3,500 years ago (in the Mid Holocene), immense shell middens – some several metres thick and covering many thousands of square metres – started to appear in the archaeological record on the Northwest Coast, beginning on the northern and central coasts and occurring later in Washington and Oregon. To some researchers at least, these middens suggest that people were expanding their use of intertidal resources, and also of salmon, possibly as a response to more stable sea levels starting around the same time.1 Salmon weirs may have increased in use over this time since they have been strongly evident on the central coast for at least the past 3,500 to 3,000 years (Matson 2003). During this same time interval, cedar plank houses became common on the coast, and concurrently semi-subterranean pithouses appeared in numbers in the Interior Plateau. Gradually, by the middle part of the Late Holocene, villages became larger as well, with houses on the coast arranged more formally in one or more rows, all usually facing the same direction (toward the water). Furthermore, as woodworking technologies continued to advance, canoes also became larger. Both the Northwest Coast cedar plank houses and the Interior Plateau pithouses reflected living arrangements that often showed differential social status. On the coast, especially within the larger cedar plank houses, each family would have its own hearth site and sleeping area, with families and individuals of different social status located in different areas of the house. Generally, chiefs and members of the “nobility,” along with their immediate families, occupied the back of the house, those of intermediate status resided in the middle

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positions, and the families of lesser status took the areas nearest the entrance.2 For the Central Coast Salish, several households totalling 100 or more people might be accommodated in a single shed-roofed house 100 metres or more long (Ames and Maschner 1999; Matson 2003; Suttles 1990a). In the interior, a family might occupy a single, smaller pithouse or share a larger pithouse with other, generally related families. A family’s winter stores might be cached within its living quarters or near the house. The differences in quality and rarity of items recovered archaeologically from houses – both on the coast and in at least some of the pithouses of the Interior Plateau – show differentiation in social status of various families, sometimes within the same house, with the families of chiefs and nobility having higher numbers of rare items like obsidian and nephrite. The antiquity of such differential status in various parts of the study area is not known. It may be relatively recent, possibly developing only within the past 2,000 to 1,000 years (see Matson, Coupland, and Mackie 2003), but some suggest it had beginnings possibly as early as 4,500 years ago, with permanent social inequality – marked by elites and slaves – well established by 2,500 years ago (Lepofsky 2004). Division of Labour

Ames and Maschner (1999, 137) suggest that the changes in the food economy, starting around the latter half of the Mid Holocene, possibly resulted in changes in gendered social dynamics. People’s increasing dependence on clams and other shellfish, as well as on salmon caught in weirs and traps in estuaries and riverine spawning sites, meant that women and children, and older people too, were able to contribute more directly to food procurement. This may have endowed these groups (elders, women, and children) with higher status and possibly shifted the power relationships within families away from the stronger, more dominant male who hunted in groups with other men and toward a more balanced social standing across gender and age groups. However, as emphasized by Moss (2011), women have often undertaken activities, including hunting and fishing, that have typically been cast as male occupations, so suggestions about changes in gendered work remain speculative. Nevertheless, women, children, and elders have probably always had important and specific roles in the family-based enterprise of survival. Their work not only in harvesting shellfish and easily captured salmon but also in contributing edible greens, root vegetables, berries, and other plant foods to the family diet was a more significant occupation, both on the coast and in the interior, than is often recognized. Women were easily capable of travelling on foot or by canoe, with other women and older children, for berry picking, root digging, clam digging, or fishing. Together the women and older children formed small social groups that had cross-cut households and that facilitated essential tasks

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undertaken in locations well beyond the main winter dwelling or seasonal camp, as well as within the village context. Men sought out women as wives and bearers of children, and increased opportunities for travel promoted marriage ties across neighbouring communities, or even farther afield by the beginning of the Late Holocene. A wife from a different place would have been a major source of new knowledge and skills related to plant use and other cultural knowledge, bringing her own experiences, and possibly even new products, with her to her new home (see chapters 5, 6, and 10). In the Nlaka’pamux story of Old-One, the Creator decrees, “Henceforth, men will hunt, fish, and make tools, and women will dig roots, and make baskets and mats” (Teit 1912, 327). Men and women performing different types of work is an almost universal phenomenon in human societies, although the lines dividing particular activities and occupations vary. Not just in Indigenous societies of northwestern North America but also throughout the continent and beyond, in societies where people derived their living from local resources by managing plant and animal populations and habitats in situ, men tended to be the hunters, warriors, and distance travellers, whereas women tended to stay closer to home, harvesting plant foods and shellfish and undertaking household tasks like food preparation and childcare. Although the role of each gender group was vital for survival, archaeologically and ethnographically, men’s occupations have been privileged by scholars until recently (Lepofsky 2004). In terms of ethnobotanical knowledge and practice, however, we know that both groups participated in major ways in learning, transmitting, and adapting knowledge about plants and their applications from generation to generation. Men’s Roles

In an elaboration of the role assigned to men in the Nlaka’pamux “Old-One” narratives, after creating four men and a woman, Old-One instructed a man to use a magic knife to cut a piece of saskatoon berry wood (after addressing the bush with, “My friend, I require you”), which Old-One induced to form itself magically into a fish spear. In a similar fashion, Old-One then formed a bow and arrow from yew wood brought to him by the man. Old-One created, in turn, a beaver spear, tools to fell a tree, and a firedrill. He taught the men how to use all of these implements, saying, “Henceforth, men will fell trees, and make fire. They will make tools and weapons, and will be workers, trappers, hunters, and fishermen.” Old-One also taught the men how to make nets and to set snares for hunting (Teit 1912, 324). Thus, in a single narrative, the work and skills of the men were mapped out, along with their main tools. These occupations described for Nlaka’pamux men were similar for men throughout northwestern North America, who focused everywhere on hunting, fishing, and working with wood and fire. Men were the specialists in fuel, in different qualities of wood for different purposes, in the manufacture and use of spears, harpoons, bows,

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and arrows, and in the materials from which they were made. These roles are confirmed in ethnographic reports and even photographs from the late 1800s and early 1900s (Boas 1921; Teit 1900, 1909; Swanton 1905, 1908). They still hold to some extent into the twenty-first century, although the roles are now translated into use of rifles, chainsaws and power tools, large-scale fishing gear, large boats, engines, and mechanical equipment. Along with men’s knowledge of woodworking, hunting, and fishing came an integrated body of cultural knowledge about the spiritual aspects of relationships with trees and forests and with the spirits of animals, about ceremonies around fishing and hunting, and about the importance of the supernatural helpers, spirits, and powers that bring success in these endeavours. Many men, especially those of the nobility, have held important ceremonial and political roles, which are discussed later. As the main long-distance travellers, men were probably the ones who surveyed new territories and identified new dwelling places when it was necessary to move households. They probably also were the first to find and claim potential harvest sites and camps used by families in their seasonal rounds. The men tended to represent their families and communities in relationships with other peoples and probably did so in ancient trading contacts, just as in more recent ones. During the eras of European exploration and trade, men were the main traders and negotiators – the ones who had the most contact with European leaders of the day. As such, they probably led the way in introducing new foods and other new products to their communities, and they would also have conveyed new words, new stories, new technologies, novel artistic innovations, and cultural traits to their own people. Women’s Roles

In the same “Old-One” narrative cited previously (Teit 1912, 324), Old-One made a root digger and showed the woman how to dig roots. In another version (ibid., 321), he “taught the women how to make birch baskets, mats, and lodges, and how to dig roots, gather berries and cure them.” As far distant as Haida Gwaii on the northern coast, women’s roles were equally distinctive and complementary to those of men, as described by Blackman (1982, 34; see also Norton 1981, 1985): “Although some economic activities, such as collecting shellfish and cooking, were performed by both males and females, in general the Haida division of labor was marked … clam digging and the implement of procurement, the gligú (“digging stick”), were considered part of a woman’s domain. The sexual division of labor was summed up for me by one elderly Massett man who offered the following comment on the essential property of the newly married couple: ‘Every man’s got to have his fishing line and devilfish stick and every woman her digging stick.’” We know that digging sticks are ancient implements, extending back far earlier than bows and arrows, which were evidently widely adopted only within

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the past 2,000 years or so (Ames and Maschner 1999). Digging stick tips, for example, were found in the context of a dense wapato meadow at Pitt Polder in the Lower Fraser Valley, dating to around 3,500 years ago (see chapter 2). Many digging sticks were recovered, some as old as 2,500 years, at the Lachane site in Prince Rupert Harbour (R. Inglis 1976; Lepofsky 2004). Evidence of digging sticks extends back into the Mid Holocene in northwestern North America, but it is likely that they have existed in some form from the time humans first entered the New World since they were found in the nearly 15,000-year-old site at Monte Verde, Chile (Dillehay et al. 2008), and it is probable that women were the main users of these implements (see chapters 2 and 5).3 In archaeological contexts, most root diggers and digging stick handles, bark peelers, and hide scrapers, as well as baskets and basketry materials, are widely assumed to be connected with women’s activities (Bernick 1998b; Hayden 1997; Lepofsky 2004). Digging sticks were often specially made for a specific girl or woman and were kept as important personal possessions for life, sometimes being interred with a girl or woman upon her death. Antler digging stick handles, in particular, were often elaborately decorated and occur more often archaeologically in burial contexts and in house pits of the Interior Plateau than any other woman’s tool. Probably the intricate incised designs found on many of these handles signified high status and prestige for an individual, paralleling the status and prestige that went with the occupation of plant gathering in many areas (M.B. Ignace, Ignace, and Nord 2009; Schulting 1994). Other artifacts and features such as hearths, pit-cooking depressions, cache pits, mats and mat-making needles, acorn-leaching pits, and drying racks probably also indicate the past presence and activities of women. Certainly, women spent an immense portion of their time harvesting and processing foods and materials (see Norton 1985). Much of the processing of both had to be done immediately after harvesting. Weaving materials alone took days of preparation – stripping, splitting, dyeing, bundling, and drying. Then, usually in the winter, these carefully prepared materials were taken out and used in constructing baskets, baby cradles, mats, clothing, blankets, and other woven items – another time-consuming and intensive occupation. Harvesting basketry materials was sometimes done in concert with food harvesting, but both tasks are so intensive that they were usually undertaken sequentially rather than concurrently. Often it was necessary for women to travel for hours, or even days, to gather the resources needed. Sometimes individual women would ascend to the treeline of the mountains to harvest root vegetables, berries, or basket materials, returning in a single day or staying over for two or three days (Dawson 1892; Turner 2003b, 2006a, 2006b). For example, Nuu-chah-nulth elder Stanley Sam (pers. comm., 1994, quoted in Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995) recalled that his own grandmother travelled on foot far back into the upland forests of Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver

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Island to get prime yellow-cedar and western redcedar bark for her weaving; she would be gone for many days – ten or more – at a time on these trips. Edith O’Donaghey, a Stl’atl’imx elder quoted in the previous chapter, recounted that her grandmother sometimes travelled all by herself up to Mission Ridge above Shalalth to dig edible roots. She would leave very early in the morning with a large pack basket on her back and stay for the whole day, coming back down at dusk (cited in Turner 1992b). That said, women tended to travel less than men, except in the context of their family’s seasonal rounds. In fact, some women may have resided their entire lives within twenty or thirty kilometres of their home village, perhaps moving to another village when they married. Many may have known or interacted with fewer than a hundred other people in their lifetime, as suggested by Dubin (1999) for Indigenous peoples in the entire region in general. This would have led to a very close and personal familiarity with local environments, mountains, streams, trees, and microhabitats within the sphere of one’s own habitat from childhood on. Haida elder Florence Davidson recalled the considerable time that her mother, Isabella Edenshaw, invested in digging and preparing Sitka spruce roots for her exquisitely crafted twined baskets and hats:4 “Ever since I can remember, I used to go with my mother in May for spruce roots [hlii.ng]. Every fine day we’d go to North Beach early in the morning before sunrise. We’d pack water and food with us and mother would cook our breakfast in the woods … We’d collect hlii.ng all day long … We’d collect piles and piles of [roots] … The sun would be going down when we started for home … Soon as my mother finished eating she’d start splitting the roots” (cited in Blackman 1982, 85–6) (figure 9-1). In almost all cases, the resources women sought were located in specific, known places often some distance from the camp or village. Critically important aspects of women’s specialized knowledge included not only the activities of digging roots, picking berries, and harvesting seaweed and greens, as well as the diverse materials required for weaving, but also knowing the prime areas to go for these products, the best time and season for them, the most efficient techniques for harvesting, which individual roots, cedar stands, berry bushes, seaweed rocks, or plant patches to select, and how to harvest, tend, or care for the plants so that they would remain productive over years and generations. As with men, women also needed to know about the spiritual aspects of their work, including the proper way to approach the plants, the words of thanks and recognition to say, and any taboos that go with harvesting,5 such as not picking seaweed from under the water but only that exposed on the rocks at low tide (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2009; Turner 2003a; Turner and Clifton 2006), taking only a portion of cedar bark from each tree, and not cutting too deeply into the inner bark of the birch tree (Turner 2003b, 2009). As illustrated by the complex timing of the seaweed harvest – which requires balancing the times for picking, drying, turning, and bringing in the seaweed with other tasks

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9-1  |  Agnes Edenshaw-Yeltatzie-Jones, sister of Florence Davidson and daughter of Isabella Edenshaw, Haida, of Massett, preparing łii.ng (spruce roots) for weaving, 1971.

like cutting and drying halibut and spring salmon, cooking and rendering seal fat and meat, feeding and caring for children, and tending fires in the smokehouse – women have had to multitask in the extreme (Turner and Clifton 2009).6 These tasks and responsibilities generally complement those of men. Just as men’s activities contribute irreplaceably to the survival and well-being of the

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household and community, so too do women’s. The story of the Kitkiata hunter, told by Dan Gosnell (Gilodza) to William Beynon in 1954, illustrates how men’s and women’s roles harmonize. In this narrative, a Kitkiata hunter travelled around until he found the very valley he searched for, where “not only game and salmon were plentiful, but also there was a plenteous supply of berries and fruits and rice[-root].” The hunter took an industrious wife who knew how to weave mountain goat wool. Working together, they were able to put by large quantities of fish and meat and to gather all of the different kinds of berries and “wild rice” (northern riceroot), and the woman wove many dancing robes (cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 217–19). It is the cooperation between them that makes men’s and women’s roles so effective. Even so, most of their tasks (other than women’s bearing and nursing children) cannot be said to be exclusively within one or the other domain. Necessity and convenience, as well as diversity in personal preference, skills, talents, and opportunities, have sometimes resulted in a blurring or crossing-over of these roles (R.E. Ignace and Ignace forthcoming; Thornton 1999). Some women hunt; some men pick berries. Some women carve; some men make baskets.7 Even archaeologically, there appears to have been some crossing of gender roles. In a detailed study of artifacts associated with burials in the Interior Plateau, Schulting (1994) found, perhaps to his surprise, that there were no cases where an artifact type was exclusively found with bodies of one gender or the other, although males tended to have more celts, scrapers, bone points, pigments, harpoons, antler wedges, stone knives, tubular pipes, and shaft smoothers placed in their burials. In the case of digging stick handles, which one might assume would be exclusively associated with women, of twelve antler digging stick handles found as grave inclusions, five were associated with male burials. Schulting (ibid.) suggests that some of these may actually have been handles of other kinds of tools, but their central hole and their similarity to digging stick handles of the ethnographic period indicate that they were indeed the handles of root digging sticks. Their inclusion with men’s interments remains a mystery. As well, of the stone artifacts, such as projectile points, that archaeologists have assumed reflect men’s work and men’s occupations, many have actually been used by women. In Schulting’s (1994) survey, he found that the burials of eleven females included projectile points and noted that a companion of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River in the early 1800s observed women manufacturing projectile points. Thus we need to be careful in making assumptions of gendered tool use (Bernick 1998b). For the Interior Plateau peoples, although women and men traditionally had different roles, Teit (1909, 573) noted that this varied slightly in different families, that many Secwepemc men made most of their own clothes, and that in several families only the men cooked fresh meat. Pit-cooking roots, however, was almost always women’s work, and often men were forbidden even to come

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near while balsamroots, camas bulbs, and other such foods were cooking. On the coast, on the other hand, in some instances pit-cooking was the exclusive activity of men.8 Pit-cooking often required careful ritual preparation, including sweat bathing and prayers. As Kirk and Daugherty (2007, 66) note, “the skill in roasting roots was more valued than skill in digging them” (see also Peacock 1998; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980). Even tasks such as berry picking involved ritual activities, such as the First Fruits ceremony enacted in a number of Interior Plateau cultures. There were also women’s dances in connection with their work. For example, Secwepemc and Dakelh women danced with baskets and branches of saskatoon berries, imitating the gathering of berries (Teit 1909, 578). Gendered roles that may have been more strictly defined in the past have changed with the times, as well. Helen Clifton (Turner and Clifton 2006, 2009) explained that for the Gitga’at and other Ts’msyen, around the turn of the twentieth century and up until about the 1950s, it was solely women who harvested seaweed. The women, with the older children, would take their canoes across to Campania Island from the seaweed camp at K’yel, on Princess Royal Island, early in the morning, leaving Helen, as one of the youngest women, to care for the small children. One of the women – usually the matriarch – would steer the canoe and carefully watch the waves to ensure that everyone jumped safely onto the rocks, picked their seaweed over the course of a couple of hours, and then, when the tide got higher, packed their seaweed and themselves back into the canoes and returned to the camp to dry their harvest. When motorboats, fishing boats, and larger skiffs started to be used in transporting people to and from the seaweed grounds, however, men started to accompany women. Sometimes they would drop the women off and go fishing, or sometimes they would stay and assist in the seaweed harvest. Today, at times, there are more men than women harvesting the seaweed; they might set their halibut nets before picking seaweed and then pull them in and reset them before returning to camp with the seaweed and any halibut caught. Children’s Roles

Children are an ever-present component of households but are often not recognized for the special roles they play in family activities. In some cases, the intended occupations of children would be determined even before birth. A woman of Nuu-chah-nulth or Ditidaht nobility, whose unborn baby boy was intended to be a whale hunter, would undertake special training, preparing her child for the later rigours of life on the ocean, surrounded by and working with spiritual powers for success in capturing whales and other feats that would provide for the community. Then, when the baby was born, if it was indeed a boy, his spine might be rubbed with the charcoal of burned sea palm (Postelsia palmiformis), a marine alga of the lower intertidal zone of rocky coastal headlands

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that is continuously battered by the waves – one of the most flexible, tough, and resilient life forms on earth. This would help to strengthen the infant, right from the start (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). A newborn Secwepemc baby boy was trained to grow straight and tall with the tough withe of a saskatoon berry bush, placed into his tiny gripping hands and used to pull him up, while talking to him and encouraging him to hang onto the stick, “Ohhh, boy! Ohhhh boy!” (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001). Nlaka’pamux babies were washed with different solutions to strengthen them, including a solution of mushrooms. Mabel Joe (pers. comm., 1984; see also Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger 1985; and Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) explained that mushrooms, although soft, are very strong, being capable of splitting wood and moving large rocks aside as they grow. Children washed in mushroom juice will therefore become strong and independent. Nlaka’pamux women also washed their babies in solutions of wild rose, desert currant (Ribes cereum), and other plants to help them grow strong and healthy (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Parents and elders carefully observed babies and children from the time they were born to see what talents and inclinations they had so that they could be encouraged in specializations like canoe making, hunting, or basket making for which they showed special aptitudes. Children were also taught discipline from an early age, as described by Mary Thomas (2001, 11): Wherever mother went the baby was with her. She packed the baby with a strap across her shoulders with the birchbark cradle on her back. Wherever she went her baby was with her. If she was gathering food out in the bushes or out in the open, like maybe digging wild potatoes, if she got tired she’d take her baby and hang it on the branch and the wind was the baby sitter. The baby slept. If you unbind the baby, it will stretch and kick, just kick away. When it gets sleepy it will not sleep unless it’s bound back in the cradle. As soon as you bind the baby, you feed it, it’s comfortable, it falls asleep, the mother packs it. That way the child knows it’s loved and protected by the parent. That little child automatically grows up to be a loving obedient child. Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), the last of the traditionally trained Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch speakers, described how the elders of his community, when he was only three or four years old, started preparing him to be an orator, dancer, and leader in the spiritual and economic realm of the potlatch (cited in Recalma-Clutesi 2007). Whenever the police boat came to take the children away to residential school, his grandparents took him away, far up the Kingcome River, or over to their small house in a remote part of their territory, at a place called Deep Harbour in the Broughton Archipelago. Here they maintained a luxʷxiwey (clam garden), hunted seal, and travelled across to different islands to

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pick seaweed and fish for halibut in the spring. They also visited their relatives at other locations where there were t’əkkillakw (estuarine root gardens) to obtain edible root vegetables – springbank clover, Pacific silverweed, and northern riceroot. Adam Dick (pers. comm., 2009; see also Turner, Recalma-Clutesi, and Deur 2013) recalled that his grandparents had a long dugout canoe that could hold their bedding and food and everything they needed. His grandparents would paddle at either end, and Adam himself had his own paddle and sat in the middle, bundled up against the cold. All the time he was with his grandparents, they were teaching him the skills for acquiring food but also teaching him about correct and proper behaviour, history, stories, and everything he needed to equip him for his later life roles. He remembered, from his childhood, creating his own small clam garden by rolling rocks down to the edge of the low tideline. Similarly, when he was at Kingcome, he and the other children also created their own small estuarine root gardens, in imitation of his grandmother’s larger ones. Children destined to be healers, river guardians, canoe builders, storytellers, historians, or any number of other specialists were watched and groomed for these jobs. For example, when he was still a child, Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief Earl Maquinna George was taken by his elders on a journey up the river over which he had hereditary responsibility so that he would come to know it intimately. At this time, he was taught what was needed to keep the river in the best possible state for the salmon that were a precious resource for the community: where to clean out jams and debris, where to leave the logs in the river to create deep pools, and how to transplant salmon eggs from the spawning beds if the river changed its course (George 2003). Like Clan Chief Adam Dick, Chief Earl Maquinna George (pers. comm., 1997) received major training from his grandfather: “A lot of my learning of responsibility for my Chieftainship came from Peter Webster. He was my grandfather. Very intelligent people, more or less told me how I should live, and how I should be, what I am as a hereditary chief, the roles and responsibilities. This was said in outright public instruction of where I belong and how I belong in that position.” Dr E. Richard Atleo (Chief Umeek), also of Ahousaht, was taught in a similar way, although, tragically, his grandfather and father passed away when he was still young, so he was left with the principles of knowledge he needed but had to chart his own way in learning the details of a leader’s role. In this, he was supported by his grandmother and other family members (E.R. Atleo 2011). Even at four or five years of age, children begin to contribute in real ways to a community’s cultural, social, and economic life. Contemporary elders everywhere remember the tasks and chores they did as children to assist their parents and grandparents: collecting firewood, fetching water, berry picking (figure 9-2), root digging, seaweed harvesting, hunting small animals, clam digging, and selecting salmon from the tidal fish traps. The stereotyped gendered activities were usually not as strongly defined for children. Boys being cared

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9-2  |  Ethan Dundas of the Gitga’at Nation with wild blueberries he has picked, at Hartley Bay, BC .

for by their grandmothers might go out to pick berries. Years later, these men recall their hands – and mouths – being stained purple from this task. Girls might help their fathers or grandfathers to build dugout canoes, fetching tools or helping to keep the fire going to heat the rocks. Gradually, however, the girls’ and boys’ tasks became more focused, as reflected in the toys that were made for them. Girls made or were given miniature baskets, whereas boys received small practice bows and arrows. Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) recalled her own experience as a child:

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9-3  |  Mary Thomas’s willow-bark doll, like those her grandmother used to make for her when she was a little girl.

I can remember my brother; Grandpa used to make him toys out of wood. We were made dolls out of natural material [willow bark], by our grandmother [figure 9-3]. And we were taught values through legends. Our legends all had something to learn from them. I was very young when my grandmother taught me how to make a basket. Because sooner or later, we were going to become part of the food gathering. They would tie a little basket around a little girl’s waist. The little girl might fill it with leaves, or dirt, or anything, but she learned that that little basket was a container and it has to be filled. And she’d go

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along. The bigger they got, the bigger her basket would be. And she was made at a very young age to fill one basket before she would go play. And I can remember, I loved to play, especially swimming when it was hot. And we’d hurry up and hurry up, and our little brother was really slower than us, we’d have to help him fill his basket, before grandma would say, “All right, you go swim.” Clan Chief Adam Dick (pers. comm., 2003) recalled how as a child he and other boys would gather armloads of succulent thimbleberry and salmonberry shoots in the spring, and as they walked through the village at Kingcome Inlet, everyone called out to them, asking for a taste.9 Being able to share their harvest, to provide food for the community, gave them great pride. Boys were taught to share the first deer, geese, or ducks they killed and the first salmon they caught with one of their elders or with the entire community. And girls were taught – and still are – to give away the berries they picked into their first basket and the first roots they dug, instilling the ethic of generosity and responsibility from an early age (George 2003; Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Turner 1996). Children were raised to be self-sufficient. Most of them could handle a canoe from a very young age and had many skills in food harvesting and preparation. Adam Dick and other elders recall as children going out in small groups first thing in the morning. They fished and snared or hunted small game, dug clams and gathered chitons and other shellfish, picked greens or berries and other fruits in season, and even gathered birds’ eggs. Then they lit a fire down at the beach and cooked their own food. In this way, they fed themselves for the entire day, not returning home until it got dark. Young people also participated in a community’s ceremonial life. For the Saanich and other Straits Salish peoples, children ceremonially carried the first sockeye to be caught in the reefnet over a pathway strewn with sacred sword fern fronds to a respected elder, who smudged it with the smoke of burning q’əxmín (“Indian celery,” Lomatium nudicaule) seeds, cooked it, and divided it up into portions to be served to everyone in the community (E. Claxton and Elliott 1993). Young people took part in many games and contests that helped to train and prepare them for later roles. For Ditidaht, Nuu-chah-nulth, and some Coast Salish boys, for example, there was the pilaa-pilaa contest, in which sword fern fronds – called pilaapila-apt (“pilaa-pilaa plant”) in Ditidaht and similar terms in several other languages – were held and the leaflets removed, one at a time, the contestants pronouncing “pilaa!” (cf. pála, “one,” a Proto-Central-Coast-Salish term) each time, with as many as possible being pulled off with one breath. The one who pulled off the most – the one capable of holding his breath the longest – was the winner. John Thomas explained that it was important for young men to be able to hold their breath a long time, especially those who were being

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trained to dive down and harvest the longest stalks of bull kelp for fishing lines and harpoon lines (see chapter 6) and those who, when a whale was harpooned and killed, had to dive underneath the body of the whale to tie its mouth shut so that it would not fill with water and sink. John himself participated in the pilaa-pilaa contests, but by his time, in the 1930s, they were using wooden clothes pegs strung up on a line stretched across the big house rather than sword fern fronds (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). There were many other races, swimming contests, and other sports that boys took part in. Girls, too, had their own games and contests that prepared them for their lives as women, such as the Nuxalk tsayamuus flower contest (described in chapter 6), which trained girls not to reveal their emotions. Children often made games of their chores, imitating animals and birds, as they participated in harvesting berries or roots. Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) remembered how she and her brother and sister would help their grandmother to gather up wapato tubers and water-parsnip roots along the Salmon River estuary near Shuswap Lake, after her grandmother had waded into the water, dug them up, and then tossed them onto the shore. When they went with their grandmother to dig glacier lily and chocolate lily bulbs and spring beauty corms, their grandmother would use her digging stick to turn over clumps of turf, and then the children would pick out the biggest roots and place them in the baskets. Their grandmother would check over their baskets to make sure they hadn’t taken roots that were too small and would remove and replant any small ones. When their grandmother harvested Indian-hemp stems, the children would sling the bundled stems over their backs and gallop with them over to the place where they would be processed, pretending to be horses. Training at Puberty

Puberty was a special time of learning for both boys and girls. Virtually every group, both on the coast and in the interior, observed particular training or rituals for young people entering adulthood. Boys and young men might undertake long spiritual quests, travelling to a remote location and isolating themselves for periods of weeks, months, or years as they searched for a spiritual helper and supernatural guidance in their future lives as hunters, fishers, or whatever special occupations they sought. With help and advice from one or more elder relatives, they would fast, bathe, or sweat in a sweat lodge to purify themselves, train by running, swimming, and other physical exertions, and pray to the spiritual entities for strength, prowess, and success. Girls would be sequestered away from their families at the time of their first menstruation and thereafter for a shorter interval at every menstruation. An elder woman, usually a grandmother or aunt, would be their only contact with the outside world. For Interior Salish girls, special huts or lodges, often of Douglasfir boughs, were made for them, where they would sit and work on intricate

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tasks like basket making, or even systematically pulling off the needles of fir boughs, one at a time, so that they would learn dexterity and discipline. Teit (1909, 587) reported that Secwepemc girls would leave their secluded lodge in the evening to practise “running, climbing, carrying burdens, digging trenches, the last so that in after years they might be expert at root-digging.10 Each morning they brought home a small load of fresh fir-brush or fire-wood to their lodge.” Boys at puberty were also often isolated for a period of time. Seeking spiritual powers that would guide them throughout their lives, they retired to remote places where they underwent rigorous training: purification rituals, fasting, bathing in the ocean or in prayer pools, sweat bathing, and scrubbing themselves with tree boughs to toughen their skin. After this period of training, they were considered to be adults and would be expected to marry and take on a man’s responsibilities and roles. Elders’ Roles

Older men and women – those who lived through their childrearing years and belonged to the grandparents’ generation – had, and still do have, a special and respected position in the household and community. Each stage of life had, and continues to have, its own particular balance of learning and sharing Traditional Ecological Knowledge. The main occupation of the children was learning – through play, combined with imitation, instruction, experience, language acquisition, and storytelling. Then, as described previously, at puberty boys and girls underwent intensive, often very formal, spiritual and practical training to prepare them for their respective adult lives. Some of this type of training continues to this day, although many of these elements of a youth’s education were stifled and eradicated over multiple generations by the enforced residential school system and potlatch prohibition (E.R. Atleo 2011). Young adults after marriage spend most of their time raising children and undertaking the more physical activities of food procurement and processing, as well as other day-today responsibilities, both practical and ceremonial. Although they never stop learning through this entire period, increasingly they begin to take on the role of teachers, particularly for their own children. Elders, especially, are sought out for their experience and wisdom, and thus their major role is to serve as advisors and teachers to all of those younger than themselves. Although many elders continue active lives of fishing, berry picking, and root digging, as well as processing the foods that others procure, their primary societal position is as guides and mentors, and others increasingly help to provide for their needs. There has always been a special relationship between children and elders, especially their grandparents. Children were instructed always to be generous with whatever they obtained, particularly to their elders. When a boy caught

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his first salmon or procured his first deer, he would give it away to an uncle or grandparent, and a girl who had made her first basket would fill it with berries and give it to an older relative (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 1999; Mabel Joe, pers. comm., 1995). These teachings of sharing food and provisions with elderly people, whether at feasts, out in the bush, or in their homes, were deeply engrained (see Andre, Welsh, and Turner 2003). Clan Chief Adam Dick (pers. comm., 2001), of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation, recalled that his grandfather, who was a leader in the community, would gather all of the young people and get them to “Go check on those houses [of the elders].” He explained, You know, that’s your job to get it [for elders] … Hunting. If they’re starting to go get seal, get three, you know. Give to the elders first. And that’s what they mainly go out for. Or, go get a deer. If they get a deer, and they hang it up for a few days and they chop it up for the people that can’t go out … Our elders … the first of everything always went to the old people … The first thing we’d do when we’re out there fishing … we’d go out for the widows and the elders. They let them have their winter supply before we’d go out for the rest of the village. For elders who wanted to continue gathering their own food, special areas might be set aside. Convenient and readily accessed hunting grounds and berry patches would be reserved for those who could not travel in steep terrain. One Nisga’a account exemplifies this: Harry Nyce’s great grandmother at Gitwinksihlkw (Canyon City) became blind in her old age, and because she loved to pick berries, everyone in the family saved the berry bushes closest to the house for her to pick and even transplanted some saskatoon, red elderberry, and other berry bushes nearby to give her easy access (Harry Nyce and Emma Nyce, pers. comm., 2013). Sometimes people brought berry-laden branches of soapberry, huckleberry, and other species to the elders so they could pick them off; this had a dual function because the pruning of the bushes was said to enhance the growth and productivity of these plants (Dr Ron Ignace, pers. comm., 2005; Turner and Burton 2010). Helen Clifton said that the Gitga’at always designated the most accessible seaweed-picking rocks for the old ladies – places where they could most easily step off onto the rocks from the canoe or boat with less risk of falling (Turner and Clifton 2006), and Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim) (pers. comm., 2011) said that the younger Hul’qumi’num hunters always hunted deer in more distant and hard to access places, leaving the Garry oak prairies, which were easier to walk over, to the older hunters. In terms of knowledge acquisition and transmission, the elders were, and are, the ones who held the group’s collective memory, history, and skills, the ones who had observed any changes, and therefore the ones who guided decisions to be taken. Elders, especially the chiefs and matriarchs, even today, have strong

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authority – and their wisdom and experience can save lives. For example, they often determine at what point a group should leave camp or travel, depending on the tides, winds, and other environmental factors. Such a decision takes experience and knowledge; if a wrong choice is made, a canoe could capsize and lives could be put in danger. Elders also participated in and officiated at ceremonies, such as the First Salmon and First Fruits ceremonies.11 Chief Earl Maquinna George (2003, 33–4) recalls such an elder, named Tushka, from when he was a child at Ahousaht: There was another old man called Tushka. He had a cane, and after the dinner … he got up and banged the cane on the floor, and he was the start of what was going on. He announced what the feast was for, who it was for, and the reason why the feast went on. He started, with the historical stories of where our people came from … He must have been one of the leading historians of our culture. He knew about the songs, and the dance that goes with each family. There were various types of feasts that went on a lot. The people were proud of the many things that were said through the long talks by Tushka. This is what Tushka used to talk about, how things came about, ownership of all the beaches and land, resources. Not just only covering forestry. There’s a lot to do with fishing grounds, halibut banks, codfish banks, salmon banks … These expert people talked for hours at a time. The tremendous changes that have occurred since the coming of Europeans in the recent centuries emphasize the key importance of cultural continuity as a means of building stability and resilience for First Peoples. Maintaining the basic teachings about family roles and responsibilities and about kinship relations with the natural world – as emphasized by many contemporary elders like Dr Mary Thomas, Annie York, Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth), Dr E. Richard Atleo (Chief Umeek), Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim), Ida Jones, and John Thomas – has been a key to the amazing capacity of Indigenous peoples to retain the essence of their cultures and, in many cases, their languages, ceremonies, and ability to harvest their own food, carve canoes, weave baskets, and adapt these skills to circumstances of today’s world (E.R. Atleo 2011; Turner 2004a, 2005; Turner and Turner 2008), despite all of the immense disruptions people have endured. Comparative studies of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge from nearly a century ago to current times (Kay 1993; Turner 2004a; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) show that, whereas some names for and knowledge about plants have been lost over intervening generations, a remarkable portion of this information has been retained, largely through the experiences and teachings of elders, both at the family level and more broadly (Recalma-Clutesi 2007).

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Slaves

Slavery was a prevalent institution at the time Europeans arrived in northwestern North America (Donald 1997), and many traditional stories mention slaves in some role, sometimes as major actors in narratives. Slaves are often portrayed as assistants and servants of young people and as labourers – for example, cutting firewood. Many took part in food harvesting and processing (Boas 2002). Even Raven was known to have slaves: “Raven finally made salmon and instructed his slaves to build a salmon weir and caught many salmon” (Boas 2002, 385, citing legends of the ‘Nakwaxda’xw [Nahwitti]). The extent to which slaves were considered to be part of a family or household varied with circumstances. In all cases, however, slaves would have been important in considerations of harvesting and use of plants and in knowledge transmission. Donald (1997) and Ames (2005) suggest that slaves were indeed a major element in salmon intensification on the Northwest Coast, their labour helping to alleviate the inevitable “bottleneck” in cutting and processing the fish before they spoiled. Slaves were also known to assist with, among other tasks, berry picking and other forms of plant gathering.12 Pacheedaht chief Charlie Jones (Queesto) recalled that his grandfather used to have slaves whom he assigned to guard his estuarine root gardens and, when they were ready, to dig the silverweed and clover roots for him (cited in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Similarly, Tlingit slaves were assigned to protect berry patches from birds or human intruders, as well as to assist in harvesting (Thornton 1999). Salish slaves, many of them captives from raids by the peoples of the central and northern coast – Haida, Tlingit, or Kwakwaka’wakw – sometimes ended up nearly 1,000 kilometres from their original homes (Ames and Maschner 1999; Gibson 1992) and must have been major sources of new knowledge and skills that were transferred from one region to another. Slaves were often part of the “goods” that were exchanged at major trading centres such as “The Fountain” (Xaxl’ep) along the Fraser River north of Lillooet, a site where numerous slaves who were captured in war from the Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc were sold back to their friends and families (Teit 1906a). Farther south, the Chinookan served as middlemen for slaves, along with many other trade goods, between the Columbia Plateau and the Northwest Coast (Ames and Maschner 1999). One story of a Ditidaht woman from Whyac on the west coast of Vancouver Island, who was taken as a slave by Hul’qumi’num people, illustrates ways that individuals who were captured travelled from place to place. Told by Effie Tate to Kennedy and Bouchard (1994, 46–7), the story is called “The Sasquatch.” A Ditidaht woman was among a small group of people who were picking salalberries when a canoe load of hostile Cowichan Indians came along. To save her companions, this woman ran towards the Cowichan men,

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giving the others time to escape by canoe. The woman was taken back to the area near the mouth of the Cowichan River [near Duncan on the east coast of Vancouver Island]. Here one of her captors took her as his wife, rather than a slave. When fishing season came, the Cowichans took her with them over to the mouth of the Fraser River. It was here that she had an opportunity to escape. She made her way back to Vancouver Island and began a long walk inland through the forest. Finally the woman got to an area some where along the upper portions of Carmanah Creek. Eventually, the woman made her way home to Whyac. One can only speculate what she must have seen and learned in her travels and how she might have brought new information with her when she returned. Possibly, she tasted wapato tubers from the Fraser Valley for the first time, and she may have encountered new types of berries, like Canada blueberries (Vaccinium myrtilloides), said to have been introduced to the Ditidaht territory from the Fraser Valley at some point (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). She probably learned some Salishan names for various plants and may have taught her Hul’qumi’num captors some of her Ditidaht names. This is all speculative but certainly within the realm of possibility. Similar stories could be told for numerous people who were captured, lived in villages far from home, and then were eventually repatriated (e.g., Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001; Reid and Sewid-Smith 2004). Task Groups

Many of the tasks undertaken by women and men – such as creating and using fish weirs, cutting and drying fish, berry picking, root digging, and pit-cooking, and making a large canoe or building a house – were accomplished by groups of people working as a team or in parallel, providing at once social contact and mutual assistance in the tasks at hand. These might be family groups – mother and daughters, aunts and nieces, sisters, brothers, or grandfather and grandsons. Pacheedaht elder Ida Jones (see chapter 5) recalled that working together in a group was highly enjoyable: “They [women] invited each other [to harvest roots], I guess so they won’t be lonely or sad, because they are happy, passing on the news” (cited in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983, 18; see also Turner 2003b). For harvesting, there were efficiencies in transportation when, for example, a group of women went by canoe for berry picking or seaweed gathering. There were also advantages in terms of safety in numbers, efficiency in childcare, and opportunities for younger, less experienced harvesters to learn from the older, more experienced ones (McDonald 2003; Thornton 2008). The Straits Salish reefnet fishery is an excellent example of such cooperative harvesting. The reefnet site, the reefnet itself, and one or more canoes typically belonged to one individual – part of an entire suite of owned and inherited

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property that included names, ceremonial regalia, stories, rights to certain ceremonies, and rights to particular resources at particular places. However, the owner could not operate the reefnet alone. It took at least six men, in two canoes, with the willow-bark reefnet, or purse net, positioned between the canoes, with lines running out from the net anchored in place to form an approach and with clusters of beach wildrye grass (Leymus mollis) tied to crosslines to simulate an ocean bottom. All of these materials had to be gathered and equipment had to be made or repaired before the fishing season. Then, as fishing commenced, after observation of a ceremonial “no catch” period (usually four days), following the capture and ritual sharing out of the first salmon, the fishing began in full. When the men spotted an approaching school of sockeye or other salmon, they spread the canoes apart, allowing the salmon to enter the net. When there were sufficient salmon in the net, the men drew the canoes together and individually selected the salmon from the net, to be apportioned to each of the fishers, with the highest share going to the owner of the reefnet (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994; Turner and Berkes 2006; Turner and Hebda 2012).13 Similar task groups would be operating on shore, where the women would be waiting to cut and smoke the fish that were caught. This type of teamwork in resource harvesting and processing took place almost everywhere – in duck hunting with nets, oulachen fishing, salmon weir and gillnet fishing, hunting with deer fences in the uplands of the Interior Plateau, and many types of plant harvesting and processing ventures. The seasonal bases, like the Straits Salish reefnet camps, the root-digging and berry-picking camp at Mission Ridge described by Edith O’Donaghey, and the Gitga’at seaweed camp at K’yel on Princess Royal Island, were often attended by groups of families – as many as ten or twelve together – each with its own shelter, boughs for bedding, fireplace, and earth oven. Each family had its own boat or its own horses and horse-grazing areas and was self-sufficient in food and provisions, but all were situated in the same general vicinity, with plenty of visiting and exchanging of labour happening continuously (Turner 1992b; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). If one woman filled her berry baskets early, she might help her sister or her niece to fill her baskets. Or if a skilled Gitga’at fish cutter completed cutting all of her halibut into wooks (“thin strips”) to hang up in the sun, she might cut someone else’s halibut for them. These people, in turn, could expect some help some other time when they needed it. Pit-cooking was a frequent communal activity, where the total collective harvest of roots, clams, or other food would be cooked together in a single large pit.14 Gitga’at elder Helen Clifton (Turner and Clifton 2006) described the routine at Hartley Bay for task groups that form when a woman is ready to chop her year’s supply of edible seaweed. Following the harvesting and drying of the seaweed in squares at the K’yel seaweed camp, the dried squares are transported back to Hartley Bay, and later on in June, a second session of processing ensues.15

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9-4  |  Gitga’at elder Colleen Robinson, an expert at seaweed preparation, demonstrating how to dampen the edible seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae) in preparation for pressing it into cedar-wood boxes, one stage in complex seaweed processing.

The seaweed squares are moistened with seawater (figure 9-4), packed in layers in a cedar-wood box, and left for two or three days for the seaweed to “get its flavour.” They are then taken out, and using axes and wooden blocks, the compressed seaweed is chopped into small pieces, which are spread out in the sun on sheets to dry, before being stored away for winter or for trade. The chopping of the seaweed is hard and intensive work. [I] put the seaweed sheets out, all over the floor, and, put the [yewwood chopping] blocks on. And, so the women would come to help chop that seaweed … different women come throughout the village to come and help me chop that seaweed, because I’m married to him [the late Chief Johnny Clifton] I guess. That’s why they’ll come. He’s got many nieces, and … well somebody will say, “When are you going to chop your

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seaweed?” And I have to send somebody out, “Well, granny’s going to be chopping seaweed on such and such a day.” I send word throughout the community and so they drift up. Some people have an hour or so, they’ll come out and they all help each other … Some of them have enough daughters or granddaughters to go and help. It works that way in every house, [when] they’re chopping seaweed. If you’ve got an hour to spare, two hours to spare, whatever time you have, you go and help chop seaweed. Especially if you don’t have seaweed. You will earn some seaweed; they’ll give you some seaweed. You earn it. (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2001) Some task groups are comprised of men and women, or whole families, working together. An example is the harvesting and scraping of the edible inner bark of western hemlock and amabilis fir in years past.16 Sheets of bark were cut from the tree, sometimes from high up on the trunk, and this was usually done by men, who climbed up the tree with ropes. The men tossed the sheets of bark down to the women, who took them to the beach or some convenient spot and, using a special knife made of mussel shell or iron, scraped off the edible ksiiw from the inside of the bark. This intensive work continued sometimes for hours, until enough had been harvested (Curtis 1915; Turner and Thompson 2006). Curtis (1915, 39–40) described the next stage in the process for a Kwakwaka’wakw family, in which the inner bark was pit-cooked: The man of the family then takes his place at the side of the pit, while his wife sits at the opposite side and the children are between them. Each has a flat, rough piece of sandstone. The cover [of the cooking pit] is raised, one after another quickly removes a great handful of bast [inner bark], and the cover is dropped. Then each kneads his handful on the sandstone, turning and returning it, tearing it apart and opening it up, until after a while it becomes smooth and pasty. It is then rolled into a ball and laid in one of the boxes, and another handful is taken from the pit. When after a week or two of this labor the family returns to the permanent wintering village, the woman cuts a mat down to exactly the shape and size of the box into which she is going to place the bast. Most of the work to be done in connection with food preparation is seasonal, and sometimes the timing for its completion is critically important. For example, without refrigeration, fish like salmon and halibut need to be processed and preserved within a day or two of being caught. Cutting fish is an exacting skill. In the Gitga’at style of cutting thin strips, or wooks, from the fish for sun drying, after the skin is removed, each piece has to be cut to the same thickness – usually so one can just see the shadow of the knife through the flesh in

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cutting halibut – so that it will dry evenly and thoroughly. An expert will be able to predict just how many wooks can be taken from any fish of a given size. There are, almost always, particular specialists in any group – women who have the ability to cut the fish quickly and accurately, time after time. Those less skilled will be allowed to practise, but until they gain a certain level of competency, they best serve the communal enterprise by helping to hang and turn the thin strips of fish for the expert cutters, as well as supporting the work by sharpening knives, washing the fish, removing debris from the cutting board, tending to children, and preparing meals. This cooperative approach, with each individual working to her own level of experience and ability, while continuing to practise and learn, allows the greatest efficiency for the overall work. Several such small, focused, and cooperative work groups might exist together at the same camp and would be operating simultaneously in fishing season at comparable locations all up and down the coast or all along the interior waterways. Many different activities have to be coordinated, similarly, among task groups at any harvest locale over the days and weeks of occupancy. Whether along the coast or in the interior, these activities are always changing slightly, varying with the success of fishing or hunting or with opportunities presented for picking berries or greens or for digging roots, depending on the weather and influenced by any number of other events that happen to occur and must be folded into the routine. Whether at the high-elevation camps of the Interior Plateau, at the seaweed camps along the coast, or at the berry patches of the Nass Valley, groups of women would work together and in parallel, cutting and drying meat and fish, picking and drying berries, and harvesting and processing root vegetables – whatever needed to be done – over a period of days or weeks, all the while looking after children, preparing meals, tending fires, and keeping supplies of water and fuel handy, while men might be away hunting or fishing (Turner 2003b). Of course, such complexity in the multitude of tasks to be accomplished on different scales of time and space requires strong guidance and leadership. It is not surprising, therefore, that a number of different arrangements for designating responsibility and authority in food production and other types of work, including strengthening relationships with the spiritual domain, were developed, culminating in the complex systems of chieftainships and clans that were encountered by Europeans arriving in northwestern North America in the 1700s and 1800s. Social Stratification and Resource Use Over the millennia of occupation of the northwestern North American landscape, Indigenous peoples’ technologies and skills developed, sea levels became less chaotic, new species established themselves, some resources became

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intensified, and human populations expanded. The increased environmental complexity – and in some senses, increased stability – paralleled, and probably led to, increased social complexity. Larger groups required more exacting ways of apportioning and controlling resource use and access to resource localities, differentiation of skills and roles, and more formal means of decision making and planning for the future. Ultimately, social stratification resulted, accompanied by the development and establishment of leaders, who were ascribed high status, and by the role of followers, who looked to these leaders for help in maintaining the necessities of life. There also developed at some point, probably in ancient times, a different dimension of social relationships in the form of clans or lineages (said to be descendants of a common, often supernatural ancestor, as described in the origin narratives) that cut across and complemented direct family and household groupings and provided people with an extra level of social and economic support. Especially in the northern part of the study area, these clans are exogamous, meaning that people could not marry into their own clan, which would be seen as incestuous. In Haida, Ts’msyen, and other matrilineal societies, children assumed the clan of their mother. Different clan membership between family members resulted in more options and opportunities for diverse knowledge systems to develop – ultimately, one could argue, providing greater resilience or adaptability for a given group of people. The increased populations and development of social complexity, as evidenced especially around the middle of the Late Holocene, some 2,000 years ago (but with roots extending into the Mid Holocene), probably required more exacting claims to particular territories – places on the landscape and seascape where a group could assert exclusive use of resources and control the ways that these resources might be allocated or shared with others (Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005). A group’s overall territory would need to encompass sufficient diversity in its resources to provide virtually everything necessary for the group’s survival from year to year and generation to generation. Peoples’ territories varied over the area in the degree to which others were excluded or in the ways that territories were shared with neighbouring and other peoples. It may be in some cases that the establishment of territory by one group had a “domino effect” on others. If one group prohibited others from using a certain area, those people would, in turn, be forced to turn to other resource sites, and an obvious reaction would be to claim their own exclusivity for such sites. Then neighbouring groups would be forced into a similar action, until no territory was left unclaimed and, by extension, unoccupied or unmanaged. Although there would have been disputed sites with valued resources that would be fought over, boundaries would have been established in many cases: along mountain ridges, around watersheds, or from one island to another. Ultimately, such divisions would have to be respected if a group wanted to keep its own territory intact and unchallenged. Of course, there were also many areas that were shared and

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many different arrangements for managing shared access to resources between and across territories. Territories and owned resource sites, usually overseen by chiefs and their delegates, were a key to intergroup social relations and to apportioning resource use (see Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005). Each area or region, depending on its unique features, would have yielded different quantities and qualities of specific resources. In terms of plants, resource sites might be huckleberry patches, crabapple stands, shorelines producing high-quality seaweed, estuarine gardens of silverweed and clover rhizomes, camas meadows, wapato patches, stands of high-quality cedar trees or yew trees, patches of beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax) or cattails (Typha latifolia), or the like. Social connections such as trading or reciprocal hosting of harvesting groups allowed people to gain access to different resources – products that might be lacking or of lesser quality in their own territories. Thus, at least in recent times, in places like the territory of the Lytton band of the Nlaka’pamux in Botanie Valley, the Halkomelem Katzie territory in the Fraser Valley, the Straits Salish–Lekwungen lands on southern Vancouver Island, the Chinookan territory at the mouth of the Columbia River, and the Nisga’a territory around the Nass River estuary, people from many communities and nations would congregate annually. Recognizing the rights and authority of the hosting communities, clans, and chiefs, the visiting groups would either trade with the hosts for the resources they sought or be given permission to harvest in a sort of “U-pick” arrangement that was in some way reciprocal (Suttles 1987b; Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Affinal Ties and Resources

Intermarriage was one social strategy to assure and legitimize access of one family or community to another group’s resources or resource-harvesting areas (Ommer and Turner 2004). Marriage connections were so predominant among the various Central Coast Salish communities that, as pointed out by Kennedy (1995), the tribal designations for individuals set out by the colonial government in the 1800s and 1900s did not at all reflect people’s actual status as community members since many people had kin ties and recognized membership in two or more communities, often even across language groups. Rather than a series of isolated villages or tribes, these communities formed networks of relationship that helped to strengthen and diversify their economies and afforded them greater resilience in times of stress (Suttles 1987a, 1987c, 1990a). Halkomelem (Hul’qumi’num) speakers of Vancouver Island in the vicinity of Duncan, Chemainus, Nanaimo, and the adjacent Gulf Islands, for example, had long standing kinship ties with the Fraser River Halkomelem communities. These communities shared not only a common language but also similar

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narratives, ritual practices, and general knowledge systems (K.T. Carlson 2001; H.G. Barnett 1955; Suttles 1987a, 1987b, 1987c). The island peoples, through their marriage ties, were able to access the immense salmon runs and wapato and cranberry harvests of the Fraser River peoples, and probably for centuries, if not millennia, hundreds of people routinely travelled from Vancouver Island to visit their relatives and to harvest these resources.17 In fact, the Cowichan peoples had their own extensive village, Tl’uqtinus, on Lulu Island, along the south arm of the Fraser River, where many families resided for at least some portion of the year for fishing, berry picking, and harvesting cattails and tules for mats, as recounted in many historical documents (Thom 2005). In return, the mainland Halkomelem visited their island relatives to receive camas bulbs, clams, and other desirable products, either by harvesting or through feasts and potlatches.18 A parallel situation was in place between the Ts’msyen peoples of the Skeena River and those residing along the coast. Each community had its harvest sites within its own territory, but each also had long-recognized histories of harvesting in other’s territories. The Kitsumkalum families, for example, harvest seafood in the territories of the Kitkatla and Lax Kw’alaams peoples (McDonald 2003). Similar marriage and socioeconomic ties existed almost everywhere. Marriage thus often brought more resource rights, accompanied by the establishment of a series of reciprocal and mutually recognized socioeconomic arrangements. Such arrangements are certainly significant in terms of ethnobotanical knowledge transmission. A woman raised and trained in one community, and speaking the language of that community, might move after marriage to her husband’s community, where she would be trained by women of her husband’s family, learning to speak their language and being instructed concerning all of the knowledge, places, skills, taboos, stories, and protocols for the proper and effective use of plant resources in her new community. In clan-based communities, she would belong to a clan opposite that of her husband and would be embraced by a whole new group of teachers in the form of members of her own clan. At the same time, she would retain the original language and skills she learned when she was growing up, and would to some extent keep her ties with her parents and siblings, so that she would have the capacity to teach her own children about two different territories and knowledge sets. Her sons and daughters, in turn, would grow up bilingual and with a wider set of skills and understandings – and access to a broader set of resources and harvesting sites – than they would if their parents had been raised in the same community. These kinds of “out-marriages,” especially among members of the nobility class, were common between neighbouring villages in the same or related speech communities. Increasingly, in later centuries as opportunities for travel broadened, marriages occurred across wide geographical and cultural spaces. Sometimes men acquired wives through warfare and raids, as was known to have occurred from oral history accounts between the Haida and Heiltsuk, the

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Nuxalk and Kwakwaka’wakw, and other peoples. The scale of one community’s introduction to another of new knowledge, names, skills, and methods for harvesting and processing plants and other resources due to women changing residence, whatever the circumstances, must have been immense. Numerous traditional narratives tell of such “mixed” marriages, not only between men and women of similar status but also between ordinary human men and women of supernatural status – the daughters of powerful supernatural beings of the sky or undersea worlds like the Haida Goose Woman, for example (see chapter 12). Stories also feature unions between women and supernatural men, such as Devil’s-club Man or Stinging Nettle Man, in which the men instruct their wives about the use and preparation of these new medicines and materials. In the ancient myth-times, men and women also married individuals of other species, the most famous examples being the “Dog Children” and “Bear Husband” tales, but there are also accounts of men marrying Mountain Goat wives and entering the communities of the Salmon people, Wolf people, and the like. People even married the Sun or Stars and were taken to live in the sky world, as in the “Star Husband” narratives. In all of these cases, the supernatural or animal being transferred key information to the human spouse, who also acquired resources or other benefits from the marriage, and perhaps all of these episodes are symbolic of the importance of knowledge acquisition through marital alliances. A woman marrying and moving to a new household might bring important innovations with her in the form of different kinds of baskets, different styles of clothing, or different ways of cutting fish or cooking roots. An example of such an innovation is in the numerous square cedar-wood seaweed-drying trays that Annetta Robinson brought with her to the Gitga’at from the village of Kitkatla when she married Jimmy Robinson and moved to Hartley Bay. These trays (figure 9-5) were a welcome addition to the seaweed-processing equipment of the Gitga’at women, several of whom sometimes borrowed them from Annetta when they needed to dry large quantities of seaweed on the beach at K’yel. These trays, in short, represent an innovation in food processing in the Gitga’at community as a result of Annetta’s residency (see chapter 5). One can imagine, over the millennia, hundreds of such introductions and demonstations of new products, devices, innovations, and inventions by women coming into a new community – from digging sticks with removable handles to coiled basketry, different styles of mats and racks for drying berries and roots, better knives for cutting fish, and so forth. Some women also brought living materials to transplant to their new villages: salmon eggs from their favourite runs of salmon; rhizomes of particularly good, straight-growing stinging nettles to plant for their fibre; or food plants such as hazelnut, highbush cranberry, riceroots, and yellow glacier lily bulbs (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 1999; Tina Robinson, pers. comm., 2002; Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994, 1996, 2001; Compton 1993b; Deur and Turner 2005; McDonald 2003, 2005). As Hul’qumi’num cultural expert

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9-5  |  Gitga’at elder Helen Clifton of Hartley Bay, BC , holding one of the cedarwood seaweed-drying trays that Annetta Robinson brought with her when she moved to Hartley Bay. Annetta’s mother had reportedly made 400 of these seaweed trays back in Kitkatla.

Dr Arvid Charlie (pers. comm., 1999) explained, “from the stories I used to hear, sometimes, our young ladies would end up somewhere where there was no fish. So when it happened … they got some salmon eggs and they transplanted them, and they started a new run … [That goes] Way, way back … Seseyitsa7, Agnes Ely, told me this … a great, great grand aunt … I was already a youth [when she told me], and when I mentioned it to Mother, she confirmed it.” Chiefs and Nobility

The Northwest Coast peoples were, and are, particularly highly organized economically and socially, with various structures and traditions of clans, lineages, chieftainships, and inheritance practices that are validated and perpetuated through feasting, ceremonial crests, dances, songs and narratives, and a

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complex of systems of exchange, investment, and validation of recognized and assumed roles known generally as the “potlatch” (Trosper 2009). The potlatch system not only acknowledged the status and prestige of chiefs and other nobility but also served as a means to recognize the history of their positions and the responsibilities they bore in caring for the people and the lands and resources under their purview. On the Northwest Coast a chief ’s status was inherited with his name and position, but he still had to work hard to maintain his place and to retain the loyalty and confidence of his followers. Thus at least part of his prestige was achieved or earned through his wisdom, leadership, and knowledge.19 In the Interior Plateau the position of chief was to some extent inherited, but chiefs could also be recognized through particular prowess in hunting, oratory, or some other admired talent. Teit (1909, 582) described the role of chiefs and nobility for the Secwepemc in terms of resource use and proprietorship: Fishing-sites belonged to the crest group. All land and whatever grew upon it, all hunting-grounds with the game thereon, and all rivers and lakes with the fish therein, belonged to the nobility; and among the Cañon division all trading-privileges also belonged to this class. The land, with the waters pertaining thereto, was divided among the various bands, although their hunting-grounds were not in all cases well defined. The hunting-territory, root-digging grounds, berrying-resorts, and camping-places in the mountains of each band belonged to the nobility of the band in common, but the trapping-grounds and fishing-places were divided among the crest groups of the nobility of each band. Chiefs and leaders often relied on supernatural help for their success. The narratives recounting ancestral feats of chiefs and other individuals often stress the importance of such assistance. For example, in the founding of the Ts’msyen community known as Robintown, near the present village of Kitsumkalum, the pioneering ancestor, Nisgeel, came to the site of Robintown from a village toward Kitsumkalum Lake and was welcomed into the valley by Robin beings – robins in their human form. The Robin people taught Nisgeel and his people how to build fish traps, and then, after awhile, they left. Nisgeel established Robintown as his permanent village, where he was joined by Eagle, Wolf, and Killer Whale clan members. They lived on the salmon from their fish traps and on the bounty of berries and other foods in the vicinity of the village (as recounted by Arthur Stevens [Lagaax] to Marius Barbeau in 1915, cited in McDonald 2003).20 Social Inequity and Burials

Burials and grave goods sometimes show evidence of social stratification and occupational specialization. For example, at archaeological sites along the coast –

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Namu, Prince Rupert Harbour, Marpole, and Deep Bay – the presence of labrets, small disc beads ground from stone or shell, beautifully flaked stone knives, and other evidence of wealth indicates not only the higher status of individuals whose bodies were associated with them but also the existence of specialized occupations, including full-time artisans and commissioned art (R.L. Carlson 1976; Bernick 1998b, 1998c). Even the materials used to wrap a deceased person reflected his or her position; in the Interior Plateau, a member of the nobility would be wrapped in a skin robe for burial, whereas a poor person would be wrapped in a tule or cattail mat (Schulting 1994). Such social stratification usually reflects the ability of a society to generate surpluses of food, which can be amassed and redistributed by its leaders, bringing status and recognition to the elite individuals and, through them, to the entire community (Hayden and Schulting 1997; Schulting 1994). Burials in the Interior Plateau have also included grave goods indicating high status. At the Bell site northeast of Lillooet, the remains of an infant of around eighteen months old buried in the floor of a house pit showed either high individual inherited status or the high status of its family. Dating back around 1,000 years, the burial contained, among other items, a carved antler figurine, a carved steatite pendant, an incised antler comb, a quartz crystal, a siltstone bear figurine, nearly 250 dentalium shell beads, and abundant red ochre. Other burials near Lytton at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers contained similar items: dentalium and perforated scallop shells, pendants of abalone and copper, quartz crystals, nephrite celts, carved steatite pipes, carved antler-tine clubs, bone and antler zoomorphic carvings (some of Northwest Coast artistic style), digging stick handles, and numerous other tools (Schulting 1994). As well as evidence of social stratification and societal complexity, these burials reflect the large-scale trade networks and communication linkages between the coast and the interior that would have served as channels for the dissemination of botanical products and information, along with these more tangible and better preserved treasures. The social differentiation reflected in archaeological contexts is most pronounced from the past 400 to 200 years, but probably extends back several millennia, and shows evidence of intensifying around 2,000 years ago, occurring roughly the same time and over a large area for most or all of the Plateau as well as parts of the Northwest Coast. This transition to more stratified societies is supported by several lines of evidence, including the exotic and prestige goods found in some burials, settlement and house structure data, increasing indications of food storage capacity, and significant elaboration and differentiation of crests, designs, and artistic styles (Schulting 1994). Other than a whole range of rare “status” goods like dentalium and olivella shells especially associated with burials, styles of hats and basketry may be another indicator of status in archaeological contexts. Croes (2003) points out, as noted previously, that hats

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with distinctive knobs on the top found at both the 3,000-year-old Hoko River site and the more recent Ozette site, may have been worn by noblemen, whereas commoners would have worn hats of a conical, flat-topped design, of a type also found at both sites. At Ozette there were also three spruce-root hats, which were twined up-to-the-left and used an ornamental skip-stitch typical of Haida and Tlingit work – possibly traded from the north and indicative of the high status of those who owned them. Plants as Crests

Crests and special prerogatives, and the rights to use and display them, are part of a chief ’s and clan’s wealth and prestige. The images associated with elites and their families and/or clans were, and are, shown in a variety of forms: totem poles, dances and masks, blankets, baskets, boxes, spoons, bowls, house fronts, and rock paintings or carvings. They signify both economic and political power in a social group, but they also have deep ceremonial and cultural significance, reflecting layers of history and connections to places, to the deeds of ancestors, and often to particular resources. For example, for the Gitxsan, each “house” belongs to a single village, which has its own leadership and its distinct history, as commemorated in adaawak, the “true traditions,” which include oral narratives, crests, and songs. Each “house” owns a series of territories, which its members take care of and from which they derive all of the resources they require through hunting, fishing, berry picking, and so forth. Rights and privileges of a “house” group are recounted and validated in front of invited guests as witnesses during feasts and other occasions (Johnson 1997). On the northern coast, among the Haida, Ts’msyen, and Tlingit, crests and other rights and titles are passed down through matrilineal descent, with a man inheriting a chief ’s position and prerogatives from his maternal uncle, but only after going through a formal process of validating his claims through potlatching before witnesses. Most crest designs are zoomorphic, being related to animals and supernatural beings, but there are a few crests that reflect people’s direct ties and spiritual and historical links to the plant world. One of the major Ts’msyen and Gitxsan clans of the northern coast is the Fireweed, or Gisk’aast, clan, whose ancestors were said to have originated on the upper Nass River. Here, as the narrative relates, a Raven group killed all of the members of a rival village, except for a young woman in puberty seclusion and her grandmother. The young woman was rescued and taken as a wife by the son of the Sky God. Her children eventually returned to earth in order to avenge their mother’s family. They made war on the Ravens and some coastal Tlingit and eventually settled near Hazelton. The original Fireweed village, Temlax’aamit (Prairie Town), was said to exist, possibly as far back as 3,500 years, on the long river flat beside the Skeena River opposite the mouth of what is now Chicago Creek. Then, as recounted in the

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Fireweed clan’s oral history, Temlax’aamit was abandoned in a year of severe and prolonged winter, attributed to supernatural retribution for disrespectful behaviour toward mountain goats by some of the village’s hunters. The survivors then founded Gitsegukla and Kispiox, migrated to Git-anyaaw, Gitwingax, and Kyah Wiget, and eventually settled at Kitselas (Johnson 1997). There are other oral histories related to the Fireweed crest and its origins. Another account is from Ken Harris (Chief Hax Bagwootxw), in which some people planted k’ilhaast (“fireweed”) in front of their house and overnight it grew so tall that it pierced the sky: “This was the gilhast [k’ilhaast] and the beginning of a new clan, the Gisgahast” (cited in Johnson 1997, 140). The k’ilhaast (“single fireweed”) was considered the first totem pole, and Gisk’aast is the name of one of the four Gitxsan Clans (ibid.). Another, related oral history recounts the miraculous appearance of a single fireweed through the snow at the southern boundary of a newly claimed hunting territory, which was then called “‘Guell haast’ [K’ilhaast] – the single fireweed … To this day Guell haast is the southern boundary of the hunting grounds of the Bear People,” and Guell haast “has had its place on the totems to tell of the time of famine and how the salvation of the people was wrought” (recounted in the late 1930s by Walter Wright, a Ts’msyen chief of the Kitselas people, cited in ibid.). The “mountain fern,” or spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa), is another Gitxsan crest, ‘Wii Ax, which was depicted in stylized form at the base of a totem pole of ‘Woosimlaxha at Kispiox village, among other places (Cove and MacDonald 1987; Johnson 1997). For the Haida, yellow-cedar and yellow pond-lily are two known plant crests (Turner 2004a). Chiefs, Nobility, Resource Use, and Management

Besides the prerogatives of crests, names, and other owned property attributed to designated groups, control over particular territories, harvesting sites, and the resources they yield relates directly to the responsibilities and privileges of chiefs and leaders. These resources include many plants and plant products (Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005). Over the course of millennia in the area, as human populations grew and some resources became more limited, more social controls would have been necessary to prevent overexploitation. Given the seasonality and patchiness associated with most plant resources, having ways to limit or distribute the harvest would have become more and more desirable and necessary. The strength of the controls placed on these resources was aligned with the convenience and perceived quality of the resources, their overall productivity, the potential intensity of use, their storability, the continuity of use, and the amount of labour expended in maintaining and enhancing them. Thus prime and highly desired resource sites like Pacific crabapple stands, highbush cranberry patches, and productive camas meadows near villages or seasonal camps, on which people expended energy through pruning, cleaning, burning,

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or otherwise tending, were the ones that would be more intensively controlled or “owned” by a chief, clan, family, or village group, depending on the region. Those in control were expected to apply their experience and judgment in order to allow optimal use of the resources and were rewarded accordingly. As Thornton (1999, 39) describes for the berry resources of the Tlingit, “Clan leaders used their knowledge and authority over local berry patches to facilitate others coming to gather when berry conditions were peak and the supply abundant … enhancing his prestige and ‘credit’ in exchange for surplus berries, and by responding to the invitation other pickers were, in effect, legitimizing the possessing clan’s prerogatives over the territory.” Similar protocols were observed, with variations, all along the Northwest Coast, as well as in parts of the Interior Plateau (Boas 1921; Budhwa 2007; McDonald 2003; Teit 1909; Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005). Just as actual plant resources and harvesting sites were owned, so too were structures made from plant materials: deer fences and deer nets; duck nets and their sites; fishnets, fishing weirs, and platforms; and bridges, shelters, drying racks, and the like at harvest camps (Hayden 1997; Schulting 1994; Teit 1906a, 1909). The various controls established for and around plant resources can be interpreted as a form of management or stewardship and, as such, will be discussed in chapter 11. Stored food, and the capacity for storage, is seen as a necessary prerequisite for the development of socioeconomic inequality, or stratification, in societies (Ames and Marshall 1980; Hayden 1992; Hayden and Schulting 1997; Schulting 1994). Stores – by the very labour that is invested in their production and by the ultimate benefits expected from their use – must have some level of ownership or control. As stated previously, improved technologies allowing effective storage of food went hand in hand with increasing social complexity (Ames and Marshall 1980). As Schulting (1994, 18) comments, when the value of food is increased through processing, “the question of ownership looms large.” Although the storing of dried salmon is usually cited as the primary example of how storage changed the social structure of societies on the Northwest Coast and in the Interior Plateau, plant resources are definitely part of this picture as well. Along the Columbia River, for example, acorn storage pits were individually owned, with acorns (from garry oak) considered a possibly high-status feast food (B. Mathews 2010; Spier and Sapir 1930, 185). Elsewhere, boxes of preserved crabapples and highbush cranberries, baskets of dried roots and dried berries, squares of dried seaweed, cedar-wood boxes of oulachen grease, and many other types of preserved foods were used as potlatch gifts, as marriage gifts, and at feasts given by chiefs, nobility, and their clans, not to mention as trade goods to be exchanged for other products of equal or greater value. However they were used, these stored resources brought additional prestige, power, and status to those who were able to organize and control their use.

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Notably, this system of accruing and controlling wealth is different from that assumed by many other societies. In the social system predominating throughout the study area, rather than through conspicuous consumption, the prestige and status of a chief, clan, or community was affirmed and validated through the distribution of wealth. Whereas some surplus food might be kept for individuals or families to consume, much was often given out as a way of gaining stature and esteem. Generosity, in this system, is a virtue; stored food and other items of value, such as canoes or intricately woven baskets created by specialist artisans, were a means of raising the stature not only of an individual but also of an entire clan, lineage, or village group. Especially in the Interior Plateau, chiefs were not always defined or chosen through inheritance but might acquire the designation through repeated generosity or prowess in contributing to the group’s stores of food or other valued goods (Hayden and Schulting 1997; Schulting 1994). Teit (1909, 573) described the protocols of the Secwepemc around a leader’s role in sharing the proceeds of a hunt, which relate both to prowess in hunting and to leadership: Fat and meat were divided equally among the hunting-party by the leader or by the eldest hunter. A man hunting alone had the sole title to whatever game he killed; but when he brought the meat home, he almost always distributed a large part among his neighbors. Even meat of game trapped was generally distributed in like manner. Skins of animals trapped belonged to the person in whose trap they were caught, and skins of animals shot belonged to the hunting-party; but the hunting chief generally allowed the best hunters the greater part of the skins. A chief or leader typically took charge of distribution of any scarce item or product. For example, among the Secwepemc, who were extremely fond of smoking the native tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata), the chief sometimes needed to oversee the harvest. The leaves were dried and pounded with grease before being smoked. Teit (1909, 574–5) explained the chief ’s role in distribution of this valued product and its successor, the introduced tobacco (N. tabacum): In some places where tobacco [N. attenuata] was scarce, it was gathered under the surveillance of the chief, in order to give every person an equal chance. It grew luxuriantly on some village sites, and some Indians think the seeds must have been planted in these places. In later times the chief of each Shuswap band received annually a present of tobacco [N. tabacum] from the Hudson Bay Company’s post at Kamloops. The chiefs of distant bands sent young men to Kamloops to receive the annual present … Upon receiving the gift, the chief called all his men together, gave a feast in

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which all smoked and talked for from two to four days, and then he divided the remaining tobacco equally among all present. Another way for a leader or a community to achieve status that relates in some ways to plant resource use is to gain control over strategic travel routes or passageways. It is likely that elites of Keatley Creek and vicinity were able to acquire wealth and power by this method since it ensured their dominance of the lucrative Fraser River fishery in the region. On the Columbia River, the Wishram were similarly strategically situated to control traffic along the river in both directions, thus serving as the middlemen between trading partners upriver and downriver, which allowed them to control the exchange of baskets of powdered dried salmon, hazelnuts, huckleberries, and acorns, among other goods (Mathews 2010; Spier and Sapir 1930). As Schulting (1994) points out, it is no wonder that it was a modified form of the Wishram language – Chinook – that became the trade jargon used over much of western North America. Similar trade-controlling communities of high status, with immensely powerful and influential leaders, developed in various regions, especially along the routes between the Northwest Coast and the interior, another prime example being the spring oulachen fishery of the lower Nass and Skeena Rivers controlled in large part, at least for a time in the mid-1800s, by the great Ts’msyen Gispaklo’ots chief Ligeex and his house. Ligeex, through the wealth and power he accrued from his prerogatives, became for a time a paramount chief, not only controlling his own house but also overseeing and controlling other chiefs in the region (Martindale 2003). Likewise, the Canyon Secwepemc elites regulated travel and trade between the eastern Secwepemc and the Tsilhqot’in, who in turn had access to coastal resources through their proximity to Homalthco and Bella Coola Inlets. Individuals in these positions often formed alliances with neighbouring chiefs, thus accruing even more power and prestige. Going far back into history, such individuals must have served as the brokers for the trade of many high-value items, from native copper to marine shells, steatite, nephrite, and obsidian (T. Richards and Rousseau 1987) – and quite possibly various plant products and manufactured objects as well.21 Most of the elites were men, but there were many matriarchs – often the wives of hereditary chiefs – who were members of the nobility and were held in equivalent high esteem due to their prestige. Occasionally, a woman would become chief through particular circumstance, either standing in for a son who would grow up to be chief, filling a chief ’s position if there was no male heir, or simply assuming the position through the force of her personality and leadership skills. Like the male nobility, women of nobility were not only highly respected and influential but also highly knowledgeable, having received training and grooming for their positions from an early age. Lucille Clifton, the Eagle

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matriarch of the Gitga’at at Hartley Bay, who died in 1962 at the age of eightysix, was one such revered leader and teacher (Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012). For many decades, she guided the women and children of the community. She recounted stories of Ts’msyen history to the children, taught them about the places they passed in their travels by canoe, settled disputes, delivered babies, and taught the younger people about seaweed harvesting and processing at K’yel and about smoking salmon and preserving crabapples and cranberries at the fall camp at Gitgiata Inlet. Every fall, after the people had returned to Hartley Bay from their rounds of fishing and other seasonal work, Lucille Clifton and the other Eagle women hosted a feast for the entire community, serving them with all of the food they had harvested and prepared over the year: half-smoked coho (wüüx22 or ts’aal) and/or dried, soaked humpback salmon (‘wiiyuu stmoon); oulachen grease (q’əwtsi) and/or seal oil (kbaüüla); toasted, flaked seaweed (łə’əsk or saoolk’a); inner bark of hemlock and/or amabilis fir (ksiiw); salmon egg caviar, cured and smoked (üüskm laan); salmon egg cheese (luayaa), served with grease and potatoes (sgusiit); boiled and drained turnips (‘yanahuu) and carrots (q’əʔwts or galot); fried or baked bread with crabapple (moolks) jelly or with thick blueberry (smmay) or salalberry jam; strips of seal flipper, singed or cooked (xslaxs); seal meat (üüla); venison stew (samimwan); Canada goose soup; crabapples (moolks) and highbush cranberries (laaya) with whipped oulachen grease; blueberries (woʔoksil), salalberries (dzawes), and other berries (e.g., waakyil, “gray currants”); oranges and apples; Salada tea; and Labrador tea (kw’ilə’məxs). These feasts – and the times of working with and learning from Lucille – are still fondly remembered by her grandchildren and their contemporaries, who are the elders of the present generation (Tirone et al. 2007; Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012). On the Northwest Coast many matriarchs, like many men of high standing, held inherited harvest rights to specific resource sites, including berry patches, crabapple stands, seaweed-harvesting sites, and seaweed-drying rocks. These women served many advisory roles related to the timing of harvests and to the relative order of different tasks. In the Nuxalk village of Bella Coola, McIlwraith (1948, vol. 1, 265) described how “one woman had the prerogative of picking the first berries of a particular kind.” When these berries were ready for picking, “she paraded up and down the village with a special decorated picking basket, calling ‘Get ready to pick red elderberries (or whatever kind was ripe) tomorrow!’” Matriarchs, like male chiefs, were to some extent “project overseers.” They supervised the seasonal movements and food harvesting of their clan or community members, making the decisions about when the roots should be dug or the berries picked, ensuring that enough food stores were put by, and when necessary, arranging for those families who suffered shortages to be given enough to sustain them. These women also often directed management practices such as pruning, weeding, or controlled burning of resource sites. They

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had the authority to call on others, especially those in their own clan or lineage, to help with food preparation, hosting feasts, and generally supporting the ability of the group to maintain its obligations and responsibilities to the community at large. Matriarchs, like their male chiefly counterparts, were usually trained in their roles from the time they were children, and part of this training was to seek and acquire strong spiritual guidance and help. Girls who were destined to be leaders received particularly intensive spiritual training as well as practical instruction at the time of their first menstruation, during pregnancy, and at other ritually sensitive times of their lives (Reid and Sewid-Smith 2004; Teit 1909). Many different arrangements existed for ensuring direction and the observance of protocols when harvesting key resources. One model for picking saskatoon berries, or serviceberries, was described for the Secwepemc by Teit (1909, 573), giving a glimpse of the chief ’s role as a sort of project supervisor: Berry-patches were tribal property; but picking was under tribal control. All the large and valuable berrying-spots were looked after by the chief of the band in whose district they were situated. Thus there were several large service-berry patches near Big Bar. The chief there watched the ripening of the berries, and deputed young men to watch and report on the various places. From time to time the watchman brought in branches and showed them to the chief. When the berries were about ripe, he sent out word that on a certain day the berrying would commence at a certain berry-patch. Women would come from as far way as Alkali Lake and Clinton. The first day each woman picked only a little, about enough for herself and her friends to eat fresh during that day and night. After the first day they picked all they could and began to cure them. When they had finished one patch, the chief directed them to the next one which was ripe, and so on until they had finished all. People who picked the berries without authorization or those who trespassed from outside of the area were fined or driven away by band members acting for the chief. Similar procedures would be followed for other resources, both berries and root crops, as they became ready for harvest. Farther south, the chief would oversee a more formal First Fruits ceremony for saskatoon berries or huckleberries. Another good example of the chief ’s role as a project organizer and supervisor – and of the importance of occupational specialization, intervillage connections, and reciprocal obligations – is in a story recounted by Lucille Clifton to William Beynon, “The Narrative of Sarapgyaw” (cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 326–31). This story told of a great feast, planned for a group of supernatural beings (who were sea monsters) by a chief named Yaragwenusk, who

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was a grandson of the Chief of the Sandbar. He wanted to erect a stone totem pole on the Nass River in the next oulachen season. “I must ask the help of every tribe,” he said. Thus he requested and received contributions from each tribe, according to the special abilities of each, toward this magnificent effort. He said to the Gitlan people, who traded in wooden dishes, “Your carvers will make a great quantity from yew wood.” From the Gispaxloats, who traded with the Hagwilget, he asked for many horn spoons. The Ginaxangik, who traded with the Chilkat, would contribute many food boxes. The Gitsis and Giludzau were to make deep wooden dishes. The Ginadoiks, whose country on the Skeena River had the greatest number of mountain goats, would bring mountain goat fat. The Gitwisabe were to make the dried inner bark of hemlock into cakes. The Kitselas would make cakes of berries, and the Kitsemkalem would produce scores of bundles of dried salmon. The Gitaxta would make shredded cedar-bark robes, and the Gitga’ata would make snuff from tobacco since they had connections with the Haida, who grew this special plant and prepared it by mixing it with finely ground baked clam shells (see Turner and Taylor 1972). Occupational Specialization and Prestige

Increased occupational specialization, for individuals and entire communities, was both an outcome and a cause of social complexity and stratification. As in any society, people who had specialized talents were often accorded a high degree of admiration and status, especially if the products of their specialty were in great demand and required intensive training to create. The type of specialization on which a person would focus depended on a combination of factors: where their background, inclinations, and talents lay; what access they had to particular resources; and what opportunities they had for training. In the ancient world of northwestern North America, people who became experts at food harvesting – fishing, hunting, root digging, and berry picking – were afforded high respect. Even today, women who can cut halibut and salmon quickly and expertly or who can pick berries more quickly and cleanly than others are greatly admired, as they would have been in the past. It is likely that such highly skilled individuals in the ancient past were the ones who became the leaders and eventual nobility of their communities as populations grew and cultures became more highly organized socially and economically. It is probably not a coincidence, for example, that the main Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Makah whalers were chiefs and that the position of whale hunting was hereditary, with individuals being trained for the role even before birth and all through their infancy and childhood. Training for many of these specialized roles involves spiritual and ceremonial preparation, praying and purification rituals, as well as practical instruction in hunting, canoe-handling techniques, basketry, and other practical aspects of a given occupation. Seeking supernatural aid, and following the protocols 92 | part three – integration and management

required to gain success through spiritual guidance, took tremendous discipline and practice, no matter what the specialty (E.R. Atleo 2011). Whether people were shamans or herbal healers, expert mountain goat hunters or root harvesters, or canoe makers or mat makers, they had to be connected to the spiritual world, and having such connections gave them high prestige and increased their social standing (Ames and Maschner 1999). One indication of the high social standing and possible spiritual connections of a specialized craftswoman from long ago is in the oldest known wooden carving on the Northwest Coast, from the Hoko River wet site. It is the handle of a mat creaser, which dates to between 2,800 and 2,600 years ago. This remarkable implement, with a painted handle, features two crested birds, probably pileated woodpeckers, touching beaks (Ames and Maschner 1999). A botanical artifact in more than one way, the creaser is a crafting tool for an important technology, cattail and tule mat making, whose products were employed for a multitude of purposes, such as covering shelters, dividing rooms, fashioning mattresses and kneeling pads, drying and serving food, and possibly covering cooking pits (Turner 1998). The woman using this mat-creasing implement was probably also an expert basket maker and maybe, like the individuals who wore the knot-topped hats found at this site, represented a developing group of high-status people who lived at least part of the time at the Hoko River fish camp. Alliances and Intergroup Relationships The great Ts’msyen chief Ligeex of the mid-1800s and the ancient chief who organized all of the Ts’msyen villages in hosting the feast for supernatural beings, both mentioned previously, represent a broader plane of social organization and interaction: across community and tribal boundaries. Although such wide-scale interactions must have been in place to some extent since the Early Holocene, they certainly intensified in the past few thousand years, probably reaching their maximum activity in the times of largest settlements and highest populations, toward the end of the Late Holocene, just before Europeans entered the region. The focus for these nodes of social interaction was on the major centres of resource production. Many of them, for example, were associated with rapids in rivers where large numbers of salmon could be caught with dip nets: The Dalles on the Columbia River, Kettle Falls on the Kettle River, Six-Mile near “The Fountain” (Xaxl’ep) on the Fraser River, and the steep-sided canyons and rapids of Kitselas on the Skeena River. These areas – possibly the first places where people started to exploit large numbers of salmon – served as major trading centres, as social centres, and as places where meetings of chiefs and leaders from different communities were held, alliances were formed, and various political organizations were instigated (see Johnson 1997). Some of the groups as they existed at the time Europeans arrived in the area apparently originated through connections and political unions made at Cultural Institutions | 93

such centres. For example, as reported by Leslie Main Johnson (1997), some of the Gitxsan ancestors were said to have come from the Owikeeno area to the Kitamaat Haisla area long ago and then to have amalgamated with some early Ts’msyens and a group of Haida to become the Eagle clan of the Haisla, which also has connections to peoples on the lower Skeena River and in other areas of the Northwest Coast. Many origin stories trace such complex ancestries. The Ts’msyen also evidently have ancestral connections with Dene (Athabaskan) peoples of the interior. The Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc of the Interior Plateau exhibit similar complexity in their social, economic, and political alliances, which developed around Lillooet and “The Fountain” along the Fraser Canyon north of Lytton. These major trading sites on the upper Fraser River are situated at the interior end of a longstanding trade corridor extending south and west through the Coast Mountains to Harrison Lake and down the lower Fraser to the coast. The Scowlitz site, situated at the confluence of the Harrison and Fraser Rivers, is another settlement along this route that has exhibited a high level of social complexity and apparent social stratification within the past 2,400 years, in its burials, in the presence of exotic objects of native copper and other valuables that reflect interior provenance, and in apparent increased house size, external and internal elaboration of houses, and expanded storage capacity, all of which serve as material symbols of wealth and power and suggest increasing social complexity and the elite social status of some (Hayden and Schulting 1997; Morrison 1997; Schulting 1994). The Stl’atl’imx of the Fountain area are also linked to the Tsilhqot’in, Nlaka’pamux, and Secwepemc peoples through intersecting territories like the Hat Creek Valley and “Many Roots” north of the Bridge River. Access to all of these different places and the different resources they provided would have given key individuals – chiefs and their families – opportunities to gain wealth. Their continued leadership and influence, however, would not have been based on wealth alone. Their personal traits and their skills in oratory and negotiation, as well as in hunting or warfare, would have been just as important. Generosity, in the form of procuring and sharing food, especially in lean times, and evidence of supernatural sanctions through their ceremonial participation would also have been prime factors in the success of these leaders. Hosting feasts for the local community, and for visitors from the entire region, would also have been a hallmark of leadership, serving as a means of redistributing food surpluses and compensating for local shortages (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Teit 1909). The more they could manage to provide and control, and the larger their circles of influence, the greater their status and potential for economic and political gain. Some of the villages encountered by the first Europeans entering the area presented strong evidence of social complexity, the elite status of some individuals and families, and associated large-scale alliances and intervillage connections.

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For example, the Wishram village of Nixlúidix (Trading Place), encountered by the Lewis and Clark expedition on 24 October 1805, apparently housed hundreds of people – possibly a thousand or more, not even counting slaves – with at least twenty large cedar plank houses, each occupied by about eight men and twenty or so women and children. The houses measured about 6 by 9 metres and were deeply sunk into the earth, with cedar-bark roofs. The high status of some individuals was reflected in their houses – for example, in doors carved and painted with animal representations. The planks of the houses themselves represented considerable value. Alongside the river at Nixlúidix, William Clark (see M. Lewis and Clark 1805) recorded huge stacks of dried salmon, with an estimated total weight of about 10,000 pounds (about 4,500 kilograms). These people were renowned traders of their salmon, connecting to tribes from the Pacific Coast to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. During the summer season, thousands of people would have camped in the area in mat lodges, not only trading but also socializing, gambling, and exchanging knowledge, stories, and ideas. Many marriages and alliances would have originated at these gatherings. Slavery was a part of this economic system, with the wealthiest families owning up to ten or more slaves, who would help with fishing, root digging, food preparation, paddling canoes, and child tending (Schulting 1994; Spier and Sapir 1930). Soon, however, the village declined drastically due to disease epidemics. Malaria alone resulted in an 87 per cent population decline between 1830 and 1840 (Boyd 1992). Such major trade centres were particularly susceptible to pandemic diseases, and thus the prestige accrued by powerful chiefs in such places endured in their elaborate funerals, with valuable grave goods and, sometimes, the killing of horses and slaves as a display of their wealth and widespread social status (Schulting 1994). Warfare, Intergroup Conflict, and Knowledge Exchange

The other side of supracommunity political alliances, with such paramount chiefs as described in the previous section, is intercommunity conflict and warfare, which was also common. The same groups that might have, on some occasions, formed mutually supportive relationships could at other times develop hostile relations that would end in war, with killings and the taking of hostages or slaves. Accounts of such hostilities are relatively common in the traditional narratives and have been historically documented (e.g., Boas 1966, 2002; George 2003; McIlwraith 1948; and Reid and Sewid-Smith 2004). Some of these conflicts have taken place at the very nodes of common resource use where cultural exchange would have occurred at other times. For example, accounts of hostility between Dene (Athabaskans) and the neighbouring Interior Salish are relatively common in the oral histories. The site called “Many Roots,” or “Plenty of Roots” in Tsilhqot’in and Secwepemc-tsín, bordering on

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Tsilhqot’in territory on the north and Secwepemc and Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc territory on the south, is a known place of conflict between these groups, where several battles were waged according to the oral traditions of all of these peoples (Matson and Magne 2007). It is a hill or mound with a lake and wetland nearby, on a tributary of the Bridge River (Teit 1909). Archaeological evidence shows that Salishan peoples once occupied the area where Tsilhqot’in peoples have lived more recently, and these peoples were possibly displaced by past warfare. Other battlegrounds are described, and cases of warfare, stealing women and children, and slavery intermingle with other oral records of trade, intermarriage, and kinship between neighbouring peoples. Similar situations must have occurred in the Interior Plateau, where the Nicola Valley Athabaskans were eventually replaced or assimilated by the Nlaka’pamux and Okanagan Interior Salish peoples, and on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where Salishan speaking peoples were evidently replaced relatively recently by Nuu-chahnulth-speaking peoples (Coupland 1989; Keddie 1997; Matson and Magne 2007; Moss and Erlandson 1992). According to Cybulski (2006), skeletal remains and other data on the Northwest Coast indicate that warfare occurred over 4,000 years ago and was a much more serious and aggressive pursuit in the northern regions than in more southern coastal areas. Warfare in particular may have resulted in certain adaptations in food storage, as indicated in the observation by Hill-Tout ([1910], 29–30) about Sechelt storage practices in reaction to raiding by a Kwakwaka’wakw group from Vancouver Island: “[The Sechelt] … did not store their winter supplies in their dwellings, but ‘cached’ them in the woods. Only a few days’ supply was ever carried home. This peculiar custom was due to the marauding proclivities of the neighbouring Yuɛkltas [Euclataw or Legwildaxw], who made periodical forays upon their settlement and carried off all they could lay hands upon. It was unsafe, therefore, to keep a large store of food by them.” Drucker (1951, 36–7) also notes the relationship between food shortages and intergroup conflict among the Nuu-chah-nulth: “Family traditions of local groups … speak of hunger and even starvation that led them to make alliances with or make war on groups who had territories along the inner channels and owned salmon streams.” Dewhirst (1978, 21) examines the role of resource scarcity for the Nuu-chah-nulth of Nootka Sound, suggesting that the whale-hunting technologies of the outside groups may have developed in response to “a tight fit between population growth with increased local groups and ownership of limited resource properties.” Although these observations and comments focus on fish and marine mammal resources, similar events and circumstances must surely have also involved plant resources, which were, after all, the major materials used in fishing and hunting technologies and cannot be separated from them. Harpoons, weirs, baskets for transport and storage, fuels for cooking and smoking food – all were centred on plant use (see chapter 6) and would have

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been implicated in any changes that took place as a result of resource use conflicts and economic strategies. It is difficult to say what other influences warfare and conflict might have had on ethnobotanical knowledge and plant use. The potential role of slaves in transmitting knowledge and practice was discussed earlier. One might assume that in any situations where populations from different communities and language groups intermingled, whether as a result of conflict, assimilation, mutual merging, or affinal arrangements, there would have been some level of knowledge exchange or borrowing related to plant names and specific resource sites, techniques for cooking and processing food, styles of mat making and basket making, techniques for house and canoe construction, and uses of medicinal and ceremonial plants. All of this sharing would have taken place in situ – in the context of a given place or territory that would have been familiar to the original residents and “new ground” for those arriving, whether by invitation and mutual consent or by force. Whatever disturbances and changes that people incurred as a result of social or economic restructuring, the existing plant resources would have assisted transitions and helped to strengthen people’s resilience and capacity to adapt. Conclusions Plant resources and the knowledge around their use both affect and are affected by the social roles and interactions of people on multiple scales and through different modes. Furthermore, these interactions with plant resources, like their use and management, are dynamic, occurring simultaneously or transforming, shifting, and replaying at many levels across time and space. The human actors in the acquisition, transmission, and adaptation of ethnobotanical knowledge are one element in the pattern. The other main elements include their practices and actions, the sites at which the actions occur (e.g., campsite, harvesting grounds, or big house), the times – seasonal, annual, and millennial – over which these activities take place, and finally, the plants and other elements of the environment involved at these sites, at these particular times, and in the course of these activities. This framework of ethnobotanical knowledge development, practice, and transmission forms the backdrop for any analysis of such knowledge, regardless of the scale or dimension of human social organization. Every instance of ethnobotanical knowledge practice, belief, and transmission represents an intersection of these factors within the framework. All of what each of us knows is built to some extent on previous knowledge of others – those who are contemporaries and those who came before. We each create and add to our own knowledge through our individual powers of observation (e.g., by watching and learning from animals and other “kin”), through our abilities for reasoning and applying and testing our ideas, and even through

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our dreams. Then each of us, in turn, passes our knowledge on to others through demonstration and communication. Knowledge about plants – like other kinds of knowledge – is thus mediated by our relationships with others, our capacity to acquire and apply knowledge from others, and their capacity and willingness to share their knowledge with us through various means. Each individual has a role in both acquiring knowledge and transmitting knowledge. Organized social groupings and relationships, including families, extended households, task groups, and clan- or village-level groups, can all be seen as modes of knowledge transfer – or, conversely, of knowledge exclusion. The ways and means of disseminating plant knowledge thus seem infinite. In actuality, there are many limitations, from the presence at a particular time and place of a particular individual holding key knowledge to the existence of a given plant or habitat in a particular site at a particular time. By examining these parameters, we can see patterns in the types of knowledge acquired and passed on under different socially mediated situations, at diverse places, and over various time frames. Social organization has had a major role among the various factors influencing the ways that existing plant populations are known and used by Indigenous peoples and the ways that Indigenous peoples have affected the presence and abundance of plant populations and communities. Social groupings, in turn, have been influenced in major ways by the plant resources themselves – their availability, utility, and productivity. Consider the effects of the availability of western redcedar in allowing the construction of large post and plank houses and oceangoing canoes on the Northwest Coast some 4,000 years ago and how this ability assisted the development of large, diverse, and stratified societies. Consider, too, the complexity of resource harvesting that requires high levels of direction and organization from project leaders and overseers, often chiefs and matriarchs. Consider the resilience afforded to families and clans from the availability of major resources like saskatoon berries, huckleberries, wapato, camas, and spring beauty, or mountain potatoes – of course, in conjunction with salmon, shellfish, and other animal resources – that have allowed reciprocal resource arrangements and sharing based on differential surpluses. Consider the prestige and esteem accorded to those who had the skills to convert – or to organize others to convert – raw resources into nutritious and storable products, or into items of spiritual and artistic beauty, and then to distribute and share these resources and high-value items with others through feasts and potlatches. Such abilities are translated and cycled into social capital through the designation of certain individuals as leaders: chiefs and matriarchs and others of high standing. Prestige positions, once attained or achieved, can extend into inherited leadership positions through careful guidance and training of one’s children or others in one’s lineage, enabling them to acquire the skills, abilities, and knowledge to assume similar leadership roles. Continued effectiveness then

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brings continued success and ongoing acknowledgment of this success in the recognition of leadership. On the other hand, consider how the abilities of skilled and observant individuals have allowed them to learn about and exploit, process, and gain benefit from particular plant species. Envision how the guidance and wisdom of elders have created a culture of respect and kincentric relationship between humans and other beings that has allowed careful and sustainable use of plants and other resource species and sanctions against careless behaviour toward them. And, finally, reflect on how, often under the leadership of chiefs and nobility, following traditions of numerous generations, certain resource sites are identified, claimed, and accessed seasonally by resource-harvesting groups – and how such intensively used sites and their species are managed, maintained, and enhanced through landscape burning, clearing, weeding, selective harvesting, pruning, tilling, replanting, and transplanting (to be discussed further in chapter 11). It is, in fact, organized social behaviour of many different sorts and on many different scales – decisions and choices made by individuals, households, clans, and villages and their leaders – that has created, collectively, the diverse patterns of plant use, and the commonalities in relationships with plants and environments, that have played out over time and space, as described and explored in the previous chapters. Ultimately, these choices and actions have affected peoples’ abilities for reproduction and thus influenced how human populations have developed and interacted. Not all of these interactions in resource use have been positive for all. The very abilities of individuals and their ancestors that led to the institution of the nobility and leadership class, to population expansion, to resource stewardship and enhancement, and to the creation of beautiful objects of art and spiritual power also created economic and social inequity, resource sequestration, power struggles, warfare, and slavery (see Martindale 2003; and Donald 1997). By and large, however, the system seemed to have been working well for the majority of people, who were living lifestyles that compared favourably with those of contemporary Europeans (E.R. Atleo 2004, 2011). With generally recognized and respected systems of territory and land tenure in place, relationships across neighbouring communities were also evidently mainly positive despite some conflicts. As increasingly complex societies with specialized occupations emerged in northwestern North America, and as territories with associated resources became well established and defined, people became increasingly identified with the resources under their control and within their capacity to produce in surplus. These resources – especially those considered rare and desirable in other regions – became both the means of enhancing the status of chiefs and nobility and the venue by which their status was affirmed and validated by their neighbours. Ceremonial events and redistribution of wealth through potlatching and feasting were enhanced by a leader’s and a community’s ability to obtain rare

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and valued resources from distant sources through commerce. And, as pointed out by Ames and Maschner (1999, 255), “the linkages among the household, social status (including gender) and regional dynamics lie through household production and specialization … regional economies through activities of chiefs and through trade and exchange.” Trading networks, or “interaction spheres” (Ames and Maschner 1999), encompass the broadest level of social organization and may well be responsible for the remarkable extent to which distinctive cultural traits, economies, and practices – including those involving the knowledge and use of plants – are held in common across broad geographic and linguistic boundaries. Trade and exchange at the regional level and beyond, and their influence on the dissemination of ethnobotanical knowledge, are the focus of the following chapter.

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10 Trade and Exchange: Sharing Plant Products and Ethnobotanical Knowledge across Geographical and Cultural Space Introduction Chief Arthur Adolph is a member of the Xaxl’ip (Xaxl’ep) community, of the Upper Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc (Lillooet) Interior Salish. Xaxl’ep, also known as “The Fountain,” is located just north of Lillooet along the Fraser Canyon. In November 2008 Art recounted a story that typifies the kind of plant resource exchange between different Indigenous communities that has been occurring in one form or another probably since the Early Holocene. He explained that the Upper, or Fraser River, Stl’atl’imx have access to certain interior berries, most notably stsáqwəm (saskatoon berries, Amelanchier alnifolia) and sxwúsum (soapberries, Shepherdia canadensis), which are not generally found in the Lower Stl’atl’imx, or Lil’wat, territory at Mount Currie in the Pemberton Valley. The Mount Currie Lil’wat, on the other hand, have resources like black huckleberries in their Coast Mountain territories that do not occur in the drier Upper Stl’atl’imx territory. Edible berries of all types are highly appreciated, so the people trade with each other for the different kinds. And, to facilitate the exchange, they have developed reciprocal kin ties. Sam Mitchell, Art Adolph’s father by customary adoption, had a niece who married into the Lil’wat community at Mount Currie, and this allowed their family access to the productive huckleberry patches and some other resources of the Lower Stl’atl’imx. When Art was around eight years old, his mother, Susan Mitchell, organized a group of people to go huckleberry picking in the Lil’wat territory.1 Art was allowed to go on this trip, which was in the summertime. He accompanied Sam and Susan Mitchell, along with other family members, on the train2 from Xaxl’ep and Ts’kw’aylaxw (Pavilion) to Mount Currie. At the Mount Currie train station,

10-1  |  Black huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum) (darker, shiny) and Cascade bilberries (V. deliciosum) (lighter colour), two prime edible berries of the Coast Mountains.

they were joined by a group of their relatives, and they all travelled together to the huckleberry-picking grounds at Alta Lake, toward Whistler, where they spent the weekend picking huckleberries. Art recalled that they stayed in cabins above the train track at Alta Lake. They all worked hard and picked large quantities of huckleberries (figure 10-1), which they brought home to Xaxl’ep. Then, his mother, Susan, organized the sharing of the harvest with the people at home who weren’t able to go on the trip. In reciprocal visits, Sam and Susan’s family members from Mount Currie often came to pick sxwúsum (soapberries) around the Lillooet area with the assistance of their Xaxl’ep relatives. Sam would meet them at the train station in Lillooet with his truck, bring them to their house to stay overnight, and then take them the next day up to the open woods of the Fountain Valley to pick the sxwúsum (figure 10-2) (Arthur Adolph, pers. comm., 2008). This exchange of hosting was typical of the way certain resources like berries were shared within families and across communities. As Thornton (1999) explains, trading and exchange allowed a redistribution of berry resources in space, just as storage technologies allowed a redistribution of their use over

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10-2 | Soapberries (Shepherdia canadensis), a prime Xaxl’ep resource of the Fountain Valley, BC .

time, and both strategies helped to mitigate issues of supply. Both enhanced a group’s capacity for resilience. All forms of trade and exchange are based on variable occurrence, distribution, and control of desirable resources and are therefore solidly embedded in territorial rights, social relationships, and reciprocity. Within these parameters, there have been many diverse arrangements, enacted on different scales and at different levels of complexity. The situation described above by Arthur Adolph is perhaps the most common and straightforward form of resource sharing. Many elders have recalled similar arrangements with kin residing in different territories (see Suttles 1987a and 1987c for a discussion of such resource exchange among Central Coast Salish). In terms of acquisition and transmission of knowledge about plants and environments, trade and exchange were crucial. It is likely that many of the plant names “borrowed” from one language into another, as discussed in chapter 3, as well as many of the stories related to plants and plant use that are shared across cultural and linguistic boundaries (see chapter 12), are a result of intergroup contact involving trade and exchange. Not only products and materials but also the cultural knowledge and vocabulary

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that accompany them – as well as, in some cases, more general knowledge, beliefs, and approaches – are communicated between peoples on various scales. This chapter addresses the role of trade and related economic and social exchange in the transmission of botanical and environmental knowledge within the context of Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems. The historical development of trade and exchange as it relates to the Indigenous peoples of the study area is briefly discussed. Then trade and exchange are defined in cultural terms. The distinctions between gifts and giving, payment for services such as witnessing ceremonies, redistribution of surplus products, and trading of products of equivalent value are blurred. There are explicit and inferred obligations attached to many types of gifts, and these are tied into social organization and differential social roles (Mauss 1990; Turner and Loewen 1998). Following this is a consideration of the types of plants and plant-related information, practices, vocabulary, and other cultural knowledge involved in systems of trade and exchange. What did people bring with them? What were their legacies? How did old and new ideas and practices combine and shift? How did languages reflect the changes? The predominant venues and mechanisms of trade and exchange are described, from feasts and potlatches to major congregation centres or nodes of exchange. Trade networks across geographic regions are then discussed, and the chapter concludes with a consideration of the implications of trade and exchange for how botanical knowledge is disseminated and for the patterns exhibited by this sharing. Historical Development of Trade and Exchange Natural environments vary in their ability to support human populations, both over space and over time. Few places can provide a complete and consistent array of necessary resources over thousands of years. Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene times must have presented particularly forbidding environments to early humans, whose survival would have depended on flexibility, adaptability, and a capacity to utilize the resources at hand in creative ways. Balancing the limited capability of these environments to support large numbers of people, on the one hand, with the advantages that many individuals with diverse skills and abilities would bring to a group’s survival, on the other, must have presented major dilemmas. People’s ability to spread out in small groups and take advantage of diversified resources would have been important. Yet the capability to maintain social relationships across these groups, and to exchange both resources and innovations (not to mention opportunities for genetic mixing), would also have been vital. It can be assumed, therefore, that at least some forms of exchange were taking place among the earliest groups of humans in the Americas, allowing them greater flexibility and helping to counter the instabilities in resource availability and accessibility they faced.

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Obsidian as a Reflection of Early Trade Networks

This assumption is borne out by archaeological records reflecting extensive ancient trading networks, from which social interactions and knowledge exchanges can be inferred. Obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass highly valued for its cutting qualities, is one of the very early trade goods, easily preserved and detected in archaeological contexts and capable of being traced through x-ray fluorescence “fingerprinting” to the specific volcanic area where it originated (Ames and Maschner 1999). It therefore serves as a possible proxy for other, less durable, and less tangible trade items and ideas – including botanical products and techniques related to plant resource use – that were passed through similar venues from group to group or transmitted across long distances by adventurous individual travellers. Obsidian has been found at scattered Columbia Plateau archaeological sites dating to at least as early as about 10,000 years ago, with a higher frequency in southern than northern sites, presumably because of closer proximity to volcanic mountain sources (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Obsidian from the ancient Olcott sites of the Cowlitz River drainage has been traced to five different sources in Oregon (Kirk and Daughtery 2007). At the opposite end of the study area, outside of On Your Knees Cave on the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island, Alaska (where the remains of a young man from about 9,800 years ago were found, as described in chapter 2), obsidian in an archaeological context was traced, at least tentatively, to the vicinity of Mount Edziza near the Stikine River on the mainland about 200 kilometres away, indicating the likelihood of a well-developed coastal trade network even at that early date. Distribution and archaeological contexts of obsidian and other valued materials may also reflect broader patterns of status, social organization, and household production among these early peoples, determined to some extent through acquisition and ownership of special products such as the artistically and skilfully produced Clovis points at the Wenatchee apple orchard site (Ames and Maschner 1999; Dubin 1999; Kirk and Daugherty 2005; see also chapter 2). On the other hand, the broad exchange of obsidian – and evidently, of the skills and knowledge surrounding its use – may have served to level cultural differences, making it difficult to identify divergent cultural histories and ecological settings of ancient peoples. In any case, we know that obsidian from eastern Oregon reached Puget Sound, the Gulf Islands, the Fraser Delta, and as far north as Namu at the mouth of the Burke Channel on the central coast of British Columbia in present-day Heiltsuk territory. Obsidian from Mount Bes But’a (Anahim Peak; “Obsidian Peak” in Dakelh) reached the Fraser River to the east, the Pacific Coast to the west, and the Skeena River at Kitselas and Hagwilget to the north (Ives 1990). And obsidian from Mount Edziza, as well as evidently reaching the On Your Knees Cave site on Prince of Wales Island, extended as far

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north as the headwaters of the Yukon and as far south as Namu (R.L. Carlson 1976, 1994). Trade in obsidian was indeed very ancient but was most intensive between about 6,000 and 4,000 years ago.3 Marine Shells in Interior Contexts

Another type of trade good that is durable and whose origins are relatively easily traced is marine shell as it occurs in interior archaeological contexts. For example, at Marmes Rockshelter on the Columbia Plateau, olive shells (Olivella sp.), most of them drilled for stringing, are present in many strata, including dozens at the 8,000-year level. A piece of California abalone shell, also drilled as a pendant, was found at this site as well (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Clam shells, pecten shells, and mussel shells have all been identified from numerous interior sites, in the context of pithouses, and often they had been modified – drilled for jewelry or, in the case of mussel shells, ground into adze blades (Hayden 1997; Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Marine shells probably moved with other goods from the coast up the Columbia and Fraser Rivers and their tributaries, where they were most likely exchanged for interior goods of some type (Ames and Maschner 1999). Among the most popular and widespread marine shells, both in archaeological and more recent contexts, are dentalium (Dentalium spp.) shells, or money shells, originating mainly from the west coast of Vancouver Island, where they live in muddy substrate at a depth of up to 15 metres or more. These shells have been found over an immense range in archaeological contexts – north as far as central Alaska, south to The Dalles and Celilo Falls, and eastward as far as the Great Lakes (Byram and Lewis 2001; Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Shells of red abalone, too, have been widely traded, from northern and central California as far north at least as Kiusta on Haida Gwaii (Gibson 1992; Dubin 1999),4 perhaps at times via Chinookan intermediaries. It is possible that the Northwest Coast tobacco, or Haida tobacco (closely related to Nicotiana quadrivalvis, which was cultivated by Native Californians), originated via the same trade route by which red abalone arrived at Haida Gwaii, maybe through long-distance travel and extended residence of Haida among coastal California peoples like the Yurok (see Turner and Taylor 1972; Turner 2004a). Other plant products from coastal environments, both marine and terrestrial, were probably conveyed along similar trade pathways, with interior plant products being exchanged coastward along the same routes. Although the origins of obsidian, marine shells, and some other products can be determined, the means of their transport to destination sites are not necessarily revealed. Likely, they travelled in diverse states and by diverse means: both as unfinished raw materials and as finished points, knives, or jewelry; carried by single individuals or small groups of travellers conveying them

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over long distances from their sites of origin to remote settlements; through “middlemen” at gathering places and trading nodes; or by means of a series of links and transmission points from person to person to person or from group to group to group along rivers and other linear routes. We know that people from all over the region were congregating at fishery sites like Kettle Falls and The Dalles from at least 9,000 years ago (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; see also chapter 2), and it seems likely that fishing techniques used at such places and probably also other practices, such as pit-cooking camas and onion bulbs and leaching acorns in pits (Mathews 2010), disseminated from such nodes of convergence and exchange. Stone Tool Traditions

The growth and development of ethnobotanical knowledge and ethnoecological knowledge systems – and the ways that these traditions have become mixed and blended over time – may well parallel the development of stone tool traditions within the study area. Four distinct and ancient traditions of stone tool making have been identified by Roy Carlson (1976) and others, reflecting the complexities of cultural exchange and intermixing of materials and technologies – including those involving plants – that must have occurred since the very beginnings of human occupation in the Americas: Pebble Tool, Microblade, Fluted Point, and Lind Coulee (or stemmed point). Each tradition represents a slightly different history and different way of life, mainly related to hunting of some form or another. The Pebble Tool Tradition, dating back possibly 12,000 years or more, is characterized by unifacial pebble tools and leaf-shaped bifaces. This tradition was centred in southwestern British Columbia, with early coastal and river sites at major rapids on the Fraser and Columbia Rivers. Apparently related to knowledge and use of marine resources, such as salmon, and possibly to woodworking technologies, pebble tool use extended along the coast at least as far north as Namu in Heiltsuk territory. This tradition interfaced with the Lind Coulee Tradition at Five Mile Rapids on the Columbia River and with the Microblade Tradition at Namu. Carlson (ibid.) suggests an ancestral relationship between the Pebble Tool Tradition and the Proto-Salish and Proto-Wakashan peoples, who possibly migrated north from western Oregon and northern California after deglaciation or arrived via a coastal route from Beringia or the Aleutians.5 The Microblade Tradition is based on a system of creating small cutting and piercing tools by striking or applying directed pressure to carefully prepared nodules of stone such as obsidian. The result is the production of numbers of sharp-edged flakes, or microblades, that can be inserted into wooden or bone handles or holders and used as knives or scrapers. Microblade technology had its beginnings in northern China or Siberia some 30,000 years ago, and it

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appeared in Alaska and Haida Gwaii around 12,000 years ago and then on the Northwest Coast, at Namu and elsewhere, sometime around 10,000 years ago, spreading up the Skeena River to Kitselas, Hagwilget, and other locations (Johnson 1997). Roy Carlson (1976) suggests that the Microblade Tradition is possibly ancestral to the Na-Dené peoples, including the Tlingit and Dene (Athabaskans), and perhaps to the Haida. The Fluted Point Tradition extends widely from the eastern side of Bering Strait through Alberta and into the continental United States, Mexico, and South America. Although rare, a few of these points have been found on the Northwest Coast (R.L. Carlson 1976). The use of Lind Coulee large-stemmed chipped-stone projectile points centred in the Columbia-Snake drainage of interior Washington and Oregon but extended southward into the Great Basin, eastward and northward into the Kootenays, the upper Thompson River drainage, and possibly the upper Fraser River drainage, and westward to the coast at the mouth of the Columbia River, eventually spreading throughout Puget Sound and the Gulf of Georgia, and as far north as Namu (ibid.). From these descriptions, it is evident that a general blending and overlapping of these stone tool traditions – which must have come through intergroup contact, intermarriage, or other types of social linkages and exchanges or through simultaneous occupation of territories – took place over the millennia during and following the Pleistocene. By about 5,500 years ago, these traditions, and the cultures in which they were embedded, were becoming less distinct and more integrated. It seems that people of diverse ancestries and histories were becoming more alike, and this convergence was probably due to interactions between them – as reflected in the obsidian trade, which was at its peak over this time – leading to mutual acculturation (R.L. Carlson 1976). Historical Patterns of Dissemination

Another indication of longstanding continuity among peoples along the coast and up the major rivers is the presence of distinctive rock carvings of similar design over a wide region. These carvings are zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, many with outlined circle faces. They occur most commonly on the northern coast: in southern Alaska, up the Nass River at Gitwinksihlkw, up the Skeena River at Kispiox, along Bella Coola Inlet and up the Bella Coola Valley, up the Fraser River as far inland as the Lytton-Lillooet region, and along the Columbia River from Portland and upstream past The Dalles. They seem to represent communication routes of the past, and these same routes would have served to distribute obsidian and other valuable trade goods, along with cultural traits and cultural knowledge – including ethnobotanical knowledge – within and across cultural and linguistic boundaries (Lundy 1976). These carvings are seldom easily dated, but from the wear of wave action on the coastal carvings,

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and their widespread consistency of form and design, many would have extended back at least to the Mid Holocene, between about 7,000 and 3,500 years ago (Ames and Maschner 1999; Lundy 1976). The rock carvings are apparently related and show similar traits to the stone sculpture complexes of the Fraser River, Gulf of Georgia, and Columbia River systems, possibly representing an early Northwest Coast art form, with a style also closely related to the later wood sculpture of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other northern tribes (Duff 1956; Lundy 1976). The proliferation of these rock carvings, starting six or more millennia ago, seems to indicate an increasingly spiritual connection to lands and resources, with ceremonial and ritual activities influencing other aspects of life (Lundy 1976). Stone and shell artifacts, rock carvings, oral histories, and cultural and linguistic traits held in common across divergent groups all stand as evidence of vast networks of communication and interchange – across oceans, along freshwater lakes and rivers, and by land along valley bottoms, river terraces, ridges, and mountain passes. Perhaps the most obvious and enduring orientation for trade was between the Pacific Coast and the interior along the major rivers, some of which penetrated as far eastward as the Rocky Mountains. For thousands of years, people have routinely crossed through the coastal ranges via well-worn trails, known as “grease trails,” bringing products such as dentalium and oulachen grease – goods that set the standard for exchange values throughout the region. Oulachen grease, or simply “grease,” which was rendered from a small type of smelt (Thaleichthys pacificus), was widely recognized as the “cornerstone of a vast northwest trade network” and was certainly among the most important trade items, particularly in British Columbia and southeastern Alaska (Byram and Lewis 2001, 151).6 It is likely that the uses of plants and plant products for food, materials, medicines, and ceremonial purposes, along with the knowledge and technologies around plant use, converged upon and were spread by the same routes as the treasured oulachen grease and the durable products like obsidian and dentalia that are more easily found in the archaeological record. Evidence for this begins to show in the transmission of names of plants from one language group to another (chapter 3), in the stylistic similarities and differences in basketry, cooking, and preservation (chapters 5 and 6), in management practices such as landscape burning (chapter 11), in stories (chapter 12), and in the ceremonial use of plants (chapter 13). Of course, these exchanges are mediated by cultural variation and by relative similarities and differences both in skills and technologies and in plant species’ abundance, range, and diversity. A given plant resource may occur in one area, but if it is less abundant or less productive, it may also be acquired through trade or through permitted access for harvesting in another people’s territory. For example, some of the stands of old-growth western redcedars of Haida Gwaii produce superior dugout canoes, and others, such

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as particular stands at Naden Harbour, were ideal for large bark roofing sheets, flattened with salmonberry sticks. Haida carvers and bark harvesters from these areas were likewise famous for their skills in constructing products of excellent quality. For this reason, although western redcedar also grows on the mainland coast, the canoes and bark sheets from Haida Gwaii were widely sought by the Ts’msyen, often in preference to their own, and were also traded northward to the Tlingit (Turner 2004a; Turner and Wilson 2008). Oulachens and dentalium themselves, however, were also inextricably connected to knowledge and use of plants. Oulachens are traditionally harvested using wooden weirs constructed of hemlock poles and boughs, traps of root and wood, stinging nettle nets, and cedar-wood dugout canoes (Stewart 1977; Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2008). Dentalium shells are obtained through the use of an ingenious implement featuring the shrub hardhack (Spiraea douglasii) (see chapter 6). Furthermore, these shells would have been carried in baskets or bags or else strung on nettle fibre or cedar-bark twine. Oulachen grease was rendered in wooden boxes and then stored and transported in cured bottles and hollow tubes of bull kelp or in bentwood cedar boxes. There are now-classic photographs taken by Harlan I. Smith and other early ethnographers of men, women, and children carrying these boxes full of grease, by means of a woven tumpline across the forehead, up the steep trail at the headwaters of the Bella Coola River, along the “grease trail” route to the Interior Plateau, through a place called “Kleena Kleene” (after tł’ina, the Kwak’wala name for this grease), and far beyond, to the Chilcotin region and the Fraser River. The photographs are relatively recent, but the “grease trails” long preceded the Europeans’ arrival on the Northwest Coast (Ames and Maschner 1999; Birchwater and Ulkatcho and Nuxalk elders 1993; Byram and Lewis 2001; Cove and MacDonald 1987; Tepper 1991). Exchange and Reciprocity There are many forms of reciprocation or mutual exchange for mutual benefit. “Trade” is one form of such exchange and is often considered a strictly economic transaction, in which goods or products desired by one individual or group are obtained from another in return for other goods or products that are thought to be of corresponding value. In relation to ethnobotanical knowledge and goods, however, this is a rather narrow interpretation that does not cover the full range of activities involved in reciprocal exchange systems. Not only do plants and plant products fit into a broader matrix of “trade goods” that included all kinds of animal products as well as rocks and minerals, but all such tangible objects are also only part of the story of cultural reciprocity that occurs in societies such as those of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America. Limiting a discussion of exchange systems to the realm of material, physical goods used

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in “barter” restricts a full understanding of both social and ecological aspects of exchange. A broader perspective is necessary, reflecting less tangible possessions such as names, crests, narratives, songs, ceremonies, and medicinal plant recipes, as well as the role and influences of kinship, political alliances, wealth, status, and obligations of leadership. Also relevant are social organization, seasonal movements, and activities related to control, management, and enhancement of resources. Ultimately – through the medium of people’s relationships with the other entities of their universe – worldviews, philosophies, and belief systems are also inextricably tied to reciprocal exchange systems. Trade and exchange can take place between neighbouring families and communities or over very long distances, where individuals or small groups embark on major expeditions for trade, exploration, or other reasons. Such situations are known from recent times, and it is reasonable to assume that there were long-distance travellers in ancient times, too. Such people may have forged more enduring connections across communities that ultimately resulted in more permanent trade routes and networks. There were many different patterns involving exchange. One example is single individuals or small groups carrying goods or holding specific knowledge or skills who might travel from community to community along a given trajectory, perhaps a coastline or a major river, while stopping for periods of time, even overwintering or residing for a year or two at a community as visitors (Decosse 1980). Such extended stays of visitors also provided important opportunities for individuals of two or more different communities to meet on the common ground of a third community. As described previously, both on the coast and in the interior, there existed major nodes of trade and exchange where different peoples converged at given times, especially around harvests of salmon, oulachens, roots, or berries. Such meetings would have resulted not only in the trade and purchase of diverse resources but also in the forging of social connections, intermarriage, invitations for visiting, and the exchange of stories, songs, and other nontangible “goods.” It was through these kinds of meeting places that much learning and borrowing of plant names and disseminating of stories, techniques for processing plants, and so forth likely occurred. Examples of exchange nodes include upland locales like Indian Heaven, the famous huckleberry-picking grounds of the Mount Adams region (Kirk and Daugherty 2007), Potato Mountain in Tsilhqot’in territory (Minnie Charleyboy, pers. comm., 2003), Green Lake in Secwepemc territory, and Botanie Valley in the territory of the Lytton band of the Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1909; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990).7 Teit (1900) reported that, as of the late nineteenth century, as many as 1,000 people congregated annually at Botanie, not only from Nlaka’pamux communities but also from Secwepemc, Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc, and others. Women would harvest roots and pick berries on the slopes of the valley, men would hunt, and everyone would trade and

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socialize. Nlaka’pamux elder Louie Phillips recalled that women would sometimes bet entire sacks of yellow glacier lily bulbs they had dug on the outcome of horse races in the valley – yet another type of exchange mechanism (cited in Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Riverine sites such as Kettle Falls, The Dalles, and Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, the mouths of the Wenatchee and Okanagan Rivers, the confluence of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers at Lytton, “The Fountain” (Xaxl’ep) farther up the Fraser, various sites on the lower Fraser, Namu on the central coast, and the lower Skeena and Nass Rivers are other major sites of longstanding cultural convergence where thousands of people gathered and goods from all of the surrounding areas would be exchanged (Ames and Maschner 1999; Hayden and Schulting 1997; Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Mitchell and Donald 1988). Chain-style and network-style connections for trading and exchange of goods and knowledge also occurred widely, in which goods and knowledge from one community would pass through an intermediary community to a third community and, eventually, to other communities at higher orders of separation. Some of the major trading centres in northwestern North America were linked to trade routes that extended south to California, east to Montana, north to the Yukon, and ultimately, to the Great Lakes and the east coast of North America. Over the course of its dissemination, especially across language and ecological boundaries, knowledge can become changed or transformed to accommodate different values and perspectives, as well as differences in range and distribution of plants. Plants names, and technologies such as pit-cooking involving plants, for example, might shift to incorporate or apply to more salient species and techniques in different local and cultural situations. Trading and Gifting

Trading and gifting are not easily separated because gifts invariably carry implications for the receiver as well as the giver, at the very least resulting in the attribution of status to and appreciation for the giver and in recognition of the receiver.8 There may also be formal or informal expectations that the giver and his or her community will receive backing, assistance, or cooperation from the receiver at some time in the future (Decosse 1980; Mauss 1990). For example, the one giving a gift may receive favours from the recipient by being hosted or provisioned at some other time; as Suttles (1951b, 27) explains in relation to the Katzie as hosts of their Halkomelem kin, “A host at one time and place is potentially a guest at another” (see also Suttles 1987a, 1987b). Mitchell and Donald (1988) maintain that an early, sophisticated system of trading – in the narrow economic sense – may have existed among Northwest Coast peoples. However, even economically motivated transactions and systems like the pessa investment system of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Reid and Sewid-Smith

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2007; Recalma-Clutesi 2007) could not operate without the matrix of social relationships, inheritance, and cultural protocols that is well documented for the Northwest Coast potlatch complex (Drucker 1951; L. King 2004; Trosper 2002, 2003). Generosity in both economic and cultural realms had high social value, and a leader who was generous to his people and his neighbours was more likely to maintain enduring internal support and strong social alliances. This affirmation, in turn, not only enhanced his people’s status and his own political survival but might also mean the difference between death and continued existence for his people in times of adversity. For example, strengthened social ties between communities might allow reciprocal access to a people’s hunting or gathering grounds, leading to enhanced food security. Gifting and generosity thus served as a form of insurance policy. Sometimes a gift might be in recognition of a past favour, such as a rescue or providing caregiving to a family member; such deeds were important to acknowledge clearly and publicly. Gifts of acknowledgment might be in the form not only of objects but also of names, songs, or rights to resources. For example, Gitga’at Eagle chief Ernie Hill Jr described how his grandfather, Ambrose Robinson, had cared for an elderly Eagle chief who was ill. In appreciation, the chief bequeathed to Ambrose the rights to a certain highbush cranberry patch on Gribble Island, across from Hartley Bay, that he had held. Ambrose Robinson assumed ownership of the patch and was able to bring women from the community over to pick highbush cranberries.9 When Ambrose passed away, the rights to this patch were returned to the Eagle clan through bequeathment to Chief Ernie Hill himself (Turner and Thompson 2006). This type of reciprocity was highly complex, extending across clan boundaries and between generations and involving rights to resources (in this case, a highly valued fruit) and territory, social organization, a chief ’s status and responsibilities, and social cohesion. Furthermore, gifts of food and other valued products were often given for those invited to serve as witnesses to important events such as the transfer of names and titles on the occasion of a feast or potlatch.10 Gifts might also be given to clan members who assisted by providing food or undertaking tasks requested of them by members of an opposite clan for a feast or ceremony they were hosting.11 Similar situations of reciprocity and generosity, translating into social capital, can be seen throughout the entire study area. Another example is from Nisga’a elder Amelia Morven (Niikw’iltlkw) (cited in Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a 1995, 48), who describes how the owners and proprietors of specific resource-harvesting areas would give permission for others to harvest in their area once their own needs had been met: Whenever it is time to harvest food at one’s ant’aałkw (place from which any type of edible produce from the ground is harvested) one would first

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satisfy his own means, then open it to others. The expression goes, ‘Way łaa nii joktgat’ meaning: ‘one is now residing at one’s ant’aałkw’; and is an indication that others may go to that place when invited. That is what my father would do. He owned a huge soapberry (ʔis) picking ground, and when he himself had taken enough he would then head up to Aiyansh and inform the people that he was now living at his ant’aałkw. Many canoes would arrive. I was not ten years old but I remember. Doing this made them very happy, to be able to share their resources with others, as it was not customary for people in those days to hoard their fortune. In the same Nisga’a volume (ibid., 79), Robert Moore (Niisxbakhl) recounts, “There are not too many places where soapberries grow. When the wilp [‘house’] get enough then the chief goes to the villages and announces that they have enough soapberries and invites others.” Having broader opportunities to access resources was also important at times when people had to forego harvesting certain resources because of scheduling conflicts. For the Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc communities along the Fraser River, for example, some of the best runs of sockeye and other salmon occurred at the same time as some of the prime berries, like black huckleberries, were ripening at higher elevations. In this case, those families who spent more time fishing down at the river could exchange some of their wind-dried fish for berries picked by those who had spent their time at camps in the mountains picking berries and digging roots (Turner 1992b).12 Sometimes, too, there were environmentally and geographically mediated differences in resource accessibility between communities that promoted convenient exchange systems. The Ditidaht villages of Clo-oose and Whyac on the west coast of Vancouver Island are a case in point. Fishermen from Clo-oose had access to the best halibut fishing grounds, whereas Whyac was situated beside the Nitinat Narrows at the entrance to Nitinat Lake,13 where people strung duck nets of stinging nettle and other plant fibres and then, using their canoes, drove the ducks from the lake into the nets. Therefore, halibut from Clo-oose were routinely traded for “black ducks” (scoters) from Whyac (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Historic rights to access and harvest in others’ territories were often widely recognized and longstanding. Hul’qumi’num elder Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim) (pers. comm., 1999) recalled that the Quw’utsun’ (Cowichan) of Vancouver Island not only had relations whom they visited in the Fraser Valley but, for countless generations, also owned a village site (called Tl’uqtinus) near Canoe Reach and several other sites near New Westminster, where they would go to fish and where they harvested wapato (called sqáwth) as well as cattail leaves (stł’áʔqən) and tule stems for their mats.14 The Quw’utsun’ also had rights to cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos) harvesting in Katzie territory (Suttles 1951b). According to Teit (1906a, 232), the Lower Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc, when they were trading with

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their Sechelt, Squamish, and Comox neighbours at Jervis Inlet or Howe Sound, “were allowed to pick berries, and to hunt and fish, as much as they liked.” Similar access rights were accorded by the Straits and Hul’qumi’num Coast Salish of southern Vancouver Island to the Ditidaht families for harvesting camas in their territories around Victoria (Turner and Kuhnlein 1983; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Likewise, the Hanaksiala of the Kitlope Valley and Haisla of Kitimaat had longstanding ties with the Kitasoo/Xai’xais and Gitga’at Ts’msyen, and for generations they have shared the use of the Kitasoo and Gitga’at seaweed and halibut spring harvesting camps. Conversely, the Ts’msyen peoples have long been welcomed to the oulachen camps of the Haisla and Hanaksiala (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2005; Compton 1993b), often bringing dried seaweed and halibut with them as a reciprocal gift. Rights to fish in the major oulachen rivers of Kwakwaka’wakw territory – the Kingcome and Knight Rivers – were also accorded to various tribes from Vancouver Island and the Broughton Archipelago (Curtis 1915), and these rights would be reciprocal, as the Tsawataineuk clans from Kingcome, for example, had clam- and seaweed-harvesting rights in the Broughton Archipelago locations (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2009; Recalma-Clutesi 2005). As Tagish elder Dora Wedge noted, “Everybody shared together. If somebody picked different kind of berries, and you haven’t got it, they’d give you some. And maybe they want something, they haven’t get something you got. Well, they just trade around, no fights, nothing, everybody got along” (cited in Greer 1995, 91). Aggression, Encroachment, Amalgamation, and Acquisition of Knowledge and Resources

The opposite of generosity and amicable sharing – of gifting goods and distribution of wealth, of creating friendships and alliances through trade – was warfare and aggression. These situations could also result in the acquisition of goods, and even in knowledge exchange, but without the social goodwill. Wars may be fought and raids launched for many different reasons, but in at least some cases, wars resulted from a breakdown of peaceful trade relations. Ames and Maschner (1999) note, for example, that a number of intense wars were fought over the spectacular oulachen runs of the Nass River, particularly between the Ts’msyen and Tlingit, and as a result, the Ts’msyen eventually pushed the Tlingit northward (see also Cove and MacDonald 1987; and Matson and Coupland 1995). Slave acquisition was one outcome of raids and wars, frequently described in narratives and undoubtedly a major means of transfer of botanical knowledge along with other types of knowledge (see chapter 9). Sometimes warfare, or the threat of warfare, would ultimately result in a peacefully negotiated settlement, which might – for example, in the Ts’msyen-Tlingit case – include acceded access to resources or territory. Furthermore, slaves taken in raids, and at times

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transported hundreds of kilometres away from their homes, were sometimes repatriated through payment of ransom goods or through purchase at major trading centres like “The Fountain” near Lillooet (Teit 1909). Thus even warfare was not necessarily a straightforward acquisition of goods on the part of victors but involved some complexity in the ways that knowledge and property were transmitted and acquired. Sometimes, too, latent knowledge or delayed transmission of knowledge might occur in the case of slaves, for example, where it might be necessary to learn another language in order to participate more fully in knowledge exchange. It might even take a full generation or more for information, names, stories, and so forth around plants, food preparation techniques, or medicinal plant use to be passed from one community to another. Alliances formed through trade might also influence the course of aggression, as in the account from Cowichan elder Simon Charlie and his son Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim) (pers. comm., 1999, 2003), who described a long-distance trading relationship that the Hul’qumi’num had long ago with the Secwepemc of the Kamloops area: We went up there [around Kamloops] every so often, whatever it was, four years, eight years, for trade. So, one time we got up there, and they had nothing. They apologized. “We don’t have nothing. We just got raided. Took all our trading stuff away, and a lot of our people, our ladies and our children.” So, overnight, of course, people had a gathering, wondering what to do. They decided to go make war on the enemies of those people. So, next day, they went out, raided that village. Got all the people back, ladies and children, and all the goods that were stolen plus a bunch of others. Yeah. So, that’s their story. It was George Manuel [Secwepemc leader] that was telling us. He’s gone now, but he learned it from his … grandfather or a great grandfather, from his elder anyway … Yeah. Precontact. One of the favourite tools, or favourite things, we traded for I understand was the rock from what is now called Alberta, a certain kind of a hard rock. Another type of situation in which knowledge and rights to goods might be conveyed across linguistic and cultural boundaries would be in cases of encroachment, assimilation, or takeover of one group and its territories and resources by another. This could be a hostile intrusion, as described previously, or a more benign amalgamation, even by invitation of the original group if their numbers were depleted for some reason. Regardless of the cause, there are known elements of cultural knowledge exchange between groups in situations like this. For example, it is suggested that the relatively high number of plant names from Straits and Lushootseed Salish that were borrowed into Ditidaht – as well as a few Ditidaht names in these Salishan languages – might indicate

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the possibility of Ditidaht expansion into Salish territory at some time in the past (Hess 1987). Similar situations – for example, between peoples speaking Pentlatch, Comox, and Legwildaxw Kwak’wala on the east coast of Vancouver Island, between Salishan peoples and the Nuu-chah-nulth in the Port Alberni area of the west coast of the island, between the Haida and Tlingit on Prince of Wales Island, and between northern Interior Salish peoples and the Tsilhqot’in and other Dene (Athabaskan) groups – may have resulted in the mutual sharing of botanical names, stories, and other cultural information. Some of the situations of occupancy of new territory and resultant acquisition and exchange of knowledge may have taken place at times when the original host population was in decline and therefore did not require as many resources as its territory produced or, conversely, when the original community enjoyed a bounty of resources that enabled it to accommodate more people.15 A more recent example of historical movement and settlement is with the migration of Secwepemc chief Kenpesq’et from the North Thompson River, along with fifty or sixty friends and relatives, to form a new community, Kinbasket, at the head of the Columbia River, within the territory of the Ktunaxa. Chief Kenpesq’et and his followers knew the country well, having travelled there previously on hunting trips, mostly by way of the Canoe River. Once in the region, they formed an alliance with the Stoney people of east of the Rocky Mountains, who routinely travelled to the Columbia River in the fall to fish for salmon and pick berries. These two groups supported each other in the event that the Ktunaxa tried to drive them away (Teit 1909, 467). This territorial shift, combined with a transmountain alliance and settlement of an area previously occupied by peoples of yet another culture and language, would have provided many opportunities for exchange and acquisition not only of botanical products and goods but also of plant names, stories, and other types of knowledge. It is likely that the use of both sweetgrass and Canby’s lovage, for example, entered the knowledge systems of the Secwepemc and other Interior Salish peoples through this venue (see Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; and Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990).16 The intersection of Secwepemc, Ktunaxa, and Stoney cultures in the Rocky Mountain Trench provides a good example of how knowledge and practice might become similar between two groups of people through mutual association with a third group, with common borrowing – and trading – from the same source. A similar situation facilitating multicultural, multilanguage exchange evidently occurred within the Bella Coola Valley, in the territory of the Nuxalk Salishan peoples. At some time in the past, Dakelth Ulkatcho families (Dene, or Athabaskan) from the Interior Plateau started travelling seasonally into the Bella Coola Valley to co-reside with their Nuxalk (Salishan) neighbours in the fall and winter (Tepper 1991). Evidently, salmon were so plentiful in the Bella Coola River and its tributaries that the Nuxalk did not mind sharing them with

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the Ulkatcho. The Ulkatcho were also pleased to enjoy Bella Coola oulachen grease, carried up the valley and onto the Plateau over the “grease trail” in cedar-wood boxes. In terms of botanical products, the Ulkatcho obtained wood and bark of yellow-cedar and western redcedar and boxes of highbush cranberries and crabapples preserved in oil, among other goods, from the Nuxalk. The Ulkatcho also had relationships through marriage to the Tsilhqot’in peoples, and some families travelled annually to Potato Mountain in Tsilhqot’in territory to harvest spring beauty corms, or mountain potatoes, yellow glacier lily bulbs, and other resources (Minnie Charleyboy, pers. comm., 2003; Birchwater and Ulkatcho and Nuxalk elders 1993; Hebda, Turner, et al. 1996; Turner 2004b). In return, the Nuxalk benefited in receiving valuable interior goods brought to the valley either from Ulkatcho territory or through the Ulkatcho homeland from the Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin): obsidian from Mount Bes But’a (Anahim Peak), beautifully tanned buckskins, dried “roots” of mountain potato and yellow glacier lily, large quantities of dried cakes of soapberries and saskatoon berries (Teit 1909), and wolf lichen (Letharia spp.) to use as a yellow dye. The Nuxalk also sometimes used, and learned how to construct, baskets and canoes of birch bark, although they were never as skilled at making these vessels as their Dene (Athabaskan) neighbours (McIlwraith 1948; H.I. Smith 1920–24; Turner 1973). On the coastward side, the Nuxalk were bounded by Wakashan-speaking peoples (Haisla and Hanaksiala to the north, Heiltsuk to the west, and Kwakwaka’wakw to the south), and they hosted Wakashan visitors from the outer coast, most especially the Heiltsuk, who brought edible red laver seaweed, herring eggs on giant kelp fronds and on western hemlock boughs, clams, mussels, and other marine products to exchange for Nuxalk salmon and some of the interior goods (McIlwraith 1948). Some Heiltsuk women were skilled weavers of mountain goat wool and were hired by the Nuxalk to make blankets, some of them dyed with wolf lichen from the interior (Willie Hans, pers. comm., 1984; H.I. Smith 1920–24). The Nuxalk also travelled to visit, and intermarried with, Hanaksiala from the Kitlope Valley and were said to have introduced springbank clover and Pacific hemlockparsley to that valley (Ken Hall and Simon Hall, pers. comm., 1994, 2007; Compton 1993b; Edwards 1979). Some Nuxalk and Heiltsuk also customarily travelled into the territory of the Qwiqwsut’inew tribe of the Kwakwaka’wakw at Haada in the Broughton Archipelago to harvest high-quality rhizomes of springbank clover and other edible roots from their t’əkkillakw (“estuarine root gardens”), with permission of their host community (Deur 2002b; Deur and Turner 2005; Reid and Sewid-Smith 2004). As well as numerous different botanical products and other goods, the NuxalkWakashan-Dene network resulted in considerable cultural exchange, linguistic borrowings, and the sharing of narratives, names, and other traditions. The Nuxalk evidently acquired their rich and complex ceremonial traditions, including elaborate winter dances, feasts, and potlatches, at least in part from

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their Wakashan neighbours (Kennedy and Bouchard 1990). The Nuxalk credit the Ulkatcho and Tsilhqot’in peoples for excellent tracking and hunting skills. Although the Nuxalk traded and intermarried with their various neighbours, they also engaged in war with them on occasion (ibid.). One such time was when a sacred ceremonial object was evidently stolen from one of the Nuxalk women root diggers visiting Haada to obtain springbank clover and silverweed roots. In revenge, the Nuxalk launched an attack on the Qwiqwsut’inew, in which men, women, and children were massacred and some taken as captives, including the great great grandmother of Kwakwaka’wakw historian Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth) (Reid and Sewid-Smith 2004).17 Although some intercommunity and internation reciprocal relationships evidently endured over centuries, and possibly even millennia, the diverse occasions of exchange and interaction would certainly have fluctuated over time and space. There may have been pulses of economic and social activity between certain communities or nations at some times, achieved through strong alliances or marital connections, for example. Then these activities might have faded as these relationships broke down, possibly to be replaced by others. In a similar vein, there may have been regional “hot spots” for trade – particular locations coinciding with specific resource peaks – which were then dissembled over time, perhaps being shifted to other sites that became, in turn, more productive. In the following section, the historical development of relationships involving trade and exchange in northwestern North America is discussed. Plants in Trade Starting in the latter part of the Mid Holocene – at a time when there was also evidence of cultures more easily recognizable as ancestral to the First Nations of modern times – trading intensified and started to extend its reach until at least around 1,500 years ago. Already, from the Mid Holocene, culture patterns based on wealth and specialization were becoming evident, with obvious widespread exchange of ideas and innovations (see chapter 9). Populations were growing, food surpluses in the form of stored goods were accruing, and individuals were focusing on particular occupations, many of which involved increasing expertise and knowledge around using plants. Luxury goods – including tools like nephrite adzes18 that had an obvious connection to woodworking and carpentry as well as to status, wealth, and social stratification – are seen in many archaeological contexts, from southeastern Alaska to Oregon. By about 3,000 years ago, the development and exchange of perishable items becomes more visible, with the archaeological remains in wet environments revealing fishnets, plaited and twined baskets, bentwood fishhooks, wooden bowls, and wooden wedges that reflect regional centres of development and interchange, such as the lower Columbia River, the lower Fraser Valley and

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Gulf of Georgia, the west coast of Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula, Prince Rupert Harbour and the lower Skeena River, and the central coast around Namu. Connections between The Dalles on the Columbia and the Interior Plateau are also suggested in the styles and types of tools from this time (Ames and Maschner 1999; R.L. Carlson 1976; Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Through evidence from sites like these, more clearly recognized are not only the trading of plant products but also the role of plants, botanical products, and access to plant resources as gifts, as tributes to leaders, as payment for services, and in ceremonial exchange. This section focuses on known exchange patterns for plants and ethnobotanical knowledge. Table 10-1 lists over sixty-five plant species known to have been involved in trade or exchange in some way within the study area. Most of these are foodstuffs or materials used in technology, as well as manufactured goods; a few are medicines. Most trade was likely in preserved or processed products (dried berries, dried roots, bundles of split leaves, or roots for basketry), which were generally lighter and more practically transported than their fresh or unprocessed forms. Everyday commodities, as well as items of high value and rarity, were used in trade, gifting, and exchange. Immense quantities of plant resources were acquired or changed hands through trade and were distributed widely during ceremonial occasions, increasing the wealth and prestige of communities and their leaders (Boas 1921; Deur and Turner 2005; Turner and Loewen 1998). Given their high status value, there would have been strong incentives to enhance and intensify these plant resources, to promote their productivity, and to increase the efficiency of their production through habitat management and technological development. Surplus high-quality botanical resources from managed landscapes – such as springbank clover rhizomes produced at the Haada t’əkkillakw (“estuarine root gardens”) in the Broughton Archipelago – provided opportunities for communities to host harvesters from other regions and to provide quantities of these resources for feasts and gatherings (Deur 2002b; Reid and Sewid-Smith 2004). Just as in economic systems of the present, peoples of the past often “added value” to the goods they traded, and they standardized the quantities and dimensions to facilitate exchange. Adding value consisted of drying and bundling or carefully stringing foodstuffs like root vegetables in regular sized units, as well as preparing standard-sized containers for cooked, dried camas bulbs, wapato tubers, and seaweed or berry cakes to increase their overall value. On the Northwest Coast not only did the bentwood cedar box serve as a container for storage and transport, but because it could be produced to standardized dimensions and volume, it also facilitated trade. With these boxes, dried seaweed cakes and dried berry cakes could be produced in squares of similar size, and the crabapples, highbush cranberries, and other foods stored in these boxes would be of a standard volume for consistency in value. Even seaweed-drying trays and

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Table 10-1  |  Plant resources known to have been traded among Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America Species/material traded

Notes

Edible seaweed, red laver (Pyropia abbottiae a and related spp.; syn. Porphyra)

Important item of trade along entire Northwest Coast (especially central and northern) and from the coast inland (e.g., up the Skeena River); sold by Saanich and Nuu-chahnulth to Oriental buyers from Victoria

Black tree lichen, “tree moss,” or wíla (Bryoria fremontiib)

Wolf lichen (Letharia vulpinac)

Cooked, dried cakes traded from Interior Salish to Coast Salish

Traded as dyestuff among interior groups and from interior to Northwest Coast (e.g., to Chilkat Tlingit and Nuxalk at Bella Coola), especially for dyeing mountain goat wool

Indian paint fungus (Echinodontium tinctoriumb)

Traded from Tlingit to Dene (Athabaskan) groups

White spruce (Picea glaucab)

Gum traded from Dene (Athabaskan) groups to the Tlingit for chewing

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis a)

Seeds traded from Upper to Lower Nlaka’pamux and probably from Upper to Lower Stl’atl’imx

Pacific yew (Taxus brevifoliac)

Wood and bows commonly traded from Northwest Coast to interior throughout range

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophyllac)

Dried cambium inner bark food traded from Ts’msyen to Nisga’a and from Haisla and Hanaksiala to other coastal groups

Yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis a)

Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis a)

Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosab)

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata a)

Bark and bark products widely traded along Northwest Coast and into interior, especially in Chilkat blankets and robes and in Kwakwaka’wakw robes; wood for bows traded from Coast Salish to interior; wood for ceremonial articles traded from northern coast to interior

Root baskets and hats traded from Tlingit to Dene (Athabaskan) groups and from Haida to Ts’msyen; possibly traded to Ozette and other locations farther south along coast

Dugout canoes traded among Nlaka’pamux

Cedar-wood dugout canoes widely traded along Northwest Coast (especially from Nuu-chah-nulth and Haida to Makah and Ts’msyen respectively) and into interior; cedar-wood boxes traded along Northwest Coast, generally from north to south and from coast to interior; bark and bark baskets, mats, robes, and ceremonial articles traded widely among Northwest Coast peoples and from coast to interior; roots and split-root baskets traded among Interior Salish and Columbia peoples and from interior to coast

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Table 10-1 | continued Species/material traded

Notes

Vine maple (Acer circinatumb)

Wood for bows traded from Northwest Coast to interior and southern BC

Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrumb)

Wood traded from Ts’msyen to Haida; snowshoes traded among Interior Salish peoples

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia a)

Dried berries and cakes commonly traded among interior peoples and from interior to coast, especially central and southern coast

Nodding onion (Allium cernuumb) and related species

Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinuma)

Bulbs traded among Nlaka’pamux; not generally eaten by coastal groups but traded in abundance to Europeans

Fibre, twine, and woven products (bags, mats, fishnets) widely traded among Interior Salish, from Interior Plateau to Northwest Coast, and from Coeur d’Alene to Plains tribes

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi b)

Berries traded from Nuxalk to Heiltsuk and Oweekeno and probably elsewhere in BC; dried leaves as tobacco probably also traded

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentatab)

Bark fibre mats and clothing occasionally exchanged among Interior Plateau peoples

Silverweed (Argentina spp.c)

A. anserina roots traded from Upper to Lower Nlaka’pamx; A. egedii roots widely traded among Northwest Coast peoples

Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittatab)

Dried roots traded among Nlaka’pamux and probably Stl’atl’imx

Edible camas (Camassia quamash,a C. leichtlinii)

Dried bulbs widely traded from Coast Salish of Vancouver Island to western coast, northern coast, and mainland; also traded among southern Interior Salish, Columbia River, and western Washington peoples, as well as north into Interior Plateau

Paper birch (Betula papyriferac)

Slough sedge, or basket sedge (Carex obnuptab)

Bark, containers, and wood traded among Dene (Athabaskan) and Interior Salish groups and from interior to coast; birchbark canoes traded among Interior Salish, Ktunaxa, and Dene peoples

Split, prepared leaves traded from Nuu-chah-nulth to Sliammon (Comox) Salish basket weavers

Mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus ledifolius, C. intercedens)

Spokan obtained wood blanks and finished bows from Nez Perce made of these woods; made to “last many generations” (J.A. Ross 2011, 279)

Hazelnut (Corylus cornutaa)

Nuts widely traded among Salishan groups of BC (e.g., from North Thompson Secwepemc to West Secwepemc and Stl’atl’imx) and among Columbia River peoples; possibly

Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolatab)

Corms commonly traded (usually dried, sometimes on strings or sticks) within and among interior groups; occasionally traded to coast (e.g., to Nuxalk at Bella Coola)

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Table 10-1 | continued Species/material traded

Silverberry (Elaeagnus commutatab) Yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorumc)

Notes

traded between Fraser River Salish and Skeena River Ts’msyenic peoples

Inner bark, mats, and bags traded among Interior Salish and from Interior Salish and possibly Tsilhqot’in to Coast Salish

Dried bulbs traded (loose or on strings or skewers) among Interior Salish and from Tsilhqot’in to Carrier and Nuxalk

Oregon ash (Fraxinus latifoliab)

Bowls (or possibly raw wood) traded to Makah from groups to south and/or east

Salal (Gaultheria shallonc)

Large quantities of dried berries and pressed cakes traded among Northwest Coast peoples

Chocolate lily, or riceroot (Fritillaria affinisb)

Sweetgrass (Hierochloe hirta, H. odoratab) Bitterroot (Lewisia redivivac)

Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi b)

Tiger lily, or Columbia lily (Lilium columbianumb)

Biscuitroot (Lomatium cous,c and other spp.)

Dried bulbs traded from Upper to Lower Nlaka’pamux

Nlaka’pamux, Ktunaxa, and other First Nations of BC trade for sweetgrass braids with peoples east of Rocky Mountains Dried roots commonly traded within and among Interior Salish groups of BC and Washington Aromatic roots widely traded as medicine between Interior Salish, Ktunaxa, and other groups

Dried bulbs traded from Interior Salish to Coast Salish

Dried roots traded within Interior Plateau groups, especially from southern to northern plateau (e.g., Okanagan to Secwepemc)

Desert parsley (Lomatium macrocarpumb)

Dried roots traded from Upper to Lower Nlaka’pamux and among Interior Salish peoples

Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca a)

Fresh and preserved fruits in water or oulachen grease widely traded along Northwest Coast and from coast to interior

Haida, or Northwest Coast, tobacco (Nicotiana quadrivalvisc)

Traded from Haida and Tlingit to Ts’msyen, from Metlakatla Ts’msyen to Nisga’a, and from Yuroks to interior peoples

“Wild celery,” or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaulec)

Wild tobacco (Nicotiana attentuatac)

Western sweet cicely (Osmorhiza occidentalisb)

Seeds from southeastern Vancouver Island traded to western and northeastern coast of island; greens traded among Nlaka’pamux peoples

Traded among Interior Salish and Ktunaxa

Aromatic roots widely traded as medicine between Interior Salish, Ktunaxa, and other groups

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Table 10-1 | continued Species/material traded

Notes

Reed canarygrass (Phalaris arundinaceab) and possibly common reed grass (Phragmites australisb)

Traded as basket decoration material, and in finished cedarroot baskets, among Interior Salish peoples and from interior to coast in the south

Cottonwood, or balsam poplar (Populus balsamiferac)

Dugout canoes traded among Interior Salish peoples; wood traded from Ts’msyen to Haida

Chokecherry (Prunus virginianac)

Dried cherries traded among Interior Salish and coastward to Fraser Valley

Labrador tea (Rhodo­ dendron groenlandicum) and trapper’s tea (R. neoglandulosumb)

Dried leaves traded among various interior peoples; probably traded among coastal peoples as well

Mock-orange (Philadelphus lewisii b)

Bitter cherry (Prunus emarginatab)

Garry oak (Quercus garryana)

Currants, wild (Ribes sp.b)

Wood for arrows and needles traded by Upper Stl’atl’imx to Secwepemc

Bark traded from groups of southern coast to central coast; bark as basket decoration exchanged among Interior Salish

Acorns commonly traded along Columbia River; probably an ancient trade product

Berries traded (probably dried) among Interior Salish peoples

Cloudberry, or bakeapple (Rubus chamaemorusb)

Berries preserved in water traded from Ts’msyen to Haida

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilisc)

Berries traded from Halq’emeylem to Lower Nlaka’pamux and elsewhere along coast; sprouts exchanged locally among Nuuchah-nulth (e.g., at halibut-fishing grounds)

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorusb)

Wapato (Sagittaria latifoliaa) Willows (Salix spp.b)

Tule, or hardstem bulrush (Schoeno­plectus acutus a)

Three-square, or “sweet-grass” (Schoeno­ plectus americanusc)

Sprouts exchanged locally among Nuu-chah-nulth; taken to halibut fishing grounds for sharing and trading

Tubers widely traded from lower Fraser Valley and lower Columbia River inland to Interior Plateau, to Vancouver Island, and elsewhere along Northwest Coast; also sold to settlers, including Chinese immigrants

Bark twine traded from Lower Stl’atl’imx to Halq’emeylem

Tule stems and woven mats widely traded, especially among Interior Salish and between Coast Salish and Nuu-chah-nulth Dried leaves for basketry traded among Vancouver Island peoples (i.e., Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Salish) and to Olympic Peninsula

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Table 10-1 | continued Species/material traded

Notes

Soapberry, or soopolallie (Shepherdia canadensis a)

Berries widely traded as dried cakes, and jarred in water, among many groups in BC, especially from interior to coast and from mainland to Haida Gwaii

Cattail (Typha latifoliaa)

Harvested leaves and woven mats traded among Interior Salish and southern coast peoples, from central to northern coast, from coast to interior, and from Fraser Valley to Salish and Nuu-chah-nulth of Vancouver Island

Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii b)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioicac)

Rhizomes traded from Nuxalk to Oweekeno and Hanaksiala; also traded within Kwakwaka’wakw communities

Fibre and twine traded from Hanaksiala and Haisla to Nuxalk and Ts’msyen; living plants transplanted from one village to another

Blueberries and huckleberries (Vaccinium spp.c)

Dried berries traded among Coast Salish, from interior to central coast, and within various interior groups

Bog cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos a)

Fresh and preserved fruits in water or oulachen grease widely traded along Northwest Coast and probably among interior peoples

Black huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceuma)

Berries widely traded among Salishan peoples of BC and among Columbia River peoples

Lowbush cranberry, or lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaeac)

Preserved fruits traded on northern coast among and between Haida and Tlingit

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule a)

Beargrass (Xerophyllum tenaxc) Wild-rice (Zizania aquatica b)

Fresh and preserved fruits in water or oulachen grease widely traded along Northwest Coast and from coast to interior

Bundled leaves (dried and sometimes dyed) and finished baskets traded from Quileute and Makah of Olympic Peninsula to Nuu-chah-nulth and Salish basket makers of Vancouver Island

Traded from peoples of Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, especially the Cree, to Nlaka’pamux and Stó:lō

a common and widespread trade; b limited or restricted trade; c moderate levels of trade

Sources: The references cited are restricted to those in which the species traded were identified and Aboriginal groups were specified. Based on the table in Turner and Loewen (1998). Compiled from the following references and citations within Albright (1984), Birchwater and Ulkatcho and Nuxalk elders (1993), Boas (1923), Compton (1993b), Croes (2003), Darby (1996), Dawson (1891), Decosse (1980), Edwards (1979), Elmendorf (1960), French (1965), Gibson (1992), Gunther (1973), Huelsbeck (1988), Hunn, Selam, and family (1990), Kennedy and Bouchard (1983), Kirk and Daugherty (2007), B. Mathews (2010), Mitchell and Donald (1988), Norton et al. (1984), Oberg (1973), Olson (1935, 1954), G. Palmer (1975b), Ray (1938), J.A. Ross (2011), H.I. Smith (1920–24), Sproat (1987), Steedman (1930), Suttles (1951b, 1955, 1987b), Swan (1869), Teit (1900, 1906a, 1906b, 1909, 1930), Turner

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(1992b, 1995, 1996, 1997a, 1998, 2003a), Turner and Bell (1973), Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy (1980); Turner and Efrat (1982), Nancy J. Turner and Marianne B. Ignace (unpub. notes, 1993–97), Turner and Kuhnlein (1983), Turner, Thomas, et al. (1983), and Turner, Thompson, et al. (1990). Also compiled from personal communications with Elsie Claxton (1996), Clan Chief Adam Dick (1994–2009), Daisy Sewid-Smith (1994–2009), Mary Thomas (1993–97), and Annie York (1985–89).

berry-drying racks were constructed with exchange in mind, as they produced finished squares of standard dimensions (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2003; Boas 1921). Strings and skewers of dried roots and smoked clams, balls of spun fibre of Indian-hemp or stinging nettle, bundles of basket materials, and finished mats and baskets were all often standardized, both for ease and practicality of handling and use and to facilitate assigning exchange value and equivalency (Ray 1939; Teit 1909; Turner 1996, 1998; Turner and Loewen 1998; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990; Schlick 1994). With the influx of European goods during the trade and colonial eras, new measures of trade were easily incorporated into the trade of traditional goods: biscuit boxes, wooden kegs, packing boxes, gunnysacks, and cotton flour or sugar bags full of berries, dried salmon, or the like all had their equivalent value and became new measures for a new age. Most recently, plastic totes and zip-closing plastic bags have become a medium of exchange.19 A good example of trading equivalencies is from Emmons’s (1991, 445) list of the “Value of Native Tlingit Products at Sitka, Alaska,” from 1890. For botanical goods, 1 gallon (about 4 litres) of “anything small, round and dried” (i.e., any dried berries) cost sixty cents. Square cakes of either dried seaweed or dried inner hemlock bark were valued at twenty-five cents each. Soapberries cost from twenty-five cents to one dollar per cake, whereas a square cake of dried strawberries (presumably Fragaria chiloensis) cost one dollar.20 These exchange values would have taken into account the perceived quality, desirability, and perhaps rarity of the products, and they reflected the overall effort required to generate them, which is probably why wild strawberries – small, soft, and difficult to pick – were valued more highly than an equivalent amount of most other types of berries. Interior Plateau peoples also had standard equivalencies for trade. The strong fibre of Indian-hemp21 became a common and valued exchange medium in the late 1890s. Five “packages” of Indian-hemp fibre (“bark”) from Upper Nlaka’pamux territory could be exchanged for one large coiled cedarroot basket, two salmon skins full of salmon oil, three sticks of salmon, one large dressed buckskin, one steel trap, or one dugout canoe (Teit 1900). Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 33) noted for her area of the Interior Plateau that bitterroot from the upper regions of Nlaka’pamux territory was “expensive stuff” and that during her childhood in the early twentieth century, a string of dried bitterroot about 1.5 metres long would be worth the equivalent of one salmon. Teit (1900, 261) reported that “ten bundles” of bitterroot had a similar value to one large, dressed buckskin, which would have also

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10-3  |  Bundle of Indian-hemp fibre.

equated to five packages of Indian-hemp “bark” or ten cakes of dried saskatoon berries. Both on the coast and in the southern Interior Plateau, camas bulbs were a highly valued trade item, sometimes exchanged in the form of loaves of dried, cooked bulbs, some over 4.5 kilograms, which the Nez Perce and Sahaptin traded for horses, although the exact equivalency is not known (Juntunen, Dasch, and Rogers 2005; United States Department of Agriculture 1999). The most enduring trade networks were established around differences in plant distribution or around variations in the quality of particular plant populations, whether used for food, material, or medicine. For example, Indianhemp – as described previously, the most important and strongest type of fibre for fishnets, mats, and bags (figure 10-3) – is widespread in the southern Interior Plateau, but the patches are scattered and the plants vary in quality and abundance depending on where they occur.22 Indian-hemp’s patchy distribution, its variability in quality and productivity, and the ease of its rendering into transportable units (balls of twine) made it a good candidate for trade, both within the range of its overall distribution in the Interior Plateau (e.g., from the Okanagan to the Secwepemc) and outside of its range, northward and westward to the coast, as far as Vancouver Island (Kennedy and Bouchard 1983; Turner and Loewen 1998). Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York explains, “Oh, you get them [Indian-hemp] from upcountry. You trade. We have [them] here [at Spuzzum], but not many … Ours are short … You get it from upcountry. Some of them are as tall as that [about 1.5 metres], and some of them [stalks] are as thick as my thumb … The people there, they gather them, bulk like this [large bundled armful], and then they bring that down here” (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 161). Another material of limited distribution that was widely traded is beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax), which is valued for certain types of basketry, especially for

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the wrapped twined trinket (pukwʔuu) baskets of the Nuu-chah-nulth and neighbouring peoples. Bundles of shiny beargrass leaves, sometimes already dyed, were bought from the Quileute and Makah of the Olympic Peninsula by Vancouver Island Nuu-chah-nulth weavers (who called it “American grass”) and by some of the Coast Salish peoples as well (Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983).23 Having access to particular high-quality resources enabled some groups to develop exceptional food products or special expertise in some technologies. Their products then became highly sought after, and their skills were emulated by others. For example, the Yakutat Tlingit women were said to excel in production of spruce-root baskets, partly because the Sitka spruce trees around Yakutat Bay grow in sandy soil along the edge of coastal dunes and therefore produce exceptionally long, straight roots (Thomas Thornton, pers. comm., 2009). Yakutat baskets became famous and desired items over the entire region because of this feature. Similarly, as noted for Haida Gwaii, western redcedars at certain locations along the coast are said to make superior canoes, and many different localities are known for the exceptionally high quality of particular foods – soapberries, saskatoon berries, bitterroots, or camas – which then become desired trade goods. Having access to high-quality goods and developing expertise in using them went hand in hand. Availability of high-quality western redcedar roots in the Coast Mountain valleys around Spuzzum, Mount Currie, and Sechelt, for example, allowed the Nlaka’pamux, Lil’wat, and Sechelt women of these communities to become renowned specialists in coiled cedar-root basketry, their baskets widely sought as trade items throughout the region and later by settlers as well.24 New techniques for weaving and woodworking as well as other skills were also “products” of exchange, which were learned (and taught) by those who visited or married into communities or were worked out by observing finished products brought in from other places. Functional equivalency, with similar applications of different materials, allowed adaptation to new situations, which was facilitated through trade and exchange. Digging sticks that may have been originally applied for camas or wapato, for example, could be turned to use for yellow glacier lily, or conversely, a digging stick made of one type of wood could be used as a model for a root digger of a different wood if the original wood was not available in a new area. This type of shifting and modification was always taking place, initiated and stimulated by trade (Dubin 1999). Food Products in Trade and Exchange

Reciprocity in the exchange of food resources was particularly common and widespread. As noted previously, although food items were often used in trading or barter, more often than not, food – and access to food – was exchanged

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and mediated at a community level, and this exchange was frequently a matter of a chief and his entire clan or community enhancing their status by hosting feasts and potlatches. Family connections invariably resulted in exchange of food; visitors would – and still do – return home loaded with dried fruit, dried salmon, seaweed, or other valued local products. Guests would also bring food for their hosts (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Sometimes these gifts were of foods not common in the host’s territory, and thus they helped people to diversify their diets. However, some foods – like black huckleberries – were so highly valued that they were appreciated even if one already had a good supply. As Mary Thomas (2001, 20) explained, “Even if my elder knew that the next-door neighbour had a lot of berries, let’s say huckleberries, just the idea of giving, the virtue in giving … My grandmother would know that woman had lots of huckleberries, but she would still take a little bag and take it over there as a gift. When she came back, she brought a lot of other types of food; that neighbour would give her something to bring back. It was the idea of sharing and giving.” The origins of some of these edible trade goods, especially those traded into areas where they do not grow naturally, may be reflected in their names. Almost all of the commonly traded plant foods – such as soapberries, edible seaweed, highbush cranberries, camas bulbs, and springbank clover rhizomes – have names that indicate borrowing from one language into another, as discussed in chapter 3 and elsewhere. One particularly intriguing possibility is a trade link for hazelnuts between the Ts’msyenic peoples of the Nass and Skeena Rivers (notably the Nisga’a and Gitxsan) and early Coast Salish peoples.25 Given the disjunct nature of hazelnut distribution (Klinkenberg 2013), it is possible that these names represent an early introduction of this shrub into the Skeena-Nass region from the lower Fraser Valley.26 Plant Technology in Relation to Trade and Exchange

Both raw and processed plant materials were commonly traded, along with finished items made from these materials (Kennedy and Bouchard 1983; Schlick 1994; Turner 1998; Turner and Loewen 1998). Western redcedar – a tree that varies considerably in abundance and quality over the study area – serves as a prime example. As noted previously, sheets of western redcedar bark and cedar planks, used for walls and roofing, along with finished cedar canoes and bentwood boxes were traded from Haida Gwaii to the adjacent mainland. The Haida were thus exporting not only the products of their exceptionally large, straightgrained cedars but also their skills and fine craftsmanship. Similarly, the Nuuchah-nulth of Vancouver Island traded their cedar house planks and canoes to their Makah neighbours. “The houses of the Makahs are built of boards and planks … principally made by the Indians of Vancouver Island, and procured by barter with them. There is very little cedar about Cape Flattery, and such

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10-4  |  Bundles of peeled, split, and dried western redcedar roots, ready for trade, along with dyed cherry bark and basketmaking awl and knife, belonging to Margaret Lester, Lil’wat basket maker, Mount Currie, BC .

as is found is small and of inferior quality … The largest and best canoes are made by the Clyoquots and Nitinats [Clayoquots, or Tlaoquiahts, and Ditidahts] on Vancouver Island; the cedar trees being of a quality greatly superior to that found on or near Cape Flattery” (Swan 1869, 4, 35). In the Interior Plateau western redcedar roots were usually traded already peeled, split, and dried, in small bundles or bags, ready for use in weaving (figure 10-4). Secwepemc elder Mary

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Thomas (pers. comm., 1994) recalled, “We [women of Neskonlith on Shuswap Lake] would trade a bag full of stinestn [‘cedar roots’] to Skeetchestn [west of Kamloops] for something we didn’t have.” Even living cedar trees themselves were sometimes exchanged and moved around as gifts. For example, archaeologist Jim Stafford (pers. comm., 2008) was shown a lone western redcedar tree near Blue Earth Lake in Cooks Ferry, Nla­ka’pamux territory. He was told that this tree had been planted there and had been presented as a gift from people from lower down the Fraser. The Lower Nlaka’pamux people often presented cedar trees as gifts to the Upper people at meeting places like Botanie Valley, and this tradition continues to the present day. Because of the tremendous variation in basketry materials, weaving and finishing styles, and ornamentation and design, basketry is a particularly important indicator of connections and innovations among and across different cultural groups and across time.27 Two baskets recovered at the Hoko River site, for example, were made with a wrap-around plaiting technique, more common at the contemporary (i.e., 3,000-year-old) Musqueam Northeast site in the Fraser Delta. These baskets were utilitarian and were possibly acquired from a basketful of goods traded to the Hoko River site from the lower Fraser region (Croes 2003). At the more recent Ozette site, basketry was recovered of styles known historically from all possible directions of contact: the north (possibly Haida Gwaii or Tlingit territory), the east (Puget Sound and the lower Fraser River), and the south (the Columbia River).28 There is modern evidence of learning basketry and weaving styles from others. For example, the Kwakwaka’wakw of the Nimpkish River apparently learned to make cattail mats relatively recently, from their Coast Salish neighbours to the south (H.G. Barnett 1955; Drucker 1951), and in the late 1800s, Sliammon women travelling to Kamloops for Catholic prayer meetings learned the art of cedar-root basketry from Interior Salish women (Kennedy and Bouchard 1983). Haida women apparently learned false embroidery decoration techniques from their Tlingit neighbours about this time as well (Blackman 1982), and Secwepemc and Okanagan birch-bark basket makers may have learned their craft from Dene (Athabaskan), Cree, or even Anishenaabe peoples, whose crafting styles, and associated belief systems, are remarkably similar (Davidson-Hunt 2003; Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty 2003). Plant Medicines in Trade and Exchange

Plant medicines, with a few exceptions like Canby’s lovage, mentioned earlier, are seldom identified explicitly as trade goods. Some medicines are regarded as private property of the healer and are believed by some to lose their healing powers if others know about them (Compton 1993b; Turner 2004a; Turner,

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10-5  |  Seeds of “Indian celery” (Lomatium nudicaule), widely known as q’ǝxmín (and variants of this term).

Bouchard, et al. 1987; Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Furthermore, individual medicinal recipes tend to be highly specialized and are not likely to be widely shared. Such recipes would be conveyed only within a given family from generation to generation or perhaps between close friends or fellow practitioners. Nevertheless, herbal medicine and its practitioners are an integral part of systems of reciprocity and exchange in many of the area’s cultures, as reflected in a substantial congruence of medicinal plant use and practice. For example, more than fifty-one of the eighty-three reported medicinal remedies used by Saanich or Cowichan healers in one study (Turner and Hebda 1990) were used similarly in at least one other Northwest Coast group.29 Since it is unlikely that all similar medicinal uses of a particular species (or of two or more closely related species) were acquired independently by each group involved, knowledge sharing through one means or another is the obvious conclusion. One can imagine that the properties of particular medicines applied with good results to the treatment of common maladies – use of licorice fern for colds, cascara as a laxative, or devil’s-club for arthritis – would quickly become common knowledge. The aromatic and slightly pungent seeds of “Indian celery,” or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule) (figure 10-5), were well known as a medicinal trade product of the Northwest Coast.30 Used in treating sore throats, colds, coughs, and tuberculosis, they were also used ceremonially as a fumigant

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and for purification at times of illness and death, as well as for burning as an incense during the First Salmon ceremony (see chapters 7 and 12). Some healers harvested and travelled with their own medicines to treat patients in distant places. This was the case with Annie York’s great aunt Josephine, a well-known “Indian doctor,” who travelled as a healer from her home near Spences Bridge to many surrounding communities. For example, she travelled downriver to Annie’s home in Spuzzum, when Annie had incurred a serious back injury from a bus accident. Before leaving Spences Bridge, Josephine gathered bags of water-hemlock (Cicuta douglasii) roots (which are highly toxic and would never be used internally) and brought them with her on the bus to pound and apply as a poultice to Annie’s back (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990).31 Pathways of Trade and Exchange The ecological differences and geographic barriers between the Northwest Coast and the Interior Plateau regions on the eastern side of the Coast and Cascade Mountains made the coast-interior interface a particularly active region for broad-scale trade and exchange. Oulachen grease has already been mentioned several times as a prime coastal product, moved along “grease trails” – multiple riverways and footpaths extending from the lower reaches of the coastal rivers to interior destinations where it was a valued commodity (Byram and Lewis 2001). From Alaska to the Columbia River, from the coast to the Rocky Mountains, and beyond, there were numerous such coast-interior river routes and trails that connected peoples of different cultural and language groups and provided access to entirely different suites of products – including many botanical products – that they would never encounter in their local territories. The coast-interior social and economic linkages between the Nuxalk and their Ulkatcho and Tsilhqot’in neighbours are particularly well known for facilitating the trade not only of grease but also of many other goods. One of the botanical products that linked these peoples was soapberries, which were, according to a Nuxalk narrative (McIlwraith 1948),32 originally introduced by Raven himself to the Bella Coola Valley from Ulkatcho territory (see chapter 12). Many other interior peoples, including the Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc, Nlaka’pamux, Gitxsan, and Tahltan, traded soapberries to their coastward neighbours (Turner and Burton 2010),33 along with other interior products, from dried saskatoon berry cakes to birch-bark baskets.34 Even products from east of the Rockies, such as sweetgrass and wild-rice (Zizania aquatica), were occasionally traded into the coastal region (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). In exchange, coastal peoples provided – besides the famed oulachen grease and marine shells – such goods as smoked clams and cockles on skewers or strings, dried herring eggs on hemlock boughs, edible seaweed, and many others.35 These items were also further traded, via the immediate interior and

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coastal neighbours, to other groups farther inland (e.g., from the Tsilhqot’in to the Canyon Secwepemc and to other Secwepemc peoples) and farther westward (e.g., to the Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw, Heiltsuk, Gitga’at, and Haida) (Birchwater and Ulkatcho and Nuxalk elders 1993; Port Simpson Curriculum Committee 1983; Teit 1900, 1906a, 1909; Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner and Loewen 1998). Even more prevalent than the long-distance routes were the pathways and water routes between villages and families within the same language areas. One example is the system of trails along the Nicola Valley and Thompson and Fraser Rivers, connecting the Upper and Lower Nlaka’pamux, along which the Upper Nlaka’pamux would bring bitterroots, Indian-hemp, silverberry (Elaeagnus commutata) bark, and interior saskatoon berries to exchange with the Lower peoples for their famous cedar-root baskets and salmon. Annie York (pers. comm., 1984) described this situation, especially important for women who were widowed: “These women … have no more husbands to go and gather fish. So that’s the way they trade with the people from the interior. They make baskets – round baskets for making soapberries into it, or berry baskets – they trade them. And their mats, too. We use lots of those bulrushes, and the people from here [Spuzzum] likes a silver willow [silverberry-bark fibre] bag. They bring that down here too … and they trade with that baskets … That’s made out of split cedar.” Alternatively, families might travel over these same routes to harvest their own products – root vegetables, berries, and basket- and mat-making materials – especially if they had relatives there who would host them since they would need permission to harvest in another community’s territory (Suttles 1987a, 1987b; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Such was the situation described at the beginning of this chapter, in a modern context, for Arthur Adolph and his family from Xaxl’ep. Waterways served as some of the most travelled trade routes. In the Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį (Long Ago Person Found) discovery, the young man whose body was found, some 300 years after his death, melting from a mountain glacier at the southeastern end of the Saint Elias Mountains of northwestern British Columbia, was evidently travelling on one of the traditional routes across the mountains from the coast of Alaska to the interior, namely up the Alsek Basin between the Tlingit and Tutchone Dene (Athabaskan) territories. He may have been carrying trade goods with him or may simply have been following a longused trail to visit relatives or to hunt. He had been on the coast just days before he died, but he showed evidence of having lived in the interior for a good part of his life (Dickson et al. 2004; Mudie et al. 2005; see also chapter 2). He represents a host of ancient travellers, and the Tatshenshini route he followed was just one of several major trade routes in the North between the coast and the interior that connected the coastal Tlingit with inland Tlingit and Dene (Athabaskan) peoples (Bielawski 2007; Greer 1995; Neufeld and Norris 1996). Many of

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the rivers and lakes that people followed, especially in the northern and interior regions, became ice routes in the winter. Aside from the major long-distance trade routes from coastal locations to the interior, shorter trails criss-crossed peoples’ territories almost everywhere. These often doubled as routes to camping places and harvesting sites, where families from different locations converged. Several trails traversed the Vancouver Island ranges, for example, and a number have been identified that crossed Graham and Moresby Islands on Haida Gwaii. All the smaller islands and headlands along the coast, and major peninsulas like the Brooks and Olympic Peninsulas, had trails across them to expedite travel and trade (Elms 1996; Whelchel 2005). Testimony (recorded in 1946) from Tlingit elder Paddy Goenette (Guneit’) of the Kaagwaantaan clan at Chilkoot village, who lived to about 100 years old (cited in Thornton et al. 2004, 85), explained how he and his family moved around their territory over their seasonal rounds and how their resources were tied in to longstanding networks of trade and exchange, both local along the coast and into the interior: I have a cabin on Sullivan Island River … We used to gather cockles and mussels all the way from Sullivan Island to the mouth of the Chilkat River. We also got ribbon seaweed [probably Palmaria hecatensis (Hawkes 1985)] in this area. We got black seaweed [Pyropia sp., probably P. abbottiae] on the west side of Chilkoot Inlet and around Nukdik Point. Black seaweed was obtained in May and June … We gather Indian rice [Fritillaria camschatcensis] and wild rhubarb [probably Rumex aquaticus var. fenestratus] at Taiyasanka Harbor and at the Katzehin River. We obtain crabs and halibut in Lynn Canal. We dry halibut along both shores … we get flounders in the same way [as crabs] … We gather hemlock bark and scrape the inner fibers and dry them or eat them fresh … We get hooligan [oulachen] at Chilkoot Bay, right at the village. We get needlefish at the mouth of the Chilkoot Lake. We dry these in long strings … People used to come from other Indian villages to trade. Places like Angoon and Hoonah. They would bring foods not available here – black seaweed with a different flavour, dried cockles, devilfish, etc. – and would trade these with the local people. They would buy dried sockeyes, cranberries preserved in hooligan oil, furs, and Chilkat blankets. If they had connections with our tribe, they might go hunting, if they got permission. When a visitor asks permission to join a hunting party, we generally allow him to go … … The Athabaskans used to come down there to trade for white man’s clothes. We sold Chilkat blankets to other people on the coast in the

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villages of southeastern Alaska. I used to trade with the Athabaskans myself. I went by foot as far as the Tanana River in Yukon Territory … The land and waters on which I hunted and fished were also used and occupied from time immemorial. I have been told by elderly people now dead. Right up to the present generations, Indigenous peoples have been using some of the same routes and trails followed by their ancestors over millennia, both to access resources within their own territories during their seasonal rounds and to link with others for purposes of trade and cultural exchange (see McDonald 2003). However, first horses and then motorized vehicles increasingly have been used for travel and trade.36 Many of the old foot trails were converted to wagon roads, then to roads for cars and trucks, and finally in some cases, to railways and major highways. Other trails have now been obscured or destroyed altogether with logging, urbanization, or agriculture. The original canoe routes along the lakes and rivers were later, in turn, plied by rowboats, motorboats, steam-driven paddlewheelers, and/or coastal freighters and passenger ferries. Bridges became more common, too, with roads and railways – like the one taken by Art Adolph and his family – commonly being built alongside the waterways on which original routes were based. Throughout all of these changes, First Peoples have continued many of their historic travel patterns – and the trading and gifting of seaweed, cranberries, soapberries, saskatoon berries, and huckleberries continue to the present as well. Knowledge Transmission, Trade, and Exchange Ethnobotanical knowledge, as noted previously, includes not only the actual use of plants but also a whole complex of beliefs and modes of communication about them and their relationships to humans and other entities of the world. The networks created for trade and exchange resulted in a much wider dissemination of such knowledge, along with the plant products and other trade goods – the tangible objects of reciprocity. The venues by which gifts and trade goods were – and are – disseminated provided immense opportunities to convey and demonstrate cultural knowledge, to strengthen ties within and across communities, and to enrich peoples’ social as well as economic lives. For example, many goods are traditionally disseminated at potlatches.37 For all of the guests, as well as members of the hosting group, including children, potlatches are times for learning and reinforcing this important cultural knowledge. Serving and gifting food and other products at such events is also a way of redistributing resources. In many cases, the food that is served represents surpluses harvested by community, family, and clan members from the group’s or chief ’s recognized territory. On other occasions, and at other places, these same people will be served high-quality food harvested and prepared by

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other hosts from their own respective territories. Thus reciprocity is achieved, with a redistribution of wealth and resource surpluses. Overall, these occasions help not only to develop and strengthen social ties and alliances but also to reinforce peoples’ overall resilience – their capacity to survive and maintain their cultural integrity in the face of uncertainty and resource variability (Ommer and Turner 2004; Trosper 2003). One could also argue that trade and exchange – as well as conflict and warfare – helped to create and reinforce social inequalities through differential wealth acquisition by elites (Gibson 1992; Hayden 1997; Schulting 1994). As Decosse (1980, 79) explains, “While the desire for trade goods was responsible for initiating social interactions, it was the latter which sustained the material flow.” Chiefs and others were able to confirm and increase their social status by obtaining rare and valued items through trade: finely crafted obsidian points, nephrite adzes, beautiful abalone jewelry, elaborately carved or painted boxes, intricately woven hats or baskets, or large, seaworthy canoes. However, they also achieved high status and recognition by giving away their accrued wealth to others and by hosting feasts and spectacular theatrical performances that rewarded generosity and leadership talent. Certainly, trade and exchange of both staple and rare items are integral parts of the development of cultural complexity both on the Northwest Coast and in Interior Plateau societies. The need for the members of the nobility to acquire, and then distribute, large quantities of food and other goods would have generated even more trade activity, with botanical products from diverse sources – berries, seaweed, edible roots, baskets, mats, boxes, canoes, and implements – playing a major role. Interaction Spheres on the Northwest Coast

The Northwest Coast, extending over 15 degrees of latitude and across some 1,920 kilometres of coastline between its northern and southern extremities, shows amazingly strong and coherent cultural links, recognized in its designation as the Northwest Coast culture area (Suttles 1990b). It shares a single ocean’s coastline, a similar maritime-oriented resource base, a relatively uniform and mild climate, and a continuous network of waterways that allows relatively easy contact between communities. Nevertheless, its peoples speak many diverse languages, and the area incorporates numerous culturally distinctive sectors, with specialized cultural traits shading more or less imperceptibly with one another at their junctures. Based on their overview of archaeological findings from the Northwest Coast culture area, Ames and Maschner (1999) suggest two broad “interaction spheres” from the beginning of the Late Holocene: northern coast and southern coast. These regions show broad congruence in features such as social organization, art styles, and ceremonial practices as reflected in archaeological evidence.

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Of these two, “the northern coast has remained the most distinctive region of the coast for the last 9,000 years,” although it showed an overlapping with the southern coast, most notably in the Mid Holocene, at the beginning of the Early Pacific period around 6,000 years ago (Ames and Maschner 1999, 165). This was a time when there was an apparent expansion of intertidal resource use and greater sedentism, possibly as a result of stabilization of sea levels. At least part of the recognized congruence within these broad spheres, they suggest, is due to trade and other forms of exchange, including intense, long-term interaction, that both supported and were promoted by the development of elites. These individuals and their descendants controlled access to trade and held rights to resources at key places; in turn, they gained status by obtaining special resources from other regions. One could argue an extension of these interaction spheres into the respective northern and southern interiors around this time as well, during the height of obsidian trade and distribution. Within the southern interaction sphere, Ames and Maschner (1999) delineate five smaller and at times ephemeral interacting subunits: the central coast of British Columbia and adjacent Vancouver Island (roughly Kwakwaka’wakw, Northern Wakashan, and Nuxalk territories); the west coast of Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula (southern Wakashan region); the extended Gulf of Georgia region along the eastern side of Vancouver Island and the southwestern coast of British Columbia to the southern end of Puget South (roughly Central Coast Salish territory); the lower Columbia River region and adjacent coastline; and the coast of southern Oregon and northern California. The boundaries between these subunits were sometimes temporary, shifting substantively over the course of the millennia as contacts developed, as trade ties formed and were broken, and as peoples migrated, amalgamated, or otherwise acquired new territories and developed new relationships with neighbours. In general, however, the peoples within these subareas shared certain characteristic traits and practices that evidently had considerable time depth. Among the regional similarities are distinctive styles of basketry, woodworking, and mat making, plant food use and preparation, fishing and hunting technologies, and other features that relate directly to ethnobotanical knowledge systems and to their regional exchange. There are also similarities in botanical names and terminology, even across linguistic boundaries. The known borrowings of plant names both between languages within these regions and into their interior counterparts, as described in chapter 3, are congruent with these spheres of interaction. Given the major interaction spheres and subunits of interaction identified by Ames and Maschner (1999) from the archaeological record generally, one expects that the opportunities for botanical knowledge transmission would have been greater and perhaps more frequent within each of these spheres and subunits than across them. In turn, the more intensive interchanges would likely have resulted in greater congruence of ethnobotanical knowledge within the spheres than across them. Although more detailed 138 | part three – integration and management

comparisons are required to demonstrate this definitively, an overview of ethnobotanical traits of different Northwest Coast peoples seems to confirm a major north-south divergence, and within the “southern interaction sphere,” a clustering of traits related to plant use and plant knowledge within the subregions of the central coast (Kwakwaka’wakw, Northern Wakashan, and Nuxalk), the west coast of Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula (Southern Wakashan), and the extended Gulf of Georgia region (Central Coast Salish), as delineated above. For each of these Northwest Coast divisions and subdivisions, the interactions also extend inland to the adjacent interior regions, although for the Southern Wakashan, the inland extension may follow the course of the Columbia River. For example, in terms of shared botanical vocabulary, as noted previously, there is significant overlapping of plant names among Haida, Tlingit, and Ts’msyen, as well as between the coastal and interior peoples of this northern region. There are, likewise, a number of plant names that share common origins among the Nuxalk, the neighbouring Kwakwaka’wakw, the Heiltsuk, and other Wakashan groups, indicating strong cultural linkages and historical channels of trade and communication between them, despite the different linguistic origins of the Nuxalk. In fact, the Nuxalk language has more botanical terms in common with Wakashan languages than with other Salishan languages (Turner 1973). There are also many oral and ethnographic records of relationships – including warfare and slavery as well as trade and intermarriage – between the Nuxalk and the Haisla, Heiltsuk, Ooweykyala, and Kwakwaka’wakw peoples (McIlwraith 1948; Reid and Sewid-Smith 2004), as well as between the Nuxalk and Ulkatcho Dakelh and, through them, to the Tsilhqot’in (Minnie Charleyboy, pers. comm., 2003; Tepper 1991). All of these associations tie into the overall dynamics of ethnobotanical knowledge transmission. The situation is complex, however, since there are different pathways through which groups can share common knowledge. Two groups evolving from a common ancestral group might retain similar knowledge, such as terms, stories, or ceremonies, from their common past. This is likely the case for a number of the Salishan peoples who share plant names derived from Proto-Salish precursors. To add complication, the meanings of such terms can shift according to cultural and ecological context, making their tracing and the pathways of origin more obscure.38 Some types of knowledge, or even names, that seem similar may have been derived independently. For example, a name meaning “bear berry” for various types of berries, mostly those inedible for humans, is common in many languages and was likely derived on many occasions through observations of bears and their eating habits. In fact, bears and other creatures like squirrels, ravens, and geese have probably taught similar lessons to groups of people in many different places over a long time period. Wood-frame shelters, two-ply twine, fishnets, woven baskets, and rush mats are common to many humans around the world and may well have been invented Trade and Exchange  |  139

independently any number of times. Similarly, the uses of yew wood (Taxus spp.) for heavy implements (Friedman 2005), of scouring rush (Equisetum spp.) as an abrasive, and of birch bark (Betula spp.) for containers seem to be ubiquitous and are probably related to the obvious physical characteristics of these substances. Some medicines, too (e.g., yarrow, Achillea spp.; and wild ginger, Asarum spp.), are probably used almost universally, not because of any direct communication across vast areas but because of their innate phytochemical traits, identified and applied over and over again. Another factor – one that we will usually never be able to determine – is which products, knowledge, information, practices, or beliefs may have been acquired or transmitted on one or more occasions but never became fully adopted or integrated into their new context. Some potential products or techniques may have simply been rejected or might have been adopted, only to be obscured and eventually disappear. Alternatively, some names or knowledge, once adopted, may have become transformed beyond recognition from their original characteristics or form. One could argue that knowledge not acquired is as significant as knowledge that is acquired (French 1981; Johnson 1997), but all we can do is speculate about this. Finally, it must be noted that documentation is still incomplete, based on what was left in the archaeological record or what has been recorded by ethnographers, ethnoecologists, linguists, and/or Indigenous experts past and present. Many voices remain unheard in the story, and much knowledge simply has not been considered. For this reason, too, any conclusions will be incomplete and speculative. Based on what can be assembled, however, this much is clear: the wide array of similarities and congruencies of plant knowledge and use among all of the various peoples, as reflected in the various languages across the study region and within the different interaction spheres and subunits, presents a convincing picture of multiple exchanges, borrowings, and adaptations of ethnobotanical knowledge, practice, and belief on many geographical and temporal scales. Determining the directions of borrowing and exchange of ethnobotanical traits presents further problems, but these directions can be deduced in some cases by the known distribution of the species involved or by more broadly applying rules similar to those suggested in chapter 3 for determining the direction of borrowings of plant names. Soapberry: A Case Example in Ethnobotanical Use and Knowledge Transmission

Soapberry, already mentioned many times in this book, is an ancient and widely known species in the study area; thus it can serve as an example of how knowledge and practice surrounding it might spread over time and geographic space. As noted in chapter 3, there is a very high level of congruence of its names,

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with only nine distinct etymons out of a total of forty-six or more languages for which names are known. The linkages between etymons correlate well with what is known about trading patterns for the berries (e.g., northern Haida with Tlingit; Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and Skidegate Haida with Gitxsan and Dene [Athabaskan]; Wakashan with Salishan; and Coast Salish with Interior Salish).39 Possibly, too, there is a link between the Salishan and Dene (Athabaskan) terms, with Dene being derived from Salishan or possibly vice versa (Cecil Brown, pers. comm., 2007; Turner and Burton 2010). To some extent, we can infer the directions of name borrowings by the overall distribution and abundance of the soapberry plant: generally, from the interior (where it is widespread) to the coast (where it is less common or absent). The situation becomes more blurred, however, when the time factor is considered. All eighteen Salishan names for soapberry are similar, being borrowed or having a common derivation from Proto-Salish xwus (“to foam, froth”). Although Shepherdia canadensis is not presently common or widely productive along the Northwest Coast (including the Proto-Salish homeland) (see Klinkenberg 2013), palaeoecological studies indicate that it used to be very common on parts of the coast in past millennia and was in fact one of the first species to recolonize the area following deglaciation (K.J. Brown and Hebda 2002b; Pielou 1991). What is the time depth, then, of the innovation of the special whipped confection made from soapberries and of the development of more recent trading patterns for the berries? Proto-Salish has a time depth of nearly 5,000 years,40 at which time soapberry was probably more widespread than it is today and possibly very common in the Proto-Salish homeland of the lower Fraser Valley, where it is now scarce or absent. Over the ensuing millennia, as Salishan peoples started to disperse, one could hypothesize that soapberry became less and less common and more and more patchy in its distribution and availability. People who enjoyed it would increasingly have needed to rely on trade and exchange to obtain it. The shrub’s developing rarity – as well as its dioecious (separate male and female flowers) state and the high variability in its fruit production and quality over seasons, years, geographic situations, and ecological circumstances – would have rendered soapberries an increasingly valued status food, right at a time when social stratification was becoming more pronounced. As a desirable food of high value, traded for oulachen grease, seaweed, and other similar costly products, soapberries needed to be, and were, enhanced – for example, by pruning its bushes and burning over soapberry patches (see chapter 11). People developed a whole suite of innovations to intensify its production and add to its value: tasting the berries before harvesting in quantity to ensure the best quality; generating more efficient methods of harvesting;41 drying the berries in cakes for large-scale storage and transport; designing special whippers to create soapberry whip most efficiently; designing special soapberry-whipping baskets (including small ones for children); inventing

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elegant and unique paddle-spoons, possessed by individuals, to enable proper “sipping” of the whip; creating special dishes of yew wood and other high-quality woods from which to eat soapberry whip; developing a special beverage from the berries; creating special songs to accompany the whipping of the berries (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2008); developing origin stories and other narratives featuring soapberries (see chapter 12); and fostering a general celebratory atmosphere around the consumption of whipped soapberries.42 Furthermore, not only have soapberries been seen as a high-status feasting food, but they also have a reputation as a nutritious “health food” and tonic, to be administered for influenza, indigestion, and various other ailments (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). A host of terms and vocabulary around all of these aspects of soapberry innovation must have developed in tandem with them: names for soapberry whippers and soapberry spoons, names for the mats and grass used for drying soapberries,43 and even terms like ‘ajaa (ʔajaa) in Skidegate Haida, roughly meaning “smeared with soapberries” (Sapir 1923) and alluding to its use as a festive food, with soapberry contests and soapberry fights (‘Ksan 1980; Turner 2004a; Turner and Burton 2010). All of these attributes play into soapberry’s role throughout northwestern North America as a highly desired, highly valued food, one that was obviously widely traded and shared and that retains its eminence to the present day. Conclusions Perhaps the most obvious effect of trade and exchange is that they promote a more even distribution of resources across geographic regions and cultural boundaries. They give people access to a wider variety of foods, materials, and other resources than would otherwise be available (Turner and Loewen 1998). Trading and other forms of exchange also help to ensure a group’s survival by providing a “safety net” in the event of local or temporary resource scarcity. Trade and exchange often feed into a system of differential social status, with chiefs and nobility asserting control over access to harvesting areas and high-value trade goods but also assuming a higher level of responsibility and obligation regarding the distribution of such goods for the benefit of the entire community, particularly through the ceremonial systems of potlatching and feasting. However, in the end, it is the associated information, technologies, perspectives, and beliefs accompanying trade and gifted goods that make their exchange so important and relevant to understanding patterns of knowledge acquisition, transmission, and adaptation. Many Indigenous narratives allude, directly or indirectly, to instances of such knowledge exchange regarding plants (see chapter 12). For example, a Nlaka’pamux story about an old woman who lived with her

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two granddaughters provides an account of dissemination of both goods and expertise in relation to marriage connections. The grandmother taught her granddaughters how to make baskets and how to perform all types of women’s work. They were then sent off to marry two brothers, Owl and Eagle, who were “great men, and hunters.” The young women started off on their journey to meet their new husbands, each carrying “a large basketful of dried roots and berries” (Teit 1912, 250). This is just one instance of how individuals bringing goods to new locations also convey associated training and knowledge. The integration and fusion of old knowledge and practice with new have been a continuous process at least over the past 5,000 to 4,500 years and are still ongoing. For example, Swanton (1905, 1908), Acheson (1998), and Boelscher (1988) identify numerous types of blended cultural knowledge and history shared by the Haida and Ts’msyen, including narratives, crests, language elements, and common lineage histories, reflecting a long tradition of contact with and movement of peoples between the mainland and Haida Gwaii. Similar ties are documented between the Haida and Tlingit (Boelscher 1989; Moss 2008a, 2008b).44 Especially within the past two millennia, there has been a notable cultural congruence between the Haida and Ts’msyen, such that Acheson (1995) suggests that Hecate Strait, which separates these two peoples, should be considered more of a highway than an obstruction between them. It seems that of the two, the Haida have been in their homeland considerably longer, with human occupation of Haida Gwaii predating that of the Prince Rupert Harbour area by about 4,000 years.45 The complexities of soapberry and its associated knowledge, discussed in the previous section, provide an illustration of the dynamics of innovation and cultural information in relation to a particular species. Soapberry’s differential abundance, patchy distribution, and historic patterns of use give us a good understanding not only of the dissemination of this valued foodstuff and its names but also of the knowledge, practices, and innovations related to its use, which must have developed and accompanied its pathways of diffusion and exchange. Undoubtedly, similar pathways of knowledge exchange, following parallel patterns of trade and sharing of goods, exist for numerous other plants and plant products. Cultural, linguistic, and ecological knowledge about these plants, and the sharing of this knowledge among different peoples, is a key component in overall adaptation and resilience, a factor as true today as ever in the past. The trade of these plants and the exchange of related knowledge have had significant cultural and ecological implications (i.e., in the form landscape management practices such as burning) that go far beyond simple subsistence (Turner and Loewen 1989). Peoples’ actual perceptions of their places, of the species on which they depend, and of the role of humans in the world are also conveyed through cultural means, with major social and ecological outcomes.

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The notion that all of the animals, fish, birds, trees, and plants – as well as fire, water, mountains and rocks, and supernatural beings of the spiritual realm – have their own societies, and are relatives of people and have the ability to influence humans profoundly, is a major and overarching belief among Indigenous peoples not only within the study area but also far beyond (Davidson-Hunt 2003; A.M. Miller 2010). This concept of “kincentric ecology” guides peoples’ behaviours and actions toward other living beings and environmental entities and is a prime determinant in ethnoecological knowledge and practice. Broadscale interactions between different peoples through trade and other forms of reciprocity have ultimately led to this commonly held concept, which is a topic of the following chapters. In some cases, as well, the “goods” that were traded or given as gifts were living plants, such as the cedars mentioned earlier, that became established in distant locations. There are many recent examples of transplanting and replanting propagules of plants, as discussed in chapter 11.

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11 Management and Sustainability of Plant Resources and Habitats

The late Mrs. Joshua Moody, she used to do that [cultivating springbank clover] in the 1920s, in that little island here at Bella Coola where the tide comes in. She used to choose a place … where there’s soft sand. I hear she’s got quite a bit of it because she was looking after it. The more you soften it the more they grow in there. She picked the roots and planted them, early in the spring, like April … she used that wooden digging stick … they have to have it where the tide comes in. It’s got no flavour when you try to do it inland … It [the garden] wasn’t very big what she used to have [about 8 by 9 metres]. They used to have it fenced up so the people knew that it belonged to somebody. She just had a wooden fence. Nobody would touch it. (Felicity Walkus, cited in Edwards 1979, 6)

Introduction The “roots” (rhizomes) of springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii), cultivated by Nuxalk matriarch Mrs Joshua Moody in the 1920s as described above, were highly valued as a food and also used as a trade good on the Northwest Coast. Archibald Menzies, naturalist and physician with Captain George Vancouver, was evidently the first European to describe its use on the Northwest Coast, in early September 1792 at Tahsis in Nuu-chah-nulth territory: In the evening our curiosity was excited in observing a number of Females busily occupied in digging up a part of the Meadow close to us with Sticks, with as much care and assiduity as if it had been a Potato field, in search of a small creeping root about the size of a pack thread. This I found to be the Roots of a new species of Trifolium which they

11-1  |  The Kingcome River estuary, BC , site of the Tsawataineuk root gardens of the family of Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), showing Adam Dick (centre, holding digging stick) with a group of Tsawataineuk community members and students from the University of Victoria.

always dig up at this time of year for food … Wherever this Trifolium abounds the ground is regularly turnd over in quest of its Roots every year. (Cited in Newcombe 1923, 116) Over 150 years later, ethnologist Philip Drucker (1951, 57) also noted the use of this clover by the Nuu-chah-nulth: “The clover-root patches were owned by the chiefs. In late summer women went to dig them. Each woman carried a burden basket and a root-digging stick. She sat on a cedar-bark mat, the heavy shaft of the digging stick in both hands, gouging and prying the roots up. As she dug them, she shook the dirt off and put them into the basket on her back.” Later still, Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxistalla) (pers. comm., 1996) of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation described the production of this clover and associated root species in the tidal marshes of the Tsawataineuk territory at Kingcome Inlet: “It was all important. That texwsus [springbank clover], and the tliksam [Pacific silverweed], and the qw’eniy’ [Nootka lupine], and the … xukwem [northern riceroot]. See, when they go down the flats, they use little pegs. ‘This is my area.’ You got your own pegs, in the flats. And then you continue on that, digging

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the soft ground … so it will grow better every year. Well, I guess, fertilizing, cultivating, I guess that’s … the word for it. Every family had pegs, owned their little plots in the flats” (figure 11-1). These and other descriptions of this important root vegetable (e.g., Boas 1921, 186–94; and Turner and Kuhnlein 1982, 423) embrace a wide range of different topics within the overall complex of “knowledge, practice and belief ” comprising traditional management systems: seasonal harvesting in specific habitats, tilling, gendered work, associated equipment, resource ownership, control, delineation of plots, soil maintenance, and other aspects of food production systems. Despite the fact that numerous early explorers, traders, government officials, and ethnographers throughout northwestern North America made such observations pertaining to Indigenous peoples’ harvesting and management practices, these practices and their significance have been, until recently, largely – and one might argue, conveniently – overlooked. First, it has been widely assumed that plants were not a particularly important component of people’s diets, especially on the Northwest Coast, and this notion has at times perpetuated itself by the frequently minimal efforts applied to document plant resources (Deur and Turner 2005; Deur et al. 2013; Lepofsky 2004; see also chapters 2, 5). Second, any detailed understanding of people’s management of plant resources has been even more obscured. Even with early records like that from Archibald Menzies or descriptions of huge mounds of clover roots being cooked at Nuu-chah-nulth feasts as noted by Philip Drucker (1951), we have generally remained blind to the overall immensity of Indigenous peoples’ capabilities and techniques to sustain and enhance their plant resources, assuming instead that “the plants just grew by themselves” (Deur and Turner 2005; Turner, Deur, and Lepofsky 2013). In some rare instances from the past when Indigenous peoples’ plant resource management practices have been acknowledged, their value has been minimized in comparison to European modes of production. First Peoples’ use of fire on southern Vancouver Island to help clear the undergrowth from wooded areas and promote the growth of key food species is a case in point. This practice was noted in grudging and derogatory terms by Captain W.C. Grant in his report to Governor James Douglas (c. 1848), where he described the fires that were “kindled promiscuously by the natives both in wood and prairie between the months of August and October. Their object is to clear away the thick fern and underwood in order that the roots and fruits on which they in a great measure subsist may grow the more freely and be the more easily dug up” (cited in Lutz 1995, 22; see also Turner 1999). To Captain Grant, the First Peoples’ burning practices were “abominable” and destructive, even though he seemed to comprehend that their underlying purpose was to enhance local Coast Salish food resources, thus affecting people’s very survival. Furthermore, even today, Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America are usually portrayed as “hunter-gatherers.” Yet,

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to characterize their relationships with plants as “gathering” is the equivalent of describing agriculturalists merely as “harvesters”; in both cases, “gathering” or “harvesting” is only a small part of a complex system of applied knowledge developed over time to allow people to survive in a particular place. Defining Management

Several researchers have suggested that the notion of “management” alone does not do justice to the Indigenous peoples’ systems of caring for their lands and for the species on which they rely. “Management,” to some, seems too objective and mechanical; instead, terms and practices like “stewardship,” “custodianship,” “tending,” “caring for,” “taking care of,” and “working with” seem more appropriate descriptions for people’s practices and attitudes of relationship with the other species they use (M.K. Anderson 2005; E.R. Atleo 2004; Fowler 2000; Fowler and Lepofsky 2011; Nabhan 1997). Caring for the land and “giving back” to other species – one’s relatives – who contribute their lives or parts of themselves for people’s well-being is a deeply spiritual endeavour, far beyond the most stark interpretation of “management” (see chapter 13). However, in its etymology, “management” originates with Italian maneggiare, which in turn derives from mano (“hand”) (cf. Latin manus), giving it an original connotation directly connected with people rather than with some mechanical or dehumanizing influence. Furthermore, the common definitions of “manage” include “to handle or direct with a degree of skill,” “to treat with care,” “to exercise executive, administrative, and supervisory direction of,” and “to work upon or try to alter for a purpose,”1 all of which seem congruent with the actions and approaches people have used to maintain and enhance their lands and resources. The ultimate outcome of management activities is assumed to be sustainability, and even enhancement, of the managed resources, and therefore Traditional Land and Resource Management (TLRM ) could be interpreted as equivalent to, or at least related to, natural resource conservation. Some narrow definitions of conservation, however, restrict this concept or practice to actions that directly prevent or mitigate depletion, with an identifiable intention to conserve (E.A. Smith and Wishnie 2000). In contrast, some of TLRM ’s practices and observances are so deeply embedded in longstanding belief systems (cultural conventions, constraints, and taboos) that they may not be directly attributable to “conservation” in the Western sense of the word (Colding and Folke 2001; Turner and Berkes 2006). For our purposes, then, Traditional Land and Resource Management can be defined as the conscious accumulation, application, and adaptation of any combination of techniques and methods drawn from Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems, mediated by particular beliefs and worldviews, that sustain or enhance the availability,

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abundance, productivity, diversity, and/or quality of a plant or animal population or of an entire resource area or habitat over a period of years or generations (see also M.K. Anderson 2005; Berkes 2012; Deur and Turner 2005; Gadgil and Berkes 1991; and Menzies 2006b). In such management systems, people engage in reciprocal relationships with their resources and environments, such that they take responsibility for caring for them. As Kwakwaka’wakw cultural specialist Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (pers. comm., 1996) explained, “People … think that Nature just grows on its own. But our people felt, to get more harvest, and bigger berries, they did these things [pruning, burning]. Same thing a farmer does … Traditionalists are very close to their environment, and they know that to survive in this world, you have to have respect for your environment, because without the environment you cannot live. If you destroy your environment, you are destroying yourself.” Elders and cultural specialists throughout the entire area – from north to south, from coast to interior, and beyond – have expressed similar sentiments.2 The idea of people as active and respectful caretakers, not just beneficiaries, of plant and animal resources seems deeply engrained indeed. The expected outcome of effective TLRM is increased productivity, biodiversity, and heterogeneity across the landscape, with mosaics of diverse, productive plant communities high in structural and compositional variation in different locations. However, for those who have not observed an area in its entirety over an extended period of time, the effects of management may be undetectable or assumed to be “natural.” A classic example is the picturesque prairie-studded Garry oak savannah landscape of southern Vancouver Island, in the vicinity of the present site of the city of Victoria. Captain George Vancouver (1798, 227–9), who was deeply impressed by this expansive, scenic landscape with its “delightful meadow[s],” wrote in his journal, “I could not possibly believe any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture. Stately forests … pleasingly clothed its eminences and chequered its vallies; presenting in many places, extensive spaces that wore the appearance of having been cleared by art.”3 Unrecognized by Captain Vancouver was that the beautiful mosaic of oak woodlands interspersed with camas meadows and fern glades was the product of centuries, probably even millennia, of repeated light-impact burning by the local Coast Salish peoples – the very activity observed but completely disparaged by Captain W.C. Grant (quoted previously) some fifty years later. Similarly, for the prairies of western Washington, Wilkes (1845, 336) wrote, “These [camas] prairies have such an air of being artificially kept in order, that they never cease to create surprise, and it is difficult to believe that the hand of taste and refinement has not been at work upon them.” As historian John Lutz (2008, 34) argues, it would have been inconvenient for Europeans to recognize – or if they did, to commend – Indigenous land management practices: “European colonists had to overlook the different agriculture,

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mariculture, and silviculture practices of indigenous peoples to characterize the non-European world as ‘in a state of nature.’ They also had to characterize the productive activities of indigenous civilizations as ‘not labour’ in order to declare America ‘unowned’ and available for the taking.” Certainly, the sophistication and effectiveness of Indigenous peoples’ resource production systems were widely disregarded by European explorers, traders, colonists, and religious and government officials, and to some extent, they still are.4 In the remainder of this chapter, I first discuss potential responses of plants to various management techniques, including their biological capacity for regeneration. I then discuss the antiquity and possible cultural and historical origins of traditional land and plant resource management practices. I reflect on some of the mechanisms and pathways by which First Peoples of northwestern North America may have developed their management practices and associated beliefs, including impacts and influences on TLRM systems from the European newcomers. Following this is a section delineating the different categories and practices of plant resource management and the nature and scales of their application in the study area – from plant population to entire landscape. I then discuss some of the cultural aspects of plant management, including relationships to social organization, individual and group control of resources, and the connections between plant management and belief systems (a topic further covered in chapter 13). I conclude by emphasizing the diversity and ubiquity of traditional plant management systems as key elements of the dynamic socialecological systems of Indigenous peoples of the study area. Sustaining Plant Resources: Disturbance and Regeneration Many of the management methods Indigenous peoples developed to sustain and promote their plant resources are based on the plants’ natural regenerative capabilities, which have evolved over thousands or tens of thousands of years in response to various types of natural disturbance, including fire, flood, landslides, insect infestations, and intensive herbivory (Colding, Elmqvist, and Olsson 2003; Hallett et al. 2003; Lepofsky 2009; Lepofsky, Hallett, et al. 2005; Moss, Peteet, and Whitlock 2007). Virtually all plant species harvested and used by Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America are perennials, and most are woody trees, shrubs, or subshrubs. Meristems – tissues comprised of cells capable of rapid growth and differentiation – occur in various parts of plants of all ages, most notably forming banks of regenerative cells in the root and stem tips, nodes, and cambium tissues. These are able, during natural growth or in response to damage, to grow and develop into more specialized tissues. Thus branches or roots, triggered by hormonal changes, can resprout when pruned,

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cut down, or otherwise injured, and bark can, over time, regrow and heal over a cut or injured area of a trunk or branch. Herbaceous perennials developing from rhizomes (underground stems) can continue to grow and spread even when some of the shoots and rhizomes are removed. As long as healthy meristematic tissues are retained, and as long as plants have the capacity to absorb and retain sufficient nutrients and water, they can reproduce vegetatively and maintain individuals and populations even with a certain level of harvesting. In fact, many plants are so well adapted to being harvested, browsed, or injured that they actually grow better and faster, and are more productive, after harvesting or disturbance. Furthermore, management strategies such as weeding, clearing, thinning, and burning have the effect of removing or reducing competing vegetation, reducing insect pests, allowing more sunlight and/or moisture to reach the plants that remain, freeing up nutrients, and ultimately promoting growth for the species that are left. Loosening the soil, which accompanies root-digging activities, helps to aerate the soil and allows better root penetration and soil regeneration. Floods and fire also introduce pulses of nutrients that can be easily taken up by the plants as they regrow following the disturbance. With the exception of cutting down some trees in their entirety for making canoes, house posts, totem poles, or beams, or for purposes of clearing an area of land, plants are generally only partially harvested and are, by intention, not killed in the harvesting process. They are “kept living,” as described by Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm., 1998, cited in Deur and Turner 2005) in defining the Kwak’wala term qw’aqw’alaʔowkw (“keeping it living”). In some cases, for both practical and philosophical reasons, people avoided cutting down the trees they needed for lumber, preferring instead to harvest the trees that were felled by winter snows or that died naturally from disease or windfall (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001). Digging edible roots might seem to be another harvesting activity that could potentially destroy an entire plant. However, on closer scrutiny, roots, too, are adapted to some level of herbivory and disturbance. When edible taproots like balsamroot, bitterroot, and silverweed are dug out, the tip of the root almost invariably breaks off and remains in the ground, enabling the plant to regenerate itself and continue to grow, eventually to produce flowers and fruits from the same original plant. Sprouts and bulblets of liliaceous species like riceroot (Fritillaria spp.), camas, and glacier lily will also readily regrow if planted. Experimental work and observation have borne out this phenomenon.5 The same principles of vegetative regeneration are brought into play with the harvesting of spruce roots and western redcedar roots for basketry (figure 11-2); branches of cedar, willow, yew, and saskatoon berry for basketry and implements; inner bark of cedar for weaving and cordage; and bark and branches of

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11-2  |  Lil’wat basket maker Margaret Lester digging roots of western redcedar for her baskets in 1984 near Mount Currie, BC . She went to special places with sandy soil to get her roots and took only a few from each tree.

various trees and shrubs for medicinal and other purposes (Peacock and Turner 2000; Turner 1998; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009; Turner and Hebda 1990; Turner and Peacock 2005). The plant products in each case are only partially harvested, leaving behind enough to keep the plant living and to allow healing or regeneration over time. Harvesters were taught about this practice from a very early age, and it was widespread and widely applied across the diverse linguistic and cultural regions of northwestern North America: “Take only part of each plant.” “Take only what you need.” In the case of some types of bark (e.g., birch, bitter cherry, Douglas-fir, and cottonwood), only the outer layers are taken, leaving the inner bark to protect the growing tissues of the tree. Bark pieces removed to access edible cambium and inner bark tissues, or for bark medicine, are generally cut in relatively small pieces from only one side of the trunk, leaving the remaining bark intact so that the tree will continue to grow. All of these practices leave some tell-tale signs on the trees, mostly in the form of partially grown-over strips or rectangles on the trunks of the trees, forming what are known as “culturally modified trees” (CMT s), which date back three or four centuries in some places and occur by the thousands in some forests – a testament not only to the conservation of trees that were used but also to the management of whole stands by given clans or families (Lepofsky 2004; McDonald 2003; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009; Turner, Deur, and Lepofsky 2013).6 Plant Resource Management over Time: Mechanisms and Pathways of Development Although the diverse strategies and approaches to land and resource management discussed in this chapter are based largely on ethnographic documentation, the complexity and sophistication of traditional management techniques, processes, and protocols seem to reflect a considerable time depth. It is reasonable to assume that the systems for sustaining certain resources and creating and maintaining particular habitats and landscapes have been developing ever since people entered the area and possibly well before that (see Turner and Berkes 2006). It is difficult to “tease out” the various elements of these systems as applied to diverse resources and on different scales, but likely there has been a cumulative building of complexity over time. Basic resource management may begin with focused applications of specific techniques for particular species in certain localities, based on observations and experiences related to the effects of animal and human harvesting, natural disturbance, site comparisons, seasonal development, and other ecological factors on the quality, abundance, and productivity of resources. Increasing pressure from population growth on existing resources probably creates the impetus for

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developing these techniques. As resources are intensified, in response at least in part to population pressures, through technological innovations – better and more effective harvesting tools, sturdier containers with greater capacity, and new means for processing and storing large quantities, such as with pitcooking – the need to oversee and manage both the processes and the harvesting of the resources becomes more pressing. This situation may lead to more complex social organization, with diverse roles for individuals: designated leaders as “project managers” to oversee the various activities; experts in determining techniques, optimal timing, and locations; and facilitators of the equitable distribution of resources. The more different requirements there are, and the more different resources and harvesting areas, the greater the need to develop protocols and widely accepted approaches and practices that govern peoples’ actions at a moral or ethical level. This is where the management becomes more abstract and less directed or intentional. Songs, ceremonies, and dances that teach restraint against overharvesting,7 stories that embody lessons for proper behaviour toward other species, and belief systems like kincentricity (see chapter 13) are not necessarily linked directly to conservation or sustainability but are nonetheless clearly elements of a broader management regime through their general effects on peoples’ conduct in relation to their environments. These culturally based philosophies and belief systems may take longer to develop. Berkes (2012) suggests a progressive layering of and building upon the different elements of management systems. First, people entering a new area quickly learn basic knowledge about the edibility or potential utility of different species they encounter. Through careful observation, they develop practical understandings of the ecological relationships, lifecycles, phenology, and habitats of these species. In time and with growing populations, more complex social structures, organization, and institutions are required to provide the conditions that will support intensive use of an area and its resources, namely a diversified knowledge base, division of labour, control of human activities, management of suites of species and habitats within a territory of a people, and opportunities for knowledge transmission. Finally – or likely concurrently – comes the inception and establishment of worldviews embodying prescriptions for proper and acceptable behaviour in the use of and care for lands and resources. One could argue that it is only with this integrated layer of cultural control that a truly sustainable anthropogenic landscape can be developed and maintained over long periods of time. The Saanich reefnet fishery, described briefly in chapter 9, is one example of how these layers of management actually work together to conserve resource species. This fishery incorporates all elements of a complex management system: basic practical knowledge about salmon behaviour and migration patterns; development of technology incorporating management of willows, bull

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kelp, and other plant species; construction of a means of escape for a proportion of the fish captured in the net; traditions of ownership of reefnet sites along with other forms of property; social organization around deploying the nets and exchange of fishing sites and technologies with the neighbouring communities, including the Halkomelem; trade networks; and finally, the embodiment of belief systems that help to sustain the salmon by directing human behaviour at a societal level, with strict requirements for a period of “no fishing,” such as reflected in the story about the origin of salmon and the reefnet fishery and in the First Salmon ceremony (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994; Turner and Berkes 2006; Turner and Hebda 2012). There is some archaeological evidence for reefnet fishing in the Gulf and San Juan Islands dating to around 2,000 years or more ago (Kirk and Daughtery 2007). In terms of other types of management systems, particularly of plant resources, what are some indicators of these systems and their antiquity? Archaeological Evidence of Plant Management

It is often difficult to pick up signals in the archaeological record indicating increased human control of resources and ecosystems (Lepofsky 2004; Lepofsky, Hallett, et al. 2005). In the case of intentional landscape burning, there may be a change in the seasonality, frequency, or extent of fires.8 For example, the presence of camas in small clearings in the dense coastal temperate rainforests of the Oregon coast may reflect ancient burning practices (Deur 2000, 2005). On the northern coast of British Columbia, an increase in the presence of lodgepole pine after about 2,200 years ago may also indicate past anthropogenic fires (A.S. Gottesfeld, Mathewes, and Johnson Gottesfeld 1991). It is challenging, however, to distinguish between natural and anthropogenic fires without detailed palaeoclimatic records since there was considerable fluctuation in natural temperature and moisture regimes that would have affected the frequency of lightning-caused fires in any given area. For example, the increase in lodgepole pine noted above may simply reflect the onset of a warmer, dryer period rather than any human influence (Lepofsky 2004). Furthermore, as pointed out by Lepofsky, Hallett, et al. (2005), once a prairie or clearing is established, the fuel load decreases and any fires that do occur will be more difficult to detect because of a corresponding decrease in the amount of detectable charcoal. In this case, other lines of evidence, such as an increase in quantities of grass pollen or grass phytoliths deposited in an area, as reflected in soil cores in wet contexts, can provide an indirect signal for the creation and maintenance of prairies. Such is the case with Ebey’s Prairie on Whidbey Island, Washington, in which several different indicators (increased fire frequency; black, organic soils typical of grasslands; and increase in the pollens of grasses and other species of open habitats) align to suggest that people began setting fires to create

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and maintain this prairie at least within the past 2,300 years or so. Because such fires have been banned since the mid-1800s to early 1900s, with active fire suppression being implemented, this prairie is diminishing due to encroachment of conifers, mostly Douglas-fir (Gedalof, Pellatt, and Smith 2006; Weiser and Lepofsky 2009). Other prairies in the region, like the Ozette Prairies of Olympic National Park, are similarly shrinking (M.K. Anderson 2009). Weeding or selective propagation may lead to shifts in the frequency and abundance of key species or even to shifts in the genetic makeup of certain populations as reflected in the palaeoecological record, but to date, in the study area, no definitive evidence of this type has been uncovered (on camas, see Tomimatsu, Kephart, and Vellend 2009). Partial harvesting of tree bark or inner bark for food, material, or medicines, in the philosophy of “keeping it living,” is reflected, as previously noted, in the presence of culturally modified trees (CMT s). Unfortunately, however, even the oldest CMT s, some of which extend back to the 1500s (Turner and Wilson 2008; Stryd 2001), take us only a relatively short distance into the past, so it is hard to know, beyond that date, when people initiated this strategy or embraced the underlying philosophy that trees and other entities in the environment were sentient beings and should be kept alive whenever possible rather than being killed thoughtlessly (see chapter 13). Nevertheless, the wide occurrence of culturally modified trees of various types and in a range of habitats over the entire area – from the Rocky Mountains to the coast and from Oregon to the Gulf of Alaska, whether at sea level or in montane forests – is a testimony to the importance of this approach and its transcendence over multiple cultures, language groups, and geographical regions. Indirect archaeological evidence of resource management might be in the form of large pit-cooking depressions, presumably for cooking root vegetables like camas or balsamroot, used over an extended period of time. The shifting frequency and character of earth ovens through time might be indicators of plant-harvesting intensity, and the implementation of different technologies and social controls could signal increases or decreases in overall plant management. In the southern Interior Plateau, the use of earth ovens increased between about 3,500 and 2,300 years ago and again after about 1,500 years ago (Lepofsky 2004; Thoms 1989, 2008a, 2008b, 2009), whereas in the northern Interior Plateau, the use of earth ovens shows an increase starting between about 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, perhaps a reflection of more sophisticated harvesting strategies and/or more developed social structures and specialization. In the northern Interior Plateau, cooking pits diminished in size over the past 2,000 years or so, but this shift, which might indicate fewer roots being cooked and therefore potential depletion of this resource, could equally reflect a change in cooking strategies or in social organization, with one-time use of a given pit rather than repeated use. In fact, it could indicate accelerated preparation and consumption of root foods rather than the reverse (Sandra Peacock and Dana Lepofsky, pers. comm., 2009). 156 | part three – integration and management

The presence of root-digging sticks in archaeological contexts may also serve as a proxy for root and habitat management, especially in conjunction with other features related to food production. Particularly impressive in this regard are the wooden digging stick remnants from the Pitt Polder wapato wet site in Katzie territory in the lower Fraser Valley (see chapter 2). The combination of digging sticks, seemingly pure and extensive wapato beds in peat, and a cobble and sand underlay (possibly to improve drainage or increase harvesting efficiency), combined with nearby storage and processing features, make this a prime candidate as a managed resource site (Bernick 2007), equivalent to the estuarine clover and silverweed t’əkkillakw (root gardens) described at the beginning of the chapter. The potential for transplanting and disseminating species from one place to another as a form of resource management might be found by examining the linguistic record, as well as through genetic studies (which could also refute such a possibility) (see Tomimatsu, Kephart, and Vellend 2009). Hazelnut, with a disjunct distribution along the Skeena River in northwestern British Columbia and with Gitxsan and Nisga’a names related to the Proto-Salish names (see chapter 3), is a candidate for ancient transport from the south. Garry oak, at least from one site at Yale in the Fraser Valley, is another candidate for human transport, although a second oak stand at Sumas was likely a Pleistocene relict (Yousry El-Kassaby, cited in Lepofsky 2004; Ritland et al. 2005). Ecological and archaeological evidence of plant use may also reflect, at least indirectly, social aspects of plant management systems. For example, long-term or intensive use of particular berry patches, such as the Indian Heaven huckleberry grounds near Mount Adams (see chapter 2) or estuarine root-harvesting sites along the coast (see Deur 2000, 2005; and Lloyd 2011), may represent clan or family ownership, with restricted rights to their use. Stands of culturally modified trees showing repeated use over a long time period may also reflect ownership (Lepofsky and Pegg 1996). The presence of structures such as rock walls or posts or pegs around estuarine gardens, as described by Clan Chief Adam Dick, quoted earlier, would similarly indicate not only cultivation of these sites but also proprietorship and restricted use by individuals or families (Deur 2000, 2005). The existence of discreet stands or patches of high-status foods such as black huckleberries, soapberries, highbush cranberries, or crabapples can also reflect past management as well as ownership of these resources. Similarly, plant resources known to have been traded9 may be particular candidates for management and proprietorship since they would require production over and above a family’s or community’s immediate needs, which might be achieved through some form of intensification. Finally, the presence of plant remains from species that do not occur in a particular locality, and that therefore presumably arrived through trade, may reflect resource management systems that resulted in the establishment of trade links and networks (Croes 2003; Friedman 1978; Gill 1983, 2005a, 2005b; Lepofsky 2004). Trading itself could be Management and Sustainability  |  157

considered a form of management, in terms of redistribution of berries, roots, and other resources in geographic space, which would have helped to mitigate supply shortages and to reallocate particularly productive and intensifiable resources. The technologies developed to allow storage of resources, such as smoking and drying, likewise assisted in the temporal and seasonal redistribution of berries and other resources, extending their availability and use over the year (Thornton 1999). There may well be, as suggested earlier, a direct connection between plant management and the development of social stratification, but much more research would need to be undertaken to verify this and to indicate the direction of cause and effect. For example, digging stick handles, which first appear in archaeological contexts in northwestern North America around 2,400 years ago, at a time of increasing social and political complexity, may reflect simultaneously a convergence of increased harvesting efficiency for prime carbohydrate-rich foods and the enhanced status of the users, as well as, possibly, increased specialization of occupations – particularly women’s root digging as an important contribution to a group’s overall well-being (Hayden and Schulting 1997; M.B. Ignace, Ignace, and Nord 2009; Schulting 1994; see also chapter 9). An abundance of grinding and pounding implements and the diversification of earth oven hot-rock cooking, which occurred over this same time period (earlier in the southern Interior Plateau), may be other strands of the same overall trend. Combined with growing populations and increasing sedentism, these elements may collectively represent a “carbohydrate revolution,” with increasingly sophisticated management of species like camas and land use intensification of sites like prairies and upland meadows (Thoms 2008a, 2008b). A similar move toward intensification of berry production – also evidently linked to increasingly complex social organization – seems to parallel that of root resources, or “geophytes.” Starting around 2,500 years ago, there is evidence from diverse regions of highly productive berry-picking sites. Berries, like some of the key root vegetables, were highly valued in feasting and trade (Thornton 1999). Large quantities of berries in archaeological contexts can signify not only large human populations but also increasing complexity in processing, as well as possible proprietorship and elite control of berry resources. Although the records of focused management practices for berries are somewhat sparse, above and beyond burning over berry patches (Boyd 1999b; Budhwa 2007), there are some compelling descriptions from different parts of the study area that hint at social stratification, large-scale production, and even cultivation in relation to berries from the time of European contact back through the generations (see Budhwa 2007; McDonald 2003, 2005; Thornton 1999; Turner 2005; Turner and Peacock 2005; and Peacock and Turner 2000). One example is the hundreds of thousands of huckleberry and/or blueberry (Vaccinium spp.) seeds recovered from hearths and storage areas associated with high-status families

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at Psacelay, a proto-historic Ts’msyen village on the Skeena River; an entire box of these berries was found, associated with one household chief (Lepofsky 2004; Martindale 1999). This finding not only indicates well-developed technologies for berry processing and storage but also hints at the social contexts for berry intensification and management, with possible intentions for feasting or trade. Similarly, the drying trenches at Indian Heaven in the Mount Adams area, found in association with constellations of bark-stripped trees and remains of temporary shelters, are indications of organized intensification of huckleberry production.10 Historical Development of Management Practices in Northwestern North America

Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems are infused with practices and concepts and with modes of teaching, learning, and social conduct that can be related directly and indirectly to resource stewardship and conservation on various scales. Management and resource-conserving approaches, drawn from traditional knowledge systems, have been described for Indigenous and local peoples of many parts of the world and for many different cultures and environments.11 The origins of these approaches are often obscured in ancient history and embodied in metaphorical teachings. For the Straits Salish reefnet fishery, mentioned previously, tradition holds that it was the Salmon people themselves who taught humans this fishing method, along with the proper protocols for the fishery, including performing the First Salmon ceremony and burning the sacred seeds of q’əxmín (“Indian celery,” Lomatium nudicaule) along the beach as food for the Salmon spirits (see chapter 12). It seems likely that a number of different plant – and animal – resource management techniques were originally learned by observing other animals and their effects on the growth and productivity of plants.12 In an example from north of the study area, in describing bears’ harvesting of masru (“Indian potato,” Hedysarum alpinum) as observed by the Kotzebue of Alaska, Anore Jones (1983, 117) writes, “As we dug we came to holes where masru had been dug a day ago – there were no tracks on the beach when we came! Strangely enough, not all the roots were taken, just the largest and some were torn off. Then we saw the bear tracks. He too had dug sporadically not taking every plant.” Many plants, like masru, are adapted to withstand and renew themselves with moderate levels of disturbance, such as caused by animals, including: • digging, overturning the soil, consumption, transport, and caching of underground storage organs like wapato, camas, spring beauty, and yellow glacier lily by burrowing rodents and by geese, swans, grizzly bears, and other wildlife;

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11-3 | Willow (Salix sp.) along the Columbia River, BC , with branch cut by beaver, showing the resprouting of long, slender withes just below the cut.

• herbivory of plant leaves and stems by deer, elk, bears, and other animals, including the grazing of eelgrass leaves and rhizomes in the intertidal environment by black brant, Canada geese, and other waterfowl; • scraping away of patches of tree bark by bears to expose the edible cambium and inner bark tissues (Dilbone 2011); • sequestration and scattering of fruits, seeds, and nuts by rodents, squirrels, bears, and birds; • breaking or “pruning” of berry branches and of berries and other propagules by bears, elk, deer, beaver, and other large species (figure 11-3); and • selection or avoidance of certain parts or growth stages of plants.

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Other episodes of natural disturbance – floods, ice jams, storms, exceptionally high tides and tsunamis, windthrow of trees, fire, and even lava flows – also present opportunities for observing the regenerative capacity of plants and were probably a source of “learning through imitation” in the development of management at the habitat level. Lessons from catastrophic depletion from overharvesting or other forms of inappropriate treatment of resource species and habitats may also have factored into the development of management systems. Additionally, one individual or group would probably have learned from the lessons of others. Stories passed from group to group and from generation to generation would serve to spread widely certain lessons learned, without the same mistakes having to be made repeatedly. The social organization necessary for management may also have been learned through observation of social animals such as wolves and of the role of leaders in determining a group’s diversified activities (E.R. Atleo 2011; Turner 1997b, 2005; see also chapter 9). An example of how grizzly bears may have informed people about a practice leading to intensification of k’ám’ts (yellow glacier lily) was provided by Lil’wat (Stl’atl’imx) elder Alec Peters (pers. comm., 1987) of Mount Currie, who observed grizzlies digging these bulbs in the subalpine parklands: You’ve got to go pretty well up the top of a mountain for it [k’ám’ts], the summit. In a certain time of the years they [people] pick it … The old-timers used to pick it and dry it for winter use. I know the grizzly bears they dig it out too. They use their big claws like that [raking motion], and they just leave it like that in the sun, you know. I guess they must taste good when they’re dry. They don’t eat it right away. I’ve watched them. A long time, I’ve watched the grizzly bear, digging it out. I’ve seen them k’ám’ts laying like that. Leaving these bulbs to wilt where they were dug, and allowing them to partially dry before cooking them, was a common practice for people, too. It is possible that people actually learned of the edibility of these bulbs by observing grizzlies. Certainly, in traditional narratives of the Interior Plateau, grizzlies are associated with this plant (Loewen 1998; Teit 1898; see also chapter 12). In one example, from a Nlaka’pamux story, Grizzly Bear women harvested glacier lily bulbs and benefited from a burned-over mountainside: “four Grizzly Bear sisters also lived in the mountains [near Botanie Valley] and used to dig roots, wandering about from place to place. At length they came to the spot which had been burned [by four brothers who had burned over a piece of mountainside for their sister so that the s’ka’mitc (sk’ém’ets) root “should yield a better crop”], and found the s’ka’mitc root very plentiful. Here they dug” (Teit 1898, 72). People may have also learned from grizzlies and other animals to harvest the glacier lily bulbs selectively at maturity (when the seed capsules, if brushed,

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readily release quantities of seeds) and to separate and leave behind the small corms and smaller individual bulbs, as well as to improve their flavour (and possibly nutrient value) through the wilting process (Loewen 1998).13 Combining these techniques with observations of the plant’s responses to burning from lightning-ignited fires in the high country, and of the general correspondence between the size of bulbs and the number of flower heads per stem, would have provided people with a whole suite of practices to test, enabling optimization of this important food of the northern Interior Plateau. Similar scenarios could be argued for peoples’ intensive use and cultivation of northern riceroot. In fact, it seems that in the estuarine tidal marshes of the central and northern Northwest Coast, there was a three-way symbiosis between riceroot, grizzly bears, and humans. In search of nutrient-rich roots and rhizomes of sedges and other plants, as well as the riceroots themselves, grizzlies gouged out and “weeded” multiple small bowl-shaped microhabitats (which they are still creating and can still be found dotted around some tidal flats). Here riceroot plants would thrive and multiply, with the small rice-like bulblets and sprouts generated from the main bulbs being scattered by the disturbance of the digging, being nurtured by the warm, dark soil exposed by the dig, and having plenty of moisture and nutrients. On one occasion, in the Kitlope Valley, I counted the total number of these vegetative propagules from fifteen riceroot bulb sets removed from a single grizzly-created depression: the total number of bulblets and larger sprouting segments was 706 (pers. obs., July 1993; Turner 1994). Each one of these, separated and replanted, would have been capable of growing into a new plant. It seems likely from this evidence that past human harvesting of the grizzly-enhanced riceroot, with disturbance caused by digging sticks and scooping out the bulbs, would invariably have left behind enough smaller propagules to maintain the riceroot populations and that within a few years of harvesting, some of these bulblets would have grown into mature bulbs, big enough to support flowering and fruiting tops. Since, based on its existence and cultural use in northeast Asia and the Aleutians, riceroot may have been one of the most ancient foods along the coast, known to the earliest people entering the New World (see chapter 2, table 2-1), it is conceivable that Asian bears were the ones who originally taught people about its use. Many people have also noted the close association between black bears and berries; it is easy to recognize the remains of copious amounts of huckleberries, saskatoon berries, chokecherries, soapberries, kinnikinnick berries (also aptly named “bearberries”), crabapples, and other kinds of fruits in their excrement and to see the places where the bears have been feeding, with resulting broken bushes and scattered berries all around. Of particular interest is the presence of bears in areas following fires.14 The closeness people feel to black bears, because of the similarities between their feeding habits and those of humans, presents special opportunities for learning from them and imitating their actions.

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The roles of other animals in traditional management are also hinted at in traditional stories (see chapter 12). In one Haida narrative,15 Deer (who lived in Tlingit country) was said to keep the skunk-cabbage he ate “just like a garden” (Swanton 1908, 446). Beavers in another story were proprietors of highbush cranberry meadows (Turner 2004a). And the Mountain Chief in Carrier country, featured in a Nuxalk story, grew soapberries on his slopes (McIlwraith 1948). Spiders grew Indian-hemp in the sky country in another story (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990), and Goose Woman on Haida Gwaii provided edible roots for her husband’s people during a famine (Turner 2004a). In Hupacasath (Nuu-chahnulth) country, at Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, Swan women were apparently regarded as the original diggers of camas bulbs, evidently tending the root patches (called tł’ayaqak). They harvested immense quantities of the bulbs by ritual singing, naming their chief camas digging grounds T’ikwatqoowise (Place Where You Dig Roots): “Their heads were bobbing up and down as they used their breasts [to push the digging sticks down].” When they finished digging roots, the Swan women gave a feast, and then they gave about fifty place names to sites in the area (Arima et al. 1991, 190–1; Sapir 1913–14). Observations about resource depletion and about the positive effects of certain practices would have been readily passed from group to group or from generation to generation by cultural transmission – for example, through oral history and discourse. Lessons gained from “trial and error” on a small scale, or focused on one type of plant or one type of habitat, could be transferred and adapted to other resources and, in some cases, to other habitats. Developing management through such extrapolation must have been one of the major ways that people built up their diverse practices over the entire area. For example, understanding that a tree would eventually heal itself if a piece of bark was removed but that it would die if girdled could be extended to many kinds of management scenarios, including harvesting cedar-bark strips for weaving, gathering inner bark for food, and removing bark for medicinal purposes. It would have been obvious that certain types of berries tend to respond similarly to fire or to pruning, so once people learned to enhance the productivity of one kind, the lessons would have been transferred to others. Similarly, selectively harvesting bulbs or corms of a certain size while leaving or replanting the smaller ones so that they could continue growing is a practice that would have worked to perpetuate a number of different “root” crops. Even adopting particular worldviews and belief systems (including particular taboos and constraints against harvesting certain resources at certain times) and passing these on through intergenerational learning must have been projected over wide and diverse areas because of their efficacy in conserving key resources or, conversely, because of the damage resulting when these ideas were ignored or bypassed. In other words, sophistication and complexity in management systems probably developed incrementally, starting with observations of specific

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effects of practices on particular species and building up to suites of practices and over­arching approaches embedded in social institutions and worldviews (Turner and Berkes 2006). Once a particular management technique had been tried and proven effective for a given resource in a specific habitat, the word must have spread quickly, from group to group, via stories, demonstration, and imitation, much in the same way that the potato and its cultivation, once introduced locally, quickly moved from settlement to settlement until, within just a few years, almost everyone was clearing plots and growing potatoes (see chapter 4). In the way of all innovations, each individual learning about a given technique and putting it into practice would have changed it slightly and adapted it to local species, conditions, and circumstances. It is possible, too, that management techniques such as seasonal landscape burning, tilling the soil, pruning berry bushes, or selective harvesting were developed more than once, perhaps multiple times, in more than one region within or beyond northwestern North America. Many of these innovations or their precursors must be relatively old and could also have evolved differently in different regions over time from the same original idea or practice. (This is probably the way that basketry techniques, fishing technologies, and specific house designs emerged.) Some particular practices that were species-specific, such as the partial harvest of redcedar bark, branches, and roots, would have been disseminated together with the spread of that species itself across space and over time. European Impacts on Indigenous Land and Resource Management

Of the entire range and diversity of methods, strategies, and approaches that people developed to sustain and promote their plant resources and habitats over many millennia, very few were actually recognized as legitimate systems of food production by the European newcomers. A widespread perspective of European officials is summarized in relation to one Ts’msyen group. When the Indian commissioner created the Kitsumkalum people’s reserves, he made them a promise: “You will not be confined to your reserves. You can go on the mountain to hunt and gather berries as you have always done. Some think it would be a hardship that the hunting grounds should not be defined, but the government does not see how that could be done, for an Indian goes where he will to hunt, or gather berries. No survey could be made of them” (cited in McDonald 2003, 59–60). As McDonald (2003, 60) observes, this seemingly generous and straightforward statement is rife with misconceptions. Not only did the commissioner miss the wide range of locations and habitats where people routinely harvested berries and hunted, but he also failed to recognize the diversity of the resources

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that they used, the fact that all Ts’msyen laxyuup (“house lands or territories”) and resources, including kelp beds, cedar and crabapple stands, berry patches, and patches or gardens of edible roots, were under the ownership and jurisdiction of Ts’msyen chiefs, and that lineages were subject to strict Ts’msyen laws and to many practices that helped to sustain their productivity. In short, the commissioner trivialized and dismissed the Kitsumkalums’ sophisticated plant management strategies. This lack of recognition of peoples’ management activities and full occupancy of their territories is reflected in innumerable writings and documents, including treaties, from the colonial era onward. Similar assumptions were made in the imposition of the so-called “Douglas treaties” on Vancouver Island, in which the importance of camas to the Straits Salish and Halkomelem peoples and the practices people used to maintain and promote this important food were completely overlooked. In the wording of the treaties, only “villages” and “enclosed fields” were to be left for people’s use, with a stipulation that people could hunt over unoccupied lands and fish as formerly, but there was no mention or recognition of camas cultivation, maintenance of prairies, or the tending of berry patches, all of which were integral parts of peoples’ food production systems (British Columbia 1875; see also chapter 4). Such misconceptions have been far-reaching, and many are still in place. They have, in fact, influenced or biased the directions of research in archaeology and ethnography, perpetuating the stereotype of First Peoples as mere “hunters and gatherers” – or, to use the words of Governor James Douglas, “wandering denizens of the forest” – who were subjected to the whims of nature and had an inferior understanding of their environments.16 Nature and Scales of Application of Plant Resource Management As described by Peacock (1998),17 in terms of Indigenous plant management strategies and their impacts on the productivity and availability of plant resources, the use of horticultural methods – including selective harvesting, digging and replanting, tilling and weeding, sowing and transplanting, pruning and coppicing, and burning – was, and is, guided by management activities such as scheduling of seasonal rounds, rotation of harvesting locales, and controlled access (ownership of resource areas), as well as by religious and moral sanctions. Management invariably requires, along with an understanding of the technical aspects of growth promotion and ecological succession, a social context of responsibility for resources, a division of labour, and special expertise about the timing and scheduling of activities, as well as ceremonial recognition and distribution of the products of such activities. Thus “cultivation” of a landscape was thoroughly woven into the social fabric of First Nations communities.

Management and Sustainability  |  165

These social and ecological processes collectively regulated the scale, frequency, and intensity of anthropogenic disturbance, and their effects were manifested on different scales. At the plant species or plant population level, they resulted in increased productivity of selected species through a combination of altering age structure and longevity, changing density and distribution, increasing the range and yield of a species, and possibly also changing its genetic makeup. At the plant community or habitat level, these methods and activities may have increased overall species richness and habitat diversity by altering the ecological processes affecting community dynamics, structure, and composition. For example, harvesting and clearing activities by humans can expand the proportion of edges, or ecotones, in areas of homogeneous vegetation and can maintain a higher ratio of certain types of productive plant communities than would otherwise occur (Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty 2003). Such practices may have, in turn, benefited other animal species, such as bears or geese, and created even more complex and productive habitats. The estuarine root gardens of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other Northwest Coast peoples, the oak savannah camas prairies of the southern coastal and interior peoples, and the subalpine root-harvesting meadows of Interior Plateau peoples are all examples of anthropogenic habitats, formerly maintained by a host of human activities that included tilling, selective harvesting, and creating and maintaining patchworks of early successional stage ecosystems amid wooded or forested areas – in essence, developing and maintaining optimal, or “cultural keystone,” habitats for key resource species to grow and thrive (Deur 2000; Deur and Turner 2005; Turner 1999; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). Ultimately, the application of complexes of management methods, activities, and approaches over time resulted in entire landscapes or territories that embraced all of the species, communities, habitats, and harvesting sites over which a people’s influence extended. An anthropogenic landscape could encompass a group’s total territory, with all of its interconnecting components, throughout seasons and annual cycles or even over centuries. The development of conventions that related to proprietorship and inherited authority over resources, patterned seasonal rounds and variable harvesting regimes, and culturally mediated prescriptions for humans’ relationships to plants and animals were all aspects of anthropogenic landscape development. People had to pay attention to many ecological and environmental details when harvesting and managing their plant resources. Subtle differences in moisture or sunlight could affect the season and productivity of species. The quality of berries and other resources, for example, can vary considerably with elevation and other environmental factors. Gitxsan elder Winnie Wesley explained that “mountain berries” are sweeter than those growing at lower elevations and that the best berry patches – especially for huckleberries and blueberries –

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occur “halfway up the mountain” – in the montane and lower subalpine forest zones dominated by conifers, at about 900 to 1,200 metres (cited in McDonald 2003, 54; and Johnson Gottesfeld 1993, 96). At the Yakima berry grounds at Indian Heaven near Mount Adams, the two kinds of huckleberries people picked – black huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum) and Cascade blueberries (V. deliciosum) – tend to grow at slightly different elevations: the former occur at around 900 to 1,200 metres and the latter at around 1,500 metres. Such berry patches would be used and repeatedly burned over for seventy years or longer (Kirk and Daugherty 2007). Different aspects and slopes also produced different results for management. Quantities of Resources and Time Required in Harvesting and Processing

Human population densities and corresponding quantities of resource species required to sustain them are obvious questions in the debate around the extent and intensity of food production systems in northwestern North America. There are still diverse views on Indigenous peoples’ demographics over time and in different regions. The pre-European contact population of Northwest Coast peoples is generally estimated at 200,000 to 400,000 based on archaeological midden sites and other factors (Boyd 1999b; Hebda and Frederick 1990). A series of smallpox and other disease epidemics, starting in the late 1790s or even earlier, with several major outbreaks in the early to mid-1800s, resulted in a huge mortality, ranging from 20 to 80 per cent of Indigenous populations, depending on the area (Boyd 1999a). In some cases, entire villages were decimated. On the southern tip of Vancouver Island, the pre-epidemic population of the Songhees Straits Salish in the Victoria area alone is suggested at around 11,000, distributed around several villages along the southern coastline (Boyd 1999a). This represents a high density for a population subsisting almost entirely on local resources – and immense quantities of plant resources used on an annual basis. In terms of camas bulb harvesting, for example, for a Songhees community of 1,000 people, or 100 families (assuming an average of 10 people per family), and given that a single family might collectively harvest around 100 kilograms of camas bulbs in a year,18 the total harvest for that community alone could be in excess of 1 million bulbs.19 Among the Tsilhqot’in, elder Minnie Charleyboy (pers. comm., 2003) recalled that each family, working together in small groups, could harvest approximately 100 pounds (over 45 kilograms) of spring beauty corms per day, and that a family needed about 250 pounds (over 110 kilograms) of the corms per year to meet its needs.20 Unfortunately, there are very few such actual records of quantities harvested or consumed or of harvest rates for plant resources in general. Table 11-1 provides a summary of some rates of harvest for different resources, mostly based on experimental harvesting trials, and table 11-2 presents a compilation of records and estimates from various sources of

Management and Sustainability  |  167

Table 11-1  |  Measured or estimated rates of harvest for indigenous plant resources of northwestern North America Species or type of plant resource

Algae

Red laver seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae; syn. Porphyra abbottiae): edible alga

Rates of harvest

Reference(s)

~ 350 kg wet seaweed/year/ family; 75 lbs (~ 34 kg) wet seaweed/hr/person; 100 squares dried (~ 100 lbs wet, or ~ 45 kg) seaweed/day/family

Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) (Chief Albert Clifton, pers. comm., 2008; Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2008; Turner, pers. obs., 2008; Turner 2003a)

Ferns and fern allies

Bracken fern (Pteri­ dium aquilinum): edible rhizomes

~ 250 mL/15 mins/person (~ 1 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

“You can get about two big (10-gallon) buckets [~ 38 litres each] full of this inner bark fairly readily”

Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) (Elizabeth Dundas, cited in Turner and Thompson 2006, 40)

“You can get about two big (10-gallon) buckets [~ 38 litres each] full of this inner bark fairly readily”

Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) (Elizabeth Dundas, cited in Turner and Thompson 2006, 40)

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia): edible fruit

~ 1,000 berries/bush; 250 mL/5 mins/person (~ 1 L/20 mins/ person, or ~ 3 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uvaursi): edible berries

~ 250 mL/20 mins/person (~ 0.75 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

~ 250 mL roots dug in 30 mins (500 mL packed roots/hr/ person); for Nuxalk, ~ 250 mL/ 20 mins/person (~ 0.75 L/hr/ person), or 0.5–1 kg/hr/person (in a good site)

Kitlope Valley (Haisla) (Turner 1994); Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6; Turner and Kuhnlein 1982)

Conifers

Amabilis fir (Abies amabilis): edible inner bark Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla): edible inner bark Flowering plants

Indian-hemp (Apocy­ num cannabinum): stem fibre

Pacific silverweed (Argentina egedii): edible roots

Camas (Camassia spp.): edible bulbs

In 2–3 days a woman could harvest enough stems to make five bundles, each 3–4 ft (~1 m) long and 5 in. (~ 12 cm) thick

Estimated 400 bulbs per hour, or 6 bulbs per minute, for Calochortus amabilis and other

/continued

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Interior Plateau (Teit 1930, 68)

California (M.K. Anderson 2005, 297); Nez Perce (A.G. Marshall 1977)

Table 11-1 | continued Species or type of plant resource

Rates of harvest

Reference(s)

bulbs from California (rates of camas bulb harvest are probably similar); 80–90 lbs (36–40 kg) per day for a good digger; 40–50 lbs (18–22 kg) easily per day Recently (with hardened soil and introduced weeds) ~ 0.5–1 L/hr/person; family of 4 could dig ~ 100 lbs (~ 45 kg) of corms per day

Tsilhqot’in (Minnie Charleyboy and Maryann Solomon, pers. comm., 2003)

550 fruits/tree; ~ 250 mL/ 1.5 mins/person (~ 1 L/6 mins/ person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca): edible fruit

Experimental harvesting: ~ 250 mL/30 mins/person (~ 0.5 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Salal (Gaultheria shallon): edible berries

10 berries/branchlet; ~ 250 mL/ 8 mins/person (~ 1 L/32 mins/ person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Biscuitroot (Lomatium cous and other spp.): edible roots

~ 300 biscuitroots dug/hr/ person; 1 bushel (~ 60 lbs, or ~ 27 kg) dug/day/woman; good digger gathers 50–75 lbs (~ 23–34 kg) of L. cous per day

Interior Plateau (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; journals from the 1840s and 1850s cited in Kirk and Daughtery 2007, 66; A.G. Marshall 1977)

Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata): edible corms Bunchberry (Cornus canadensis): edible fruit Black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii): edible fruit Yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum): edible bulbs

Northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis): edible bulbs

Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva): edible roots

Experimental harvesting: ~ 350 berries/m2; ~ 250 mL/10 mins/ person (~ 1 L/40 mins/person, or 1.5 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Recently (with hardened soil and introduced weeds) ~ 1 L/1.5 hrs/ person; a family of four could harvest 100 lbs (~ 45 kg) per day of these bulbs

Secwepemc (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994); Tsilhqot’in (Minnie Charleyboy, pers. comm., 2003)

Experimental harvesting: ~ 125 mL (1/2 cup; 7 large bulbs; total of 706 propagules) dug from grizzly hollow in 10 mins (~ 0.75 L/hr/person); for Nuxalk, ~ 250 mL/hr/person

Kitlope Valley (Haisla) (Turner 1994); Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

~ 250 g (1/4 lb)/hr/person to dig and clean fresh bitterroot

Secwepemc (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994)

Management and Sustainability  |  169

Table 11-1 | continued Species or type of plant resource

Rates of harvest

Reference(s)

Nootka lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis): edible roots

Experimental harvesting: ~ 250 mL/12 mins/person (~ 1 L/48 mins/person, or ~ 1.2 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Labrador tea (Rhodo­­ dendron groenlandi­ cum): leaves for tea

Coastal black gooseberry (Ribes divaricatum): edible berries

Pacific crabapple Malus fusca): edible fruits

~ 1,000 crabapples avg./tree; 250 mL fruits/5 mins/person (1 L/20 mins/person, or 3 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

~ 250 mL/2.5 mins/person (~ 1 L/10 mins/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Gray currant, or stink currant (Ribes bracteosum): edible berries

0–150 berries/bush; ~ 250 mL/5 mins/person (~ 1 L/20 mins/ person, or 3 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6) Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Nootka rose (Rosa nutkana): edible rind of fruit

350 berries/bush; ~ 250 mL/ 12.5 mins/person (~ 1 L/50 mins/ person) 30–50 hips/bush; ~ 250 mL/ 5 mins/person (~ 1 L/20 mins/ person; but need considerable processing for edibility)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Experimental harvesting: ~ 1-1.5 L/hr/person

Vancouver Island (Turner, pers. obs. picking near Spectacle Lake logged site on southern Vancouver Island, July 2009)

Wild raspberry (Rubus 450–600 berries/bush; idaeus): edible berries ~ 250 mL/30 mins/person (~ 500 mL/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus): edible berries

175 berries/6m2; ~ 250 mL/ 10 mins/person (~ 1 L/20 mins/ person, or ~ 3 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa): edible berries

Experimental harvesting: ~ 2 L/5 mins/person with stems, or ~ 1 L/hr/person cleaned and destemmed 18 berry clusters per bush; ~ 250 mL/5 mins/person with stems (~ 1 L/20 mins/person, or 3 L/hr/person)

Kitlope Valley (Haisla) (Turner 1994); Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Blackcap (Rubus leucodermis) and trailing blackberry (R. ursinus): mixed edible berries

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis): edible berries

30 berries/bush; 250 mL/5 mins/ person (~ 1 L/20 mins/person, or 3 L/hr/person)

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Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Table 11-1 | continued Species or type of plant resource

Rates of harvest

Reference(s)

Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii): edible rhizomes

~ 500 mL rhizomes dug/30 mins in Kitlope experiment (1 L/hr/ person); for Nuxalk, ~ 250 mL/ 30 mins/person (~ 500 mL/hr/ person)

Kitlope Valley (Haisla) (Turner 1994); Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Experimental harvesting: 100 berries/bush; ~ 250 mL/10 mins/ person (~ 1 L/40 mins/person, or 1.5 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Cattail (Typha latifolia): leaves for mats

Alaska blueberry (Vaccinium alaskense): edible berries Alaska blueberry (Vaccinium alaskense) and red huckleberry (V. parvifolium) mixed: edible berries Oval-leaved blueberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium): edible berries

Red huckleberry (Vaccinium parvi­ folium): edible berries Mountain huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum, V. deliciosum): edible berries

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule): edible fruits

“Even an experienced mat-maker must have needed 3–4 days to gather materials for a single mat, prepare them, make the string and do the sewing; ~ 6–8 mats needed to cover a shelter of size indicated by postholes from dry part of Hoko site.”

Hoko River (Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 98)

Experimental harvesting: 1–1.2 L/hr/person, or ~ 5–8 L/ day/person

Kitlope Valley (Haisla) (Turner 1994)

Experimental harvesting: ~ 350 berries/bush; ~ 250 mL/10 mins/ person (~ 1 L/40 mins/person, or 1.5 L/hr/person); “it can take hours to fill a 2.5 gallon bucket”

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6); Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) (Turner and Thompson 2006, quote at 69)

Family of 7 or 8 people could collect around 500 kg (“half a ton”) of fresh and dried berries in a season

Yakima Sahaptin and others at Indian Heaven near Mount Adams (Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 69)

Experimental harvesting: ~ 100 berries/bush; ~ 250 mL/ 4 mins/person (~ 1 L/16 mins/ person, or ~ 4 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Experimental harvesting: ~ 300 berries/bush; ~ 250 mL/8 mins/ person (~ 1 L/32 mins/person, or ~ 2 L/hr/person)

Nuxalk (Lepofsky, Turner, and Kuhnlein 1985, table 6)

Note: Rates of harvest are based on experimental harvesting or observation.

Management and Sustainability  |  171

Table 11-2  |  Quantities of plant resources harvested by Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America Species or type of plant resource

Algae

Red laver seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae; syn. Porphyra abbottiae): edible alga

Quantities harvested

Group (references)

~ 350 kg wet seaweed/year/family; 100 squares dried (~ 100 lbs wet, or ~ 45 kg) seaweed/day/family; Annetta Robinson’s mother made 400 seaweed trays back in Kitkatla for her family to use (Helen Clifton)

Gitga’at (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2008; Turner, pers. obs., 2008; Turner 2003a)

Ferns and fern allies

Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa): edible rootstocks

Rootstocks of this fern dug up “by the sack” and pit-cooked by the Nisga’a, among other peoples

Nisga’a (Nisga’a Tribal Council 1995, 83)

Immense piles cooked for feasts (apparently higher than a person’s height) by steaming (water had to be poured from the roof of the house)

Nuu-chah-nulth (Drucker 1951, 62)

Dozens of bark sheets needed for each summer lodge or dwelling; 3–6 large sheets per canoe; 5–6 sheets per cache pit lining; possibly 25–30 rectangular bark sheets, each 1 × 2 m, per family per year; Fort Langley bought enough cedar-bark sheets to roof the buildings within two years

General (Turner, pers. obs. from photographs and canoes)

Western larch (Larix occidentalis): sweet edible sap

A productive tree could yield at least 4–5 L of sap twice a year

Spokan (J.A. Ross 2011) Stl’atl’imx (Teit 1906a, 222; Turner 1992b)

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata): wood for canoes, house posts and planks, boxes; bark sheets for siding and roofing

“Considerable quantities” of seeds eaten by Upper Stl’atl’imx; Edith O’Donaghey’s (pers. comm., 1985) father used to bring the cones home “by the sackful”

Single large (multifamily) house required 500,000 to 1 million board feet of lumber to maintain (might stand for 400 years) [single family modern house requires 10,000– 12,000 board feet]; cedar-bark sheets for building Fort Langley

“Fern roots” (probably referring to bracken fern, Pteridium aquilinum): edible rhizomes

Conifers

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa), white pine (Pinus monticola), western redcedar (Thuja plicata), and other spp.: bark sheets for dwellings, canoes, etc.

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis): edible seeds or “nuts”

172 | part three – integration and management

Meier archaeological site near Portland, Oregon (Ames and Maschner 1999, 167)

Table 11-2 | continued Species or type of plant resource

Quantities harvested

Group (references)

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla): edible cambium or “sap”

“Many hundred score of dried cakes of hemlock sap”

Peter O’Reilly, Indian reserve commissioner (Department of Indian Affairs 1900, 83)

Flowering plants

Interior Plateau and Nlaka’pamux (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum): stem fibre for basketry, mats, cordage, and nets

Each family in any Interior Plateau community would have dried and stored several large basketfuls of these sweet fruits; probably totalled ~ 10 gallons (~ 38 litres) of dried berries every summer

“Vast quantities” needed; ~ 5 stalks to produce 1 ft of cordage (~ 15 stalks/m of cordage); a 40-ft deer net requires ~ 7,000 ft of cordage (~ 35,000 plant stalks)

Interior Plateau peoples generally and Native Californians (Blackburn and Anderson 1993; M.K. Anderson 2005, 231; Stevens and Anderson 2006)

Edible camas (Camassia spp.): edible bulbs

“canoes laden with camas” brought by Cowichan to Fort Langley; ~ 100 camas bulbs per litre (conservatively estimated); ~ 100–260 kg/ year/family (~ 10,000–26,000 bulbs harvested/year/family depending on size of bulbs); ~ at least 1 million bulbs per community of 1,000 annually (based on ~ 30 L/bushel, or 3,000 bulbs/bushel), or 2.6 million using figures calculated by Beckwith; 4 bushels per family equals ~ 12,000 bulbs per family; ~ 200,000 bulbs per family harvested every year from the interior camas (C. quamash) grounds of eastern Washington, Idaho, and western Montana (Thoms)

Central Coast Salish (Christopher Paul, pers. comm. to M. Babcock, 1968; Christopher Paul, pers. comm., 1969; Beckwith 2004, 101-2; Deur and Turner 2005; Maclachlan 1998, 40); Interior Salish (Thoms 1989)

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia): edible fruit

Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata): edible corms

~ 50–120 kg corms/year/family, or ~ 250 lbs/year/family

Nlaka’pamux (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990); Tsilhqot’in (Minnie Charleyboy, pers. comm., 2003)

Management and Sustainability  |  173

Table 11-2 | continued Species or type of plant resource

Quantities harvested

Group (references)

Yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum): edible bulbs

Households would harvest 500 lbs (~ 225 kg) of bulbs annually; family of 4 needed 250 lbs (~ 115 kg)

Secwepemc (Ike Willard, cited in G. Palmer 1975b); Nlaka’pamux (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990); Tsilhqot’in (Minnie Charleyboy, pers. comm., 2003)

Seaside strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis): edible berries

Recently, ~ 4–5 gallons (~ 15–20 L) per year/family

Haida (Turner, pers. obs.; Turner 1995)

~ 2,000 dried berries per litre; ~ 40,000 dried berries per 20-litre storage basket; 4 baskets per family equals ~ 160,000 berries/year/ family; 10–20 million berries/year/ community of 1,000 people; salal cakes 10–15 lbs (~ 4.5–7 kg) each (Gunther)

General, Northwest Coast, based on berry counts (Deur and Turner 2005; Gunther 1973)

300 biscuitroots/hr/person, or ~ 30 kg (~ 66 lbs)/day/person

Sahaptin (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; journals from the 1840s and 1850s cited in Kirk and Daugherty 2007)

Salal (Gaultheria shallon): edible berries

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum): edible green shoots Biscuitroot (Lomatium cous and other spp.): edible roots

Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca): edible fruits

Stems of “wild rhubarb” (Heracleum maximum) were “very much used” by Secwepemc peoples

Teit (1909, 515)

Lucille Clifton (cited in Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012, 349) used to put by ~ 4–5 barrels, each 5 gallons (~ 20 L), packed with crabapples and highbush cranberries every winter

Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) (Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012; Turner and Thompson 2006)

Prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.): edi­ ble succulent stems

“much used” by the southern bands of Secwepemc

Secwepemc (Teit 1909, 515)

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus): edible sprouts

Harvested by the “armload” and canoe-load in the spring

Nuu-chah-nulth (George 2003); Kwakwaka’wakw (Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2004; Turner and Turner 2008)

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis): edible berries

Edible sprouts gathered by the “armload” in the spring

Kwakwaka’wakw (Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2004; Turner and Turner 2008)

174 | part three – integration and management

Table 11-2 | continued Species or type of plant resource

Quantities harvested

Group (references)

Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia): edible tubers

Large quantities dug around Fort Langley; “highly esteemed by the [Columbia River] natives, who collect vast quantities of it for their own use and for barter.”

Halkomelem and Chinookan (Cox 1957, 79; Darby 1996; Garibaldi 2003)

Pacific willow and other willows (Salix lucida ssp., lasiandra and other Salix spp.): inner bark for reefnets and cordage

For a reefnet of ~ 10 × 10.3 m (~ 30 × 34 ft), 750–1,688 m of willow shoots (1–3 cm diameter) would be required; each family constructed a new net each season

Straits Salish (Townsend 2009)

Straits Salish and Interior Plateau peoples, based on counts of tule mat elements in museum collections (Deur and Turner 2005; J.A. Ross 2011)

Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii): edible rhizomes

~ 1,000 tule stalks per large sewn tule mat (~ 1 × 4 m); ~ 10 mats or more per family, especially for the large lodges used as dwellings in Interior Plateau, requiring a dozen or more large mats, totalling 12,000 tule stems per mat lodge; for Spokan, 20 woven tule mats (1.1 × 3 m) for each lodge

Nuu-chah-nulth (Drucker Immense piles cooked for feasts 1951, 62) (apparently higher than a person’s height) by steaming (water had to be poured from the roof of the house) “Large quantities” dried on racks over fire hearths; well over 200 berry-drying features in upland meadows (archaeological); 100 gallons of huckleberries per acre (~ 380 L/0.4 ha)

Indian Heaven (southwest of Mount Adams), Yakima, and others (Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 167; Lepofsky 2004; Mack 1992; Mack and McClure 1996, 2002)

3.5 m length of nettle twine from 6 1.5-m stalks; net 10 m long and 1 m deep (10 m2) can require ~ 30 m twine (50–60 nettle stalks) and take 20–25 hours to construct; cattail or tule mat 1.2 × 2.4 m (4 × 8 ft) required ~ 30 m (~ 100 ft) of string

General, calculated from personal experience (see also Price, Samford, and Steponaitis 2001; and Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 98)

Tule, or hardstem bulrush (Schoenoplectus acutus): stems for mat making

Mountain huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum, V. deliciousum): edible berries Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica): stems for fibre and cordage

Management and Sustainability  |  175

Table 11-2 | continued Species or type of plant resource

Quantities harvested

Group (references)

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule): edible fruits

Lucille Clifton (Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012, 349) used to put by ~ 4–5 barrels, each 5 gallons (~ 20 L), packed with crabapples and highbush cranberries every winter

Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) (Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012; Turner and Thompson 2006)

known quantities of particular plant resources harvested or used by a family or given group. The ultimate quantities of plant resources that can be harvested and processed relate in part to the productivity and abundance of the resource being harvested (which in turn relates to effectiveness of management), in part to the rates and efficiency of the harvest, in part to the time available to devote to harvesting the resource in light of what other resources need to be harvested at the same time by the same individuals, and/or in part to how long it takes to process a given resource into a storable condition before it spoils. Ultimately, too, restricted availability of the resource itself – as well as external factors like weather conditions, tides, presence of bears in the area, or other factors – might present the ultimate constraints on the amounts one is able to harvest. The information in tables 11-1 and 11-2, limited and fragmented as it is, indicates that immense quantities of many diverse resources were needed for survival and trade and that correspondingly immense amounts of time were collectively devoted to acquiring and processing the resources. Often, family groups, or small groups of women, might spend half of each day gathering a particular resource and the rest of the day processing it, sometimes day after day until sufficient quantities were obtained. The time required to harvest and process seaweed presents a good example. The general practice was, and still is, for groups of people to go out by boat from a spring harvest camp – like the Gitga’at camp at K’yel on Princess Royal Island – early in the morning when the tide was low. They spread out along the shoreline of the islands in the vicinity and picked seaweed for two to four hours, until the tide started to rise. Then they returned to the camp, around noon or one o’clock in the afternoon. Once harvested, the seaweed had to be dried almost immediately,21 a task and process that took at least a full sunny afternoon. The seaweed was spread out on flat bedrock areas, usually in squares or shapes conforming to the shape of the rocks, or on cedar-wood trays. The quantities harvested daily could translate into 100 squares (of about 60 by 60 centimetres) or more per family group. The squares had to be turned and shifted after a couple of hours, and then, by sundown, fully dried, they were brought indoors so that they

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wouldn’t become damp in the evening dew. Once dried, the harvested seaweed was stored indoors until the next stage of processing, usually undertaken back at the main village. In this stage, the dried cakes were rewetted with salt water, pressed into cedar-wood boxes, weighted down, and left for a number of days, before being taken out, chopped into fine pieces, redried, and then stored in airtight containers. Following these different steps, a family might harvest and process its year’s supply of seaweed – around 300 kilograms of fresh seaweed, for Helen Clifton’s (pers. comm., 2001; see also Turner and Clifton 2006) family at Hartley Bay – in a total of about five full days, not counting the time when it is in the cedar-wood boxes or the time travelling to and from the seaweed camp.22 The time required to weave the baskets and make the trays and boxes needed for harvesting, processing, and storing plant resources also must be taken into account when estimates of time and resource-harvesting rates are considered. In the seaweed example, openwork cedar-withe pack baskets would have been needed, in the past, to hold the fresh seaweed, as well as many cedar-bark baskets to transport it and several wooden boxes with lids to store it. The time taken to maintain and repair these containers would also have been considerable, although with care and upkeep, most could be reused over several years.23 The construction of canoes, paddles, anchor lines, and mats, travel to the harvest camps and seaweed-picking grounds, and the time and materials required to build the small lodges where people stayed at their camps are other investments of time and energy that factor into the overall equation. These items and structures would generally be quite durable, however, and like the baskets, trays, and boxes, can be expected to have been functional over generations, with planks and posts replaced in the lodges as required. Right after seaweed harvesting, at least for the Gitga’at, women would begin the work of harvesting and processing cedar bark for mats, hats, clothing, and baskets – a task that could be accomplished with ease only while the bark was still fresh and pliable.24 Once cleaned and pulled apart, the layers of bark could be dried and stored in whole sheets for winter, a time when many of the baskets and other equipment were actually made. Some weavers would split the freshly harvested and cleaned bark sheets into strips of various widths and lengths, ready for use, and then bundle and dry these strips separately. Before the bark could actually be woven, it was soaked in water until pliable, and it was continuously wetted during the weaving process. Thus a woman might devote several days to the harvesting and initial processing of cedar bark each year and then many days in the wintertime working with this material to make her family’s requirements of clothing, mats, and basketry, as well as perhaps some items to be traded for other goods. Obviously, the efficiency of any harvest is dependent on high abundance, productivity, and predictability of the resource, as well as on easy accessibility and availability. The higher the overall quality of the resource, and the more

Management and Sustainability  |  177

concentrated and productive it is – whether a seaweed-picking area, a cedar stand, a berry patch, or a root-digging ground – the less the time and energy that need to be expended in its harvest. Knowing that one can count on harvesting valued staple resources at the same sites from year to year and generation after generation is critically important for a people’s survival and well-being. This is where land and resource management in all its different forms and on multiple scales comes into play. Furthermore, to what extent did peoples’ ability to augment the natural availability of their plant resources, or to intensify the production of plant foods and other resources required for survival, enable their own populations to grow and thrive? Conversely, one might ask, to what extent did the need to meet increasing levels of human consumption from population growth and expansion help to motivate the development of management practices and approaches? These questions may never be adequately answered, but they should be kept in mind in the discussions that follow. Management Techniques and Outcomes

The diverse approaches and practices that relate to Traditional Land and Resource Management in northwestern North American cultural areas, some of which have already been mentioned in the previous section, are summarized in table 11-3. Many of these are interrelated, with a range of different outcomes reflected on different temporal and spatial scales.25 As noted previously, these practices also apply to different groups of species, such as fruiting shrubs, root vegetables, or closed forest communities. Table 11-4 lists individual plant, algal, and fungal species for which some evidence of management in the form of selective or partial harvesting, habitat manipulation, ownership of stands or patches, or other ways of maintaining and enhancing their production has been documented. Over 100 species or closely related groups of species are identified as having had some form of management associated with their maintenance or productivity within one or more cultural areas in northwestern North America. The practices and techniques applied to maintain and enhance the productivity of key resources and prime harvesting sites are both cumulative and dynamic, building upon observations and experiences of earlier generations and adapting to new technological and socioeconomic changes. Many of them are quite specialized and are relegated to skilled practitioners who then teach others through processes of observation and experiential learning.26 Significantly, the management methods tend to work in concert with natural processes to which plants and other species are already adapted: soil development, nutrient cycling, photosynthesis, genetic divergence, decomposition, light and moisture sequestration, seasonality, phenology and reproductive cycles, tidal cycles, vegetative reproduction, responses to fire, flood, and other disturbance,

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Table 11-3  |  Techniques and approaches applied by Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America to maintain and enhance plant resources Management practice

Notes (examples)

Species- or population-level management

Gardens of annual species cleared and sown, mulched and fertilized

Northwest Coast tobacco (Nicotiana sp.) and native tobacco (N. attenuata)

Partial harvesting of edible root vegetables

Portion of root remains in ground to regrow (balsamroot, bitterroot)

Partial harvesting of roots for fibre, implements, etc.

Only a few roots taken from each tree (western redcedar, Sitka spruce, yellow-cedar)

Partial and selective harvesting of medicinal plants and roots

Harvested from remote places; spot-harvested; plants often regenerate from fragments left in the ground (like a pulled-up dandelion in one’s lawn) (Canby’s lovage, mountain valerian, false hellebore, yarrow)

Partial harvesting of bark as material Partial harvesting of bark for medicinal use Partial harvesting of edible cambium and inner bark

Fibrous tree bark pulled or cut in slabs from living trees (western redcedar, paper birch); bark for dye (red alder) Rectangular pieces cut from living trees (red alder, cascara, Pacific crabapple, Pacific yew)

Rectangular pieces cut from living trees (lodgepole pine, amabilis fir, western hemlock)

Partial harvesting of planks for construction, etc.

Wooden planks split from standing, living trees (western redcedar)

Partial harvesting of fibrous stems and leaves of herbaceous perennials for mats, cordage, baskets

Cut from perennial plants at end of growing season; often only vegetative plants taken (cattail, tule, stinging nettle, Indian-hemp, slough sedge); spot-harvesting from many different plants (sword fern)

Partial harvesting of edible seaweed

Fronds of Pyropia abbottiae and related species pulled from the rocks by hand, allowing rapid basal regeneration; giant kelp fronds coated with herring spawn harvested from living plants

Partial harvesting of woody withes and branches for basketry, rope, fish traps

Pruned from growing trees or bushes (saskatoon berry, hazelnut, Rocky Mountain juniper, Pacific crabapple, western redcedar, willows, Pacific yew)

Harvesting edible stems and leaves from living herbaceous perennials

Vegetables (cow-parsnip, fireweed, giant horsetail, Indian celery)

Harvesting pitch or gum from living trees for material or medicinal purposes

Collected from natural or human-made wounds in trees or from pitch blisters (western hemlock, lodgepole pine, Sitka spruce, subalpine fir, and other conifers)

Management and Sustainability  |  179

Table 11-3 | continued Management practice

Notes (examples)

Pruning and coppicing of berry and nut bushes

Bushes pruned or cut down to the base to stimulate new growth and larger, higher-quality fruits (saskatoon berry, salmonberry, highbush cranberry, salal, hazelnut, black huckleberries and blueberries, soapberries)

Pruning and coppicing of arrow shaft, basketry, and cordage materials Burning of individual fruiting shrubs or trees Burning of populations of basketry materials Selection by size, age, or reproductive stage of plant or organism

Digging and tilling before, during, or after harvesting Replanting propagules during or after harvesting Protection of growing tissues (e.g., covering over soil after harvesting) Transplanting

Scattering seeds, fruits, corms, bulbs

Bushes pruned or cut down to the base to stimulate new, straight, vigourous shoots for basket rims (saskatoon berry), cordage (hazelnut, sandbar willow), basketry (Rocky Mountain maple), nets (willows), or arrows (saskatoon berry, oceanspray) Individual bushes sometimes burned down to produce vigourous young shoots and eventually increase fruit production (saskatoon berry, hazelnut); individual or clumps of trees burned to create fuel (subalpine fir)

Cattail and tule patches burned over after harvesting to clean them for the following year; beargrass patches similarly burned over

For several edible and material species, only vegetative plants harvested (desert parsley, Lomatium macrocarpum; slough sedge, or basket sedge, Carex obnupta); others harvested only at certain stage of maturity (yellow glacier lily, balsamroot, spring beauty, edible seaweed – sporebearing plants avoided) Edible root vegetables said to grow faster and more productively after soil disturbance (springbank clover, Pacific silverweed, northern riceroot, blue camas, yellow glacier lily, spring beauty) Fragments of plants returned to the ground (springbank clover, Pacific silverweed, northern riceroot, yellow glacier lily) Mushroom stalks cut (mature specimens only) and soil covered over afterward (pine mushroom); turf replaced after roots dug (yellow glacier lily, blue camas, spring beauty)

Individual propagules (bulbs, corms, rhizomes), seedlings, or rooted shoots transplanted from one location to another (camas, Camassia quamash; stinging nettle; highbush cranberry; soapberry; cattail; wapato); seeds or nuts transplanted (hazelnut, garry oak); trailing blackberry vines transplanted Berries or seed heads scattered during or after harvesting (spring beauty, blueberries and huckleberries, “wild celery”); corms of spring beauty, roots of silverweed

/continued

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Table 11-3 | continued Management practice

Insect control Diversification as management

Notes (examples)

(Argentina anserina), and bulbs of tiger lily and yellow glacier lily ritually scattered after harvesting (Tsilhqot’in) Tent caterpillar nests systematically removed/burned (chokecherry); control of insect pests by landscape burning (J.A. Ross 2011)

Developing and using alternative resources can ease harvesting pressure on prime resources (e.g., using clams instead of, or along with, salmon, onions instead of camas bulbs, or clover rhizomes instead of silverweed may have allowed continuing sustainability of the original resources while allowing populations to survive and thrive)

Plant community- or habitat-level management

Site selection for prime populations

Altering successional stages by burning over meadows or woods

Weeding, tilling, and clearing root “gardens”

Clearing for settlements

Moving rocks, erecting fencing, installing posts or pegs, etc. Terracing or use of terraces

Berry gardens created on terraces beside waterfalls as ideal moisture regime (Heiltsuk); root gardens located at particular tidal zones; barriers placed to take advantage of flood tides and river floods (Nuu-chahnulth, Kwakwaka’wakw); prime productive berry patches identified and owned (Tlingit, Ts’msyen) Patches intentionally burned over periodically and routinely (oak savannahs, boreal forests, montane meadows) to remove underbrush, create clearings, increase size and productivity of berry bushes or root vegetables, and create forage for deer and other game; provides dead snags and branches for fuel

Competing woody shrubs, grasses, and other vegetation are removed by hand before, during, or following harvesting (blue camas meadows, tiger lily patches, strawberry patches, tidal estuarine gardens) (Coast Salish, Secwepemc, Tlingit, Kwakwaka’wakw)

Trees are felled around houses or village sites; stumps and cleared ground provide habitat for certain berry bushes; also provides wood for construction and protection from surprise attacks by enemies Rocks are moved and piled up to clear root-digging grounds and to delineate owned berry patches or root “gardens”; posts or pegs set around patches or individual trees to indicate ownership

Terraces constructed or natural terraces used for house placement but also provide areas for plant growth, as with the orchard gardens of Robintown (Ts’msyen) and the terraces at Nimpkish River estuary (Kwakwaka’wakw); berry garden terraces constructed (Heiltsuk)

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Table 11-3 | continued Management practice

Notes (examples)

Enhancing nutrient regimes and fertilizing

Adding ashes, clamshells, or animal and fish remains to berry patches, root gardens, or around individual trees (e.g., Heiltsuk berry gardens); ceremonially “feeding” strawberries (Fragaria chiloensis) and nagoonberries (Rubus arcticus) with salmon eggs (Tlingit) (Thornton 1999)

Preferential use of dead trees, downed limbs, and other self-produced plant materials

Retains standing forests; harvesting wind-thrown or snow-downed logs for construction (western redcedar, trembling aspen); harvesting wood from downed logs or driftwood as fuel; using tree knots from rotten logs for fishhooks (western hemlock and others); driftwood gathering; harvesting tree roots for basketry from already exposed root systems

Landscape-level or territorial management

Ownership, proprietorship, or caretaking responsibility

Kincentric belief system

Ceremonial harvesting, dissemination practices, and constraints against harvesting

Social controls of various types enacted over resource species, habitats, and territories; harvesting usually overseen by chiefs as part of inherited responsibility (see Blackman 1990; McIlwraith 1948; Suttles 1987b, 2005; Thornton 1999; and Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005; see also table 11-4 for examples)

“Resource” species also regarded as sentient relatives of humans, requiring respect and reciprocity with use; constraints against overharvesting or wastage (Thornton 1999; Turner and Berkes 2006)

First Fruits and First Roots ceremonies, diverse puberty or bereavement ceremonies, and taboos against certain types of harvesting by certain people at certain times effect constraints on and controls over resource use (Turner and Berkes 2006)

Sources: Based on compilations of Christine Joseph (Watta) (pers. comm., 1999), Daisy Sewid-Smith (pers. comm., 1994), Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1997), M.K. Anderson (2005), Bandringa (1999), Blackman (1990), Boas (1921, 1930, 1966), Bouchard and Kennedy (1990), Boyd (1999b), Collins (1974, 175), Compton (1993a, 1993b), Curtis (1915), A. Davis, Wilson, and Compton (1995), Deur (1998, 2000), Deur and Turner (2005), Drucker (1951), Gill (2005a, 2005b), Haeberlin and Gunther (1930), Hunn, Selam, and family (1990), Johnson (1997), Johnson Gottesfeld (1993), Kennedy and Bouchard (1983), Kimmerer and Lake (2001), Kuhnlein and Turner (1987, 1991), Lepofsky and Lertzman (2008), Lepofsky, Lertzman, et al. (2005), Mack and McClure (2002), McDonald (2003), Minore (1972), Norton (1979a), Peacock (1998), Peacock and Turner (2000), Richardson (1982), J.A. Ross (2011), Shebitz, Reichard, and Dunwiddy (2009), L.R. Smith (2008b), Stewart (1984), Stryd (1997), Suttles (1951a, 1951b, 1955, 1987b, 2005), Teit (1900, 1909), Thornton (1999, 2008); Turner (1987, 1995, 1997a, 1998, 1999, 2003a, 2004a, 2005), Turner and Berkes (2006), Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy (1980), Turner and Brown (2004), Turner and Clifton (2006), Turner, Deur, and Lepofsky (2013), Turner and Efrat (1982), Turner and Hebda (1990), Turner, Ignace, and Ignace (2000), Turner and Kuhnlein (1982, 1983), Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger (1985), Turner and Peacock (2005), Turner, Smith, and Jones (2005), Turner and Taylor (1972), Turner, Thomas, et al. (1983), and Turner, Thompson, et al. (1990).

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Table 11-4  |  Plant resources managed and sustained through various means by Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America Plant resource

Algae

Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) Red laver edible seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae and related spp.) Fungi and lichens

Black tree lichen, or wila (Bryoria fremontii) Pine mushroom (Tricholoma magnivelare), cottonwood mushroom (T. populinum), and other spp.

Management methods applied

Fronds harvested with herring spawn; picked from living plants; same kelp beds used generation after generation (Haida, Heiltsuk, other Northwest Coast peoples)

Special beds accessed for prime fishing lines; certain kelp beds owned (general, Haida, Ts’msyen, Ditidaht, Northwest Coast) Pulled off rocks when young, allowing base to regenerate; said to grow better with harvesting; two crops taken from same spots each season; patches used generation after generation (Haida, Ts’msyen, Kwakwaka’wakw, other Northwest Coast peoples)

Harvested only from certain species of conifers, at certain elevations; pulled off living trees with twisting poles, allowing base to regenerate (Interior Plateau peoples) Mature individuals cut at base; soil carefully replaced to protect those still growing (Stl’atl’imx, Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc, other Interior Plateau peoples)

Ferns and fern allies

Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa)

Licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhiza) Sword fern (Polystichum munitum) Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) Conifers

Amabilis fir (Abies amabilis) Grand fir (Abies grandis)

Partially harvested so remaining rootstock grows into new plant (widely used along Northwest Coast and inland along the Coast and Cascade Mountains)

Rhizomes partially harvested; the rest left to grow (general, Northwest Coast) Fronds for pit-cooking, matting, and ceremonial purposes harvested only a few from each plant to maintain plants (general, Northwest Coast)

Patches maintained by burning and clearing; some patches owned and inherited (general, Northwest Coast, especially western Washington prairies) Boughs, bark, and pitch harvested from living trees (general and widespread); edible inner bark partially removed so as not to kill tree (Kwakwaka’wakw, Ts’msyen, and others) Boughs, bark, and pitch harvested from living trees; pitch harvested over generations from the same tree (Kwakwaka’wakw, Coast Salish)

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Table 11-4 | continued Plant resource

Management methods applied

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa)

Boughs, bark, and pitch harvested from living trees (Interior Plateau, northern interior)

Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum)

Bow staves possibly cut from standing, living trees in Interior Plateau, as in Great Basin area and California; boughs cut from living trees for medicine, smudging, etc.; branches from living trees for bows (Interior Plateau)

Yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis)

Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) and white spruce (P. glauca) Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis)

Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta)

Bark harvested for weaving material; only partially harvested so as not to kill tree (widely, Northwest Coast)

Sheets of bark and roots harvested from living trees; only partially harvested so as not to kill tree; roots and pitch harvested from living trees (Interior Plateau, northern interior)

Roots harvested for basketry; only a few taken from a single tree in any one year; limbs and sapling trunks used for fish weirs; inner bark (food) and pitch (medicine, adhesive) harvested from individual living trees over generations (Haida, Tlingit, Ts’msyen, Kwakwaka’wakw, other Northwest Coast peoples)

Partial harvesting of inner bark (food) and pitch to keep tree alive (Haida, Gitxsan, other Northwest Coast peoples for pitch; Interior Plateau and northern interior peoples for food and pitch)

Western white pine (Pinus monticola)

Sheets of bark harvested for baskets and canoes from living trees (Ktunaxa, Lakes, Secwepemc)

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Bark for fuel cut from standing, living trees; self-pruned limbs from living trees used extensively for fuel; branches cut from living trees for pit-cooking, bedding, floor covering, and sweathouses (widespread, Vancouver Island, southern coast, Interior Plateau)

Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa)

Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia)

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

Pitch and edible inner bark harvested from standing, living trees (Interior Plateau peoples); fallen needles harvested for pit-cooking and insulation

Bark removed for medicine from branches or partial harvesting from trunks of living trees; wood cut from standing living trees for bows and other implements; called “begging from” the tree (Kwakwaka’wakw, Halkomelem, other Northwest Coast peoples)

Bark sheets, inner bark, and planks taken from standing, living trees; also branches and roots for rope and basketry; limbs and sapling trunks used for fish weirs; “groves” managed over generations for canoes and bark production; stands “owned” by families/lineages (general, Northwest /continued

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Table 11-4 | continued Plant resource

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)

Flowering plants

Vine maple (Acer circinatum)

Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum) Bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum)

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) Sweetflag (Acorus americanus) Nodding onion (Allium cernuum)

Management methods applied

Coast, Interior Plateau); seedlings said to have been given as gifts from coastal to interior Nlaka’pamux at gatherings, like in Botanie Valley (Jim Stafford, pers. comm., 2008)

Bark harvested for food (inner bark) from standing, living trees; branches and sapling trunks cut for herring egg harvesting, lining acorn-leaching pits, and reinforcing weirs; poles cut for weirs and twisting eelgrass (general, Northwest Coast) Branches and wood harvested from living trees, for snowshoes and other implements (mainland Halkomelem, Lower Stl’atl’imx, among others)

Branches, wood, and bark harvested from living trees for weaving, snowshoes, and other implements (Interior Plateau) Bark and wood harvested from living trees for weaving, paddles, spindle whorls, and other implements, as well as for fuel (Coast Salish) Stems and leaves harvested for medicine, tea, and food storage from perennial plants (widespread, coast and interior)

Evidently transplanted (e.g., to Salmon River estuary at Salmon Arm) Patches maintained by burning and partial harvesting; possibly transplanted (Interior Plateau, Tsilhqot’in)

Mountain alder, green alder (Alnus incana, A. viridis)

Wood and bark harvested from living trees for use as fuel, tools, and dye (widespread, Interior Plateau, and northern Interior)

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)

Individual bushes pruned and burned; maintained by landscape burning; occasionally transplanted (Nlaka’pamux, Nisga’a); many varieties recognized (Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux, other Interior Plateau peoples)

Red alder (Alnus rubra)

Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) Arbutus, or Pacific madrone (Arbutus menziesii)

Limbs and sapling trunks used for fish weirs; wood and bark harvested from living trees for use as fuel, tools, and dye (Straits Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, other Northwest Coast peoples)

Patches maintained by continual harvesting; said to grow taller and straighter in tended patches; transplanted (Interior Plateau, Tsilhqot’in) Wood spared as fuel and for any other use by Saanich for spiritual reasons (because of its service to people during the Great Flood); leaves and bark harvested for medicine from living trees (Straits Salish)

Management and Sustainability  |  185

Table 11-4 | continued Plant resource

Management methods applied

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)

Leaves for smoking and medicine harvested from living plants (widespread, Interior Plateau, recently Northwest Coast); transplanted (Nisga’a) (Emma Nyce, pers. comm., 2013)

Silverweed (Argentina anserina)

Roots spread around ritually following harvest (Tsilhqot’in)

Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata)

Selectively harvested by size; “mother plants” and very young plants spared, only daughter plants harvested; root tips regrow into new plants; achenes scattered during harvesting for food (Secwepemc and other Interior Plateau peoples)

Pacific silverweed (Argentina egedii)

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera) Edible camas (Camassia leichtlinii, C. quamash)

Slough sedge, or basket sedge (Carex obnupta) Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata) Pacific hemlockparsley (Conioselinum gmelinii) Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) Hazelnut (Corylus cornuta)

One of the estuarine tidal marsh garden species; tended, weeded, roots selectively harvested, and propagules replanted; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Haida); plants transplanted (e.g., Knight Inlet) (general, Northwest Coast)

Bark for baskets, lining cache pits, burials, etc. removed from standing, living trees without killing the tree (general, Tsilhqot’in, Ulkatcho Dakelth, Dene [Athabaskan], Secwepemc, Okanagan, Ktunaxa)

Camas prairies maintained by burning (Vancouver Island, western Washington, Willamette Valley); patches cleared and weeded; bulbs selectively harvested by size; ground tilled; turf replaced after digging; patches “owned” by families (Coast Salish, southern Interior Plateau); occasionally bulbs transplanted (Nuu-chah-nulth); often harvested in summer season when seeds are ripe and easily scattered Leaves for basketry taken from same site over and over; said to grow better with “cleaning” and routine harvesting; only leaves from vegetative plants taken (Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, Makah)

Patches maintained by fall landscape burning (Interior Plateau, Tsilhqot’in); corms selectively harvested; turf replaced after digging (general, interior); mature stems and handfuls of corms ritually scattered around areas without the plant to extend their range (Tsilhqot’in) Roots selectively harvested and smaller roots replanted; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (Kwakwaka’wakw)

Branches “pruned off” for use in basketry and sweat lodge construction; inner bark harvested for medicine, from living bushes (mainly Interior Plateau)

Individual bushes pruned and burned for nut production and use of withes for rope, arrows, etc.; growth improved /continued

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Table 11-4 | continued Plant resource

Black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii)

Silverberry, wolf willow (Elaeagnus commutata) Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) Yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum)

Management methods applied

by landscape burning and clearing (Kalapuya, Nlaka’pamux, other Interior Plateau peoples); patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans; occasionally transplanted (Ts’msyen) Transplanted to garden in late 1800s (Nisga’a) (Emma Nyce, pers. comm., 2013) Inner bark harvested in quantity from living bushes in particular designated patches (Nlaka’pamux, other Interior peoples)

Shoots for eating and stems for fibre harvested routinely from same patches; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (Haida, Ts’msyen, Stl’atl’imx, among others) Patches maintained by landscape burning (Interior Plateau); bulbs selectively harvested by size (indicated by multiple flowers on a stalk); harvested in season when seeds are ripe and easily scattered; propagules from bulbs replanted; turf replaced after digging (Secwepemc)

Seaside strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis)

Strawberry patches owned and weeded; spirits of the berries ritually “fed” with salmon eggs (Tlingit)

Cascara (Frangula purshiana)

Medicinal bark harvested in strips so as not to kill the tree (Northwest Coast, Interior Plateau); quite a few other trees were also harvested like this (Turner and Hebda 1990)

Wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca, F. virginiana)

Chocolate lily (Fritillaria affinis)

Northern rice­ root (Fritillaria camschatcensis) Salalberry (Gaultheria shallon)

Sea milkwort (Glaux maritima)

Rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera oblongifolia)

Patches maintained by landscape burning and clearing (Coast Salish, Vancouver Island, Gulf Islands)

Bulbs selectively harvested; bulblets scattered with tilling; patches maintained by landscape burning (Coast Salish, Vancouver Island, Gulf Islands; Interior Plateau); handfuls of the bulbs ritually scattered around after harvesting (Tsilhqot’in)

One of the estuarine tidal marsh garden species; tended and weeded, bulbs selectively harvested, and propagules replanted; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (Kwakwaka’wakw, Ts’msyen, other Northwest Coast peoples); transplanted to new areas (e.g., Knight Inlet, Robintown) Patches tended by burning (Makah, Nuxalk, other Northwest Coast peoples); harvesting berries by their stems said to increase future productivity; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (general, Northwest Coast); possibly transplanted (Heiltsuk)

Prime patches “owned” by chiefs (Kwakwaka’wakw)

Plants for medicine selectively harvested to leave smaller plantlets growing (Quw’utsun’ Halkomelem)

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Table 11-4 | continued Plant resource

Management methods applied

Cow-parsnip (Heracleum maximum)

Edible shoots selectively harvested from particular patches; picking season prolonged by harvesting; patches used over generations (widespread, Northwest Coast, northern and southern interior)

Roundleaf alumroot (Heuchera cylindrica) Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor) Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva) Giant wild rye (Leymus cinereus)

Canby’s lovage, or licorice root (Ligusticum canbyi)

Tiger lily, or Columbia lily (Lilium columbianum) Canby’s biscuitroot (Lomatium canbyi) Desert parsley (Lomatium macrocarpum) Indian celery, or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule)

Nootka lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis) Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus)

Roots for medicine selectively harvested from patches to leave smaller plantlets growing (Secwepemc)

Shoots harvested from living, growing shrubs; pruning said to produce straighter stems for arrows, needles, digging sticks, etc. (Straits, Squamish and neighbouring Coast Salish, Lower Stl’atl’imx) Roots selectively harvested and propagules replanted; roots transplanted (Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux, Ktunaxa, other Interior Plateau peoples)

Leaves and stems cut from perennial rootstocks in particular patches that are used over years (Okanagan, Nlaka’pamux)

Roots harvested selectively, leaving small segment in ground to regrow (Secwepemc) Size and quality of bulbs maintained by landscape burning; selectively harvested from known, delineated patches; weeded and possibly transplanted; prime patches owned (Skagit Valley, Secwepemc, Tsilhqot’in); handfuls of the bulbs ritually scattered around after harvesting (Tsilhqot’in) Various species of Lomatium known from Washington State and Oregon; edible roots selectively harvested (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Hunn and French 1981) Edible roots selectively harvested; only “female” vegetative plants harvested for their roots (Okanagan, Interior Plateau)

Green leaves picked selectively in spring from patches; plants perennial and soon regenerate (e.g., like asparagus); seeds harvested with care, leaving enough to fall to the ground and reseed; patches maintained for generations (Tsilhqot’in, Stl’atl’imx, Secwepemc, and others for greens; Coast Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, and others for seeds)

One of the estuarine tidal marsh garden species; tended and weeded; roots selectively harvested from living perennial plants; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuxalk); transplanted (e.g., Knight Inlet)

Leaves for berry drying, pit-cooking, and food preparation routinely harvested from living plants and patches (general, Northwest Coast, southern and eastern Interior Plateau); Deer said to keep his skunk-cabbage “just like a garden” in Haida story (Swanton 1908, 446)

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Table 11-4 | continued Plant resource

Management methods applied

False lily-of-thevalley (Maianthemum dilatatum)

Plants known to have been transplanted for medicinal use (Tlingit); leaves for medicinal purposes harvested from perennial rhizomes (general, Northwest Coast)

Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca)

Trees tended, pruned, lopped, and transplanted; crabapple stands “owned” by chiefs and families (Kwakwaka’wakw, Haisla, Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and other Northwest Coast peoples)

Wild tobacco, or coyote tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata)

Evidently cultivated from seed in Interior Plateau; grown in prehistoric times (Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan, Ktunaxa)

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus)

Stems harvested for medicine (inner bark) by pruning from “daughter” shoots; mother shoots left to regrow; cut shoots replanted (Halkomelem and other Northwest Coast peoples); constraints against harvesting flowering or fruiting stems or more than four stems (Ts’msyen, Haida)

Northwest Coast tobacco, or Haida tobacco (Nicotiana quadrivalvis var.)

Cultivated from seed capsules on northern coast; grown in gardens in prehistoric times (Haida, Tlingit, Ts’msyen); apparently obtained centuries ago from Native Californians, perhaps via Columbia River trading

Wild caraway, or yampah (Perideridia gairdneri)

Apparently selectively harvested; one of the prairie root species improved by landscape burning (Interior Plateau, Vancouver Island, western Washington)

Reed canarygrass (Phalaris arundinacea), reed grass (Phragmites australis), and other perennial grass spp.

Stems harvested from perennial plants in given patches for basketry decoration (Coast Salish) and mats (Interior Plateau)

Mock-orange (Philadelphus lewisii)

Bushes trimmed to produce long, straight shoots for arrows and mat needles (Straits and neighbouring Coast Salish)

Bitter cherry (Prunus emarginata) and pin cherry (P. pensylvanica)

Outer bark harvested in strips from standing, living trees for basketry decoration, cordage, etc. (Coast Salish, Interior Plateau)

Cottonwood (Populus balsamifera)

Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)

Garry oak, or Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana)

Inner bark harvested for food from standing, living trees (Nuxalk, Stl’atl’imx); bark sheets cut from living trees for lining cache pits, buckets, etc.; outer bark cut from living trees for high-quality fuel for smoking salmon (Gitxsan); self-pruned limbs from living trees used extensively for fuel; seedlings transplanted (Heiltsuk)

Bushes tended, pruned, and cleaned of tent caterpillars; different varieties recognized (Secwepemc, other Interior Plateau peoples)

Oak savannahs maintained by landscape burning (Coast Salish, Kalapuya); possibly trees tended in the past for acorn /continued

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Table 11-4 | continued Plant resource

Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum)

Trapper’s tea (Rhododendron neoglandulosum)

Management methods applied

production (as with California oaks) (M.K. Anderson 2005); trees possibly relocated, planted, or transplanted (Lepofsky 2004; Norton 1979a) Leaves and shoots selectively harvested from living plants for beverage tea and medicine; plants weeded by some (Ts’msyen, Makah, other Northwest Coast peoples)

Leaves and shoots selectively harvested from living plants for beverage tea and medicine (Interior Plateau)

Wild gooseberry (Ribes sp.)

Patches cleaned and pruned (and possibly burned) to make them more productive (Ts’msyen)

Northern black currant (Ribes hudsonianum)

Patches cleaned and pruned (and possibly burned) to make them more productive (Ts’msyen)

Nagoonberry (Rubus arcticus)

Berry patches owned; spirits of the berries ritually “fed” with salmon eggs (Tlingit)

Gray currant, or stink currant (Ribes bracteosum)

Trailing black currant (Ribes laxiflorum)

Wild raspberry, or American red raspberry (Rubus idaeus)

Bushes pruned back after harvest; productive patches “owned” by chiefs and families (Kwakwaka’wakw, Ts’msyen, other Northwest Coast peoples)

Productive patches “owned” by chiefs and families; possibly maintained by fire (Kwakwaka’wakw, other Northwest Coast peoples)

Grows more productively after landscape burning (Stl’atl’imx, Interior Plateau, possibly northern interior)

Blackcap (Rubus leucodermis)

Patches maintained by landscape burning (Straits Salish, Halkomelem, Stl’atl’imx, Interior Plateau)

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)

Green shoots cut from plants and regenerate later; berry bushes pruned after harvesting to enhance production (Halkomelem, Kwakwaka’wakw, other Northwest Coast peoples); patches “owned” by chiefs and families (Kwakwaka’wakw and others)

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)

Green shoots cut from plants and regenerate later (widespread, Northwest Coast, Interior Plateau); grows more productively after landscape burning

Trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus)

Patches maintained by landscape burning (Straits Salish, Halkomelem)

Sandbar willow (Salix exigua)

Bark and stems cut from living plants; regenerate in following years (Stl’atl’imx, other Interior Plateau peoples)

Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia)

Patches owned, tended, weeded, and cleared; tubers transplanted into new areas; possibly grown over cobble base to keep tubers shallow (Halkomelem, Fraser Valley, Columbia River Valley)

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Table 11-4 | continued Plant resource

Management methods applied

Willows (Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra and other spp.)

Bark and stems cut from living plants for cordage and netting; regenerate in following years (Straits Salish and others)

Tule, or hardstem bulrush (Schoenoplectus acutus)

Stems routinely harvested from given patches used over generations; possibly transplanted (Coast Salish, Interior Plateau)

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa)

Olney’s “three-square” (Schoenoplectus americanus)

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis)

Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii)

Cattail (Typha latifolia)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica)

Alaska blueberry (Vaccinium alaskaense) Dwarf bilberry, or mountain blueberry (Vaccinium caespitosum)

Black mountain huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum)

Bark and stems harvested from living trees; shoots occasionally transplanted (Ts’msyen); prime patches “owned” by clans and chiefs (Kwakwaka’wakw)

Plants routinely harvested from given patches; known to have been transplanted (Coast Salish, Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, among others)

Patches maintained by landscape burning; bushes pruned; berries scattered; occasionally transplanted (Tlingit, Ts’msyen, Coast Salish, Interior Plateau)

One of the estuarine tidal marsh root garden species; tended and weeded, rhizomes selectively harvested, and propagules replanted; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, other Northwest Coast peoples); transplanted to new areas (Nuxalk: Kimsquit to Kitlope)

Leaves and stalks routinely harvested from particular patches; rhizomes sometimes transplanted to new areas (e.g., Hesquiaht Nuu-chah-nulth); patches possibly burned, as they were in the boreal forest; seed fluff harvested for stuffing and diapers (widespread, Coast and Interior Salish, Ditidaht, among others)

Stems for fibre routinely harvested from particular patches; rhizomes known to have been transplanted to new areas; always found at ancient village sites (widespread, Northwest Coast); constraints against harvesting until fruiting is finished (Ts’msyen)

Productivity improved by burning; bushes pruned, fertilized, and sometimes transplanted; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans; transplanted to new areas (Northwest Coast)

Productivity improved by burning; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans; transplanted to new areas (Interior Plateau, Northwest Coast, Olympic Peninsula)

Productivity improved by burning; bushes pruned, fertilized, and sometimes transplanted; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans; transplanted to new areas (Northwest Coast, Interior Plateau)

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Table 11-4 | continued Plant resource

Management methods applied

Velvetleaf blueberry, or Canada blueberry (Vaccinium myrtilloides)

Productivity improved by burning; bushes pruned and transplanted to new areas (e.g., Ditidaht, Nuu-chah-nulth, Sechelt, Sliammon)

Evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum)

Maintained by burning and pruning (Makah, possibly other Northwest Coast peoples)

Oval-leaf blueberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium)

Bog cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos)

Red huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium) Bog blueberry (Vaccinium uliginosum) Mountain valerian (Valeriana sitchensis) False hellebore (Veratrum viride)

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule) Beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax) Eelgrass (Zostera marina)

Productivity improved by burning; bushes pruned, fertilized, and sometimes transplanted; berries “scattered”; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (Northwest Coast, Interior Plateau, Ts’msyen)

Cranberry patches “owned” and harvesting controlled (Katzie, Haida, others); productivity improved by burning (Olympic Peninsula prairies, Ts’msyen) (Gill 2005a, 2005b; M.K. Anderson 2009)

Productivity improved by burning; bushes pruned, fertilized, and sometimes transplanted; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (widespread, Kwakwaka’wakw, Northwest Coast)

Productivity improved by burning; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans; occasionally transplanted (Northwest Coast – e.g., Sliammon, Makah) Medicinal roots selectively harvested; often regenerated from fragments left in the ground (Secwepemc and other Interior Plateau peoples) Medicinal roots selectively harvested; often regenerated from fragments left in the ground (widespread, coast and interior) Sometimes transplanted to new areas and “gardens”; bushes pruned to renew growth; patches “owned” by chiefs and families or clans (Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, Ts’msyen, other Northwest Coast peoples) Leaves routinely harvested from particular patches; burned over periodically to enhance productivity and improve quality of leaves for basketry (Makah, Quileute, Coast Salish of Washington) Harvesting rhizomes through moderate disturbance said to enhance growth and palatability (Kwakwaka’wakw, other Northwest Coast peoples)

Note: For species found growing in the Robintown “orchard garden” near Kitsumkalum, see below in this chapter. Sources: See table 11-3.

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herbivory, and intra- and interspecies competition and symbiosis. These processes are incorporated into the following discussions of different aspects of management, as are the associated culturally mediated processes of narrative and ceremony, settlement and seasonal movement, food-processing methods, social stratification, governance, division of labour, trade, and affinal exchange, among others. Species- or Population-Level Management Annual Species

The only annual species that has been documented as being grown in plots similar to the European style of gardening – and therefore clearly recognized as “gardening” by the European newcomers – is Northwest Coast, or Haida, tobacco.27 Evidently extinct since the 1880s, this tobacco had large, globular capsules and relatively small leaves, and it has been suggested to be a distinct species or variety that was grown, used, and traded by the Haida and Tlingit long before contact with Europeans. A number of European explorers attest to its presence under cultivation, both in Haida territory, such as at Cumshewa and Skedans, and in Tlingit lands, such as around Yakutat Bay (Curtis 1916; Emmons 1991; Newcombe 1897–1916; Turner 2004a; Turner and Taylor 1972). It was also known to Ts’msyen peoples but was apparently obtained by trade. Women were the usual cultivators of Northwest Coast tobacco. They used several recognized “gardening” practices in its production (Emmons 1991; Turner 2004a): • ownership of the gardens (designated only for growing tobacco) by individual women, with the size of the garden in proportion to the owner’s rank; • clearing and weeding of square patches of ground for the gardens; • fencing the gardens with stakes of crabapple lashed with cedar withes and other such barriers, for security against both people and dogs; • sowing “seeds” (actually, apparently the large, spherical fruiting capsules) usually around the end of April, with each capsule being placed on a small hill of earth; • mulching and fertilizing with rotten wood (which was sometimes mixed with the capsules when planted); and • harvesting the plants all together when they had reached the right stage and then drying and curing the plants carefully on cedar frames over small fires of alder. Notably, July, known as us whook disi (“native tobacco drying moon”), was the first month of the Chilkat Tlingit calendar (Emmons 1991, 462). For the Haida,

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however, the plants were apparently harvested at the beginning of September, and at this time, rotten wood was put into the ground to enrich the soil for the next year. These techniques are similar to those used by Native Californians for growing their tobacco (Donn Todt, pers. comm., 2003) and, significantly, are quite analogous to the practices used in the early contact period for growing potatoes, which the Haida in particular became famous for producing and trading (Turner and Taylor 1972). Possibly the tobacco cultivation techniques – and the original “seeds” of Northwest Coast tobacco itself – were derived in prehistoric times through trade at the mouth of the Columbia River, at The Dalles, or as far south as California and were brought, either via a coastal route or northward through the interior, to Haida and Tlingit territory (Meilleur 1979). Some of the origin stories for this species place its origin with the “Stick” Indians, or Dene (Athabaskans), up in the interior (Turner and Taylor 1972). A second species of tobacco (N. attenuata), used by the Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc, Okanagan, Ktunaxa, and other peoples of the Interior Plateau, being cured and smoked in pipes of antler, steatite, or wood, may also have been cultivated, but its status as a cultivated plant is rather tenuous.28 With the possible exception of chenopods (Chenopodium spp.) – annuals whose seeds are found in copious quantities at diverse archaeological sites of the Interior Plateau (Lepofsky 2004)29 – most of the other plant species that can be considered to have been cultivated, tended, or managed in some way within the study region are perennials, and the associated management activities would have taken into account the previously discussed abilities of these plants to regenerate their tissues or to regrow entire plants from vegetative propagules – mainly root fragments or underground stems – as well as from seed. Partial Harvesting: Perennials and “Keeping It Living”

As previously described, many of the foods and materials people obtained from plants were partially harvested from the plant, leaving most of the plant intact, or at least with sufficient meristematic tissues to enable it to heal or regrow. The most widely recognized form of partial harvesting is in the removal of bark from various types of trees, as already described in this chapter and in chapters 5, 6, and 7 (see also Turner, Ari, et al. 2009). Species whose “dead” outer bark was taken off, still leaving the viable inner bark to protect the tree, include paper birch, bitter cherry, and pin cherry. In addition, the outer bark of oldgrowth Douglas-fir (Mathews and Dady 2008) and cottonwood (Mary Hanson, pers. comm., 2009) was removed from living trees for use as hot-burning fuel.30 Species whose inner as well as outer bark was required and therefore only partially harvested, so as not to kill the tree, include fibrous resource trees like western redcedar and yellow-cedar, edible cambium species like lodgepole pine and western hemlock, and dye- or medicinal-barked species like red alder, Pacific crabapple, cascara, Pacific yew, and subalpine fir. Additionally, pitch-producing

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11-4  |  Mallets made of yew wood (Taxus brevifolia). Since yew has the capacity to regenerate from cut stumps, branches and even trunk sections could be harvested without killing the parent tree, as long as it was done with care. These Gitga’at mallets are used for pounding dried halibut.

trees like spruce, hemlock, and grand fir were sometimes cut or burned in one spot to activate pitch production. Some of these pitch trees were employed continuously for such purposes over many generations, in a similar way to how the eastern sugar maples (Acer saccharum and other spp.) serve as an annual source of sap for maple syrup. The pitch was variously chewed for pleasure, used as waterproofing or adhesive for implements and containers, or prepared for medicinal use. Individual Sitka spruce and grand fir trees that have been used for eighty years or more, and are still used today, are known from certain camps and villages. Only on occasions when logs were required for construction or as fuel, or when an area was being cleared for settlement or some other purpose, was an entire tree felled.31 Whole planks were cut from standing western redcedar trees without killing them, and large limbs, branches, or roots were also routinely harvested from living trees and shrubs for basketry, cordage, nets, or other

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purposes, always leaving a sufficient part of the plant behind to enable it to survive and continue growing (figure 11-4). Edible green shoots from plants like fireweed, thimbleberry, and salmonberry, as well as cordage, basketry, and mat materials from cattail, tule, Indian-hemp, stinging nettle, beargrass, and slough sedge (Carex obnupta), can be harvested sustainably from perennial rootstocks, either at the beginning of the growing season for edible plant parts or when the season’s growth is mature for the material plants. In all cases, the plants are often said to grow better and to be of higher quality in the years following harvesting than if left unharvested to die back naturally. Edible seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae), too, was said to flourish with harvesting.32 Similarly, partial harvesting of edible rhizomes like springbank clover and eelgrass, and of medicinal “roots” like licorice fern and showy aster (Eurybia conspicuua) rhizomes, allowed these species to regenerate readily, as long as the harvesters removed only limited quantities and did not take too much at any one time (Cullis-Suzuki 2007). Pruning and Coppicing

Another form of partial harvesting, but one combined with a process that intentionally stimulated regrowth and production of flowers and fruits, was the practice of breaking off the branches – essentially pruning – of berry bushes. This technique was widespread and was often undertaken by women during and after harvesting berries or fruits. As Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm., 1997) commented, “A lot of people think we never touched the wild … berries. But we did. We cultivated it. We pruned it … Especially that gwadems [red huckleberries], when they finished picking the gwadems, you know, they pruned them. They break the tops off. Salmonberries too.” Breaking off berry-laden branches of soapberry, red huckleberry, and other berries had a dual function. Not only did it increase the succeeding years’ growth and berry production, but it was also a means of ensuring that elders could share in the harvest. Once removed, the branches could be carried by the armload to a convenient location where the grandmothers (and very young children, too), unable to manoeuvre over the rough ground and undergrowth, could sit and pick off the berries. Other species for which there has been specific oral evidence of pruning include saskatoon berry, Pacific crabapple, gray currant (Ribes bracteosum), blueberries, and highbush cranberry (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1997; M.K. Anderson 2005; Compton 1993b; Johnson Gottesfeld 1993; Peacock and Turner 2000; Turner and Peacock 2005; see also table 11-4). M. Kat Anderson (1993a, 1993b, 1996, 2005) has demonstrated, working with Native Californians, that pruning and coppicing enhance the production of long, straight, flexible shoots (withes) for basketry, cordage, fish traps, and other purposes. Although there is little current evidence of this practice for First

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Peoples in northwestern North America, it is likely that it was once widespread. Stl’atl’imx elder Sam Mitchell (pers. comm., 1974) demonstrated how the long stems of “rope willow” (Salix exigua) were twisted into rope while still growing and then cut off at the base (see chapter 6). This would have had the effect of coppicing in the same manner as Native Californians did for this species, producing immense quantities of high quality withes for basketry. In the Secwepemc area of the Interior Plateau, Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1996) remembered her mother looking at tall, bushy saskatoon berry bushes and saying, “Yes, it’s time to cut it down.” Then she would cut or burn the bush right back to the ground. In the year following, long, straight, flexible sucker shoots would arise from the rootstock. These were ideal for crafting the rims of birch-bark baskets, making arrows, and other purposes. However, only a few of these young, straight shoots were cut from any one bush. The rest were left to grow and develop, and within just a couple of years, the coppiced bushes would have regrown and would be covered with large, plump, juicy berries. After perhaps eight or ten years, they would again become too large and bushy, and berry production would decline; then they would be cut back again (ibid.). Through this technique of always creating young, vigorous growth, these bushes could be kept at a relatively young, productive stage for decades (M.K. Anderson 2005). Other types of shrubs were also pruned back for material production. Some implements, like digging sticks, arrows, and mat-making needles from oceanspray, were considered best if made from older stems; the first-year shoots were too thin and soft. In this case, the bushes might be pruned but the wood used in multiyear cycles (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 1999). Hazelnut, mock-orange, willows, and Rocky Mountain maple are other species whose shoots, splints, and bark were used for basketry and implements and whose quality and productivity were probably improved through coppicing or pruning, as was the case for their equivalents tended by Native Californians (M.K. Anderson 2005; Deur and Turner 2005). Burning Individual Plants

Berry bushes were sometimes managed by burning them,33 as indicated in the Kwakwakaw’akw “prayer” or address to berry bushes as recorded in Boas (1930, 203, emphasis added): I have come, Supernatural Ones, you, Long-Life-Makers, that I may take you, for that is the reason why you have come, brought by your creator, that you may come and satisfy me; you Supernatural Ones; and this, that you do not blame me for what I do to you when I set fire to you the way it is done by my root (ancestor) who set fire to you in his manner when you get old on the ground that you may bear much fruit. Look! I come now dressed with my

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large basket and my small basket that you may go into it, Healing-Women; you Supernatural Ones. I mean this, that you may not be evilly disposed towards me, friends. That you may only treat me well. In this case, the type of berry bush referred to is unspecified, but it is apparent that the words are from a female berry picker, and she speaks to the supernatural character attributed to this resource, addressing the bushes as “Supernatural Ones” and “Long-Life-Makers” and the berries as “Healing-Women,” “Supernatural Ones,” and “friends.” Hazelnut bushes were also burned back periodically, according to Nlaka’pamux plant specialist Annie York (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990), as they also were by the Kalapuya in the Willamette Valley (Boyd 1999b). After just a few years, these treated bushes would produce an abundance of nuts, with the enhanced productivity continuing for several more years, until the bushes were deemed ready to be burned back once again. Selection by Size, Age, or Reproductive Stage

Selective harvesting of plants by their status, state, or size was an important technique related to a plant’s reproduction abilities and may potentially lead to genetic selection of traits such as early fruiting, larger bulbs and roots, sweeter, larger berries, and other desirable attributes. For example, it was common to harvest root vegetables such as edible camas, yellow glacier lily, spring beauty, springbank clover, Pacific silverweed, northern riceroot, and Nootka lupine at their fruiting or postfruiting stage, when the leaves had started to fade and die back. In these situations, harvesting tended to result in scattering of ripe seeds since most of these species, having dry capsules, are well adapted to “shattering” or releasing their seeds when the capsules are brushed or bumped, or even when blown by the wind. Thus, at the same time as one generation of plants was being removed, the ground was being prepared for new growth through digging, tilling, and weeding, and the seeds for the next generations were being scattered or dropped into ideal niches for germination and growth. Alan Marshall (1977, 161) emphasizes the importance of timing of the harvest for the Nez Perce in terms of regeneration of the resource species: The conservation of these plants was affected by the timing of their collection. Many of the root foods, especially important ones as /q’eq’í.t/ [q’eq’éet] [Canby’s biscuitroot, Lomatium canbyi], /‘qámsit/ [kouse, Lomatium cous], and /qém’es/ [camas, Camassia quamash], were not collected in quantity until their seeds had ripened. This was important in maintaining the stands of these plants which thrive in disturbed soils. By digging after the seeds ripened, the people ensured that plant seeds would be distributed in “prepared” seedbeds. This may have been especially critical for camas, which is restricted to habitats with poorly aerated soils. Increased

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aeration resulting from digging probably increased nutrient cycling rates. Furthermore, not all /qém’es/ were collected; small bulbs were left in the soil. Some people distinguished between “male” and “female” bulbs, and utilized only female bulbs. The depth of disturbance was about 12 to 18 inches [30 to 45 centimetres]: the largest, most prized bulbs being found deepest. Disturbance was extensive. Women used digging sticks – /tuqes/ – to loosen the soil, then sorted through the clods, breaking them up by hand, to gather the appropriate bulbs. By harvesting after the seeds were ripe, the people were sure of getting tasty roots. This timing was important since stored nutrients are somewhat depleted through the fruiting process. Prior to seed maturity, the root tissue can be soft, somewhat spongy, and flavourless. Once the seed has set, however, the root gains a finer texture and flavour and probably also has a higher nutritional value (see Loewen 1998). In situations when the ground was burned over after the harvest, the seeds would already have been shed and many would have been lying protected from the fire under the soil or settled into crevices that would then have caught any nutrient-rich ash washed into the soil by succeeding rains (Beckwith 2004). Root size was also a factor in management strategies. Notably, for arrowleaved balsamroot in particular, the medium-sized taproots were the ones selected for harvest. The gigantic “mother” roots – which can be as large as one’s arm and produce as many as forty to fifty flower heads – were left in the ground, and only the middle-sized, or carrot-sized, “daughter” roots were dug for pit-cooking and eating (Aimee August, pers. comm., 1991; Peacock 1998). In this way and for this species, the most productive plants (in terms of flower and seed production) continued to grow and generate large quantities of achenes. Similarly, the largest bulbs of camas (Camassia spp.) were said not to taste as good as those of slightly smaller size, so they were left behind in the harvest.34 The same was said by some for the largest corms of spring beauty, or mountain potato; Patrick Lulua (pers. comm., 2003) observed that if the corms become really big, they go hollow inside and then are not good to eat any more. Instead, people selected the corms that were between about 2 and 3 centimetres across, leaving the largest ones behind. The smallest, youngest roots, bulbs, and corms of balsamroot, camas, and mountain potato respectively were also either left in the ground during digging or replanted (as is done with most of the edible “root” species) so that a continuous crop would be produced as the younger individuals matured and themselves became ready to harvest after a few years. This type of multiyear rotation of harvest, coupled with age selection, was an effective way to sustain a root resource. For the edible root masru (“Indian potato,” Hedysarum alpinum), the Kotzebue Inuit, just north of the study area in Alaska, harvested the plants based on their

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age as a way of perpetuating the populations; fast-growing, medium- to smallsized clumps usually had the best roots – white, crisp, sweet, tender, and of good size, which is 2.2 centimetres in diameter and 30 to 45 centimetres long: “That first year we had easy digging in the loose, sandy soil of an old river channel. Only masru plants grew there, in clumps of all ages and sizes. We didn’t dig every plant. Only a third of these were the proper age. This left older plants to re-seed the garden” (A. Jones 1983, 117). In terms of vegetative reproduction, given the common practice of replanting propagules that were separated from the bulbs as they were dug, in the case of species such as riceroot and yellow glacier lily, and given that plants were selected for large bulbs (i.e., multiflowered glacier lilies and large, tall riceroots), replanting the same genetic stock might tend to result in increasingly large and vigorous plants being perpetuated (see Reedy-Maschner and Maschner 2012) – a proposition admittedly hard to test. For berries, intensive picking almost invariably results in a scattering of some of the berries under the bushes, particularly with species like soapberries and huckleberries – which were picked by hitting the branches or raking the fingers through the branches – but also with saskatoon berries, raspberries, thimbleberries, salmonberries, and most other fruits. If berries from bushes that produce the largest, sweetest-tasting berries are the ones selected for picking, the picking process itself – which leaves some of these behind on the ground – might ensure that the desired high-quality strains are perpetuated. Digging, Tilling, and Weeding

Digging up the soil in the process of root harvesting (either for edible “roots” or for roots as materials for weaving or cordage) results in a loosening and aeration of the soil, which in the immediate and succeeding years allows for better regrowth of the roots and propagules left behind in the soil. Digging and tilling also allows easy removal of unwanted grasses or other “weedy” plants, which gives a further advantage to the desired species. The Tlingit of Glacier Bay weeded their seaside strawberry patches of unwanted brush that might grow up and advance the successional stage to shrub or forest cover, when strawberries would be shaded out (Thornton 1999). Camas prairies of southern Vancouver Island were cleared of bushes and tree seedlings for similar purposes: to maintain the open areas most conducive to camas production and to prevent these areas from being taken over by woods (Christopher Paul, cited in Babcock, 1967; Beckwith 2004; Turner and Hebda 2012). Sometimes, weeding of a root-harvesting area was undertaken during different occasions and seasons than the actual harvest, such as in the early spring, giving a competitive advantage to the camas, springbank clover, riceroot,

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or wapato over the growing season, before harvesting in the summer or fall (McDonald 2003; Turner and Peacock 2005).35 Digging and tilling of the soil – and production of the edible roots themselves – were easiest if the soil was sandy and loamy, without too much clay or too many rocks. Therefore, these practices were usually combined with the selection of sites for enhancement that had the right kind of soils and a good moisture regime. Elders like Tsilhqot’in plant harvester Minnie Charleyboy (pers. comm., 2003) have said that picking and digging spring beauty corms, or mountain potatoes, makes them grow better. Long ago, she said, when everyone was digging them, they were much larger than you can find them today. She suspected that overgrazing by cattle had had an impact on their size, but the lack of digging and harvesting in recent years was also a factor. She had been coming to Potato Mountain to harvest these corms for over fifty years. Her family would start harvesting these “potatoes” at lower elevations in early June and then move up into the mountains in early July to continue the harvest. The Tsilhqot’in also burned over areas of the mountainsides from time to time to increase the productivity and size of mountain potatoes and other roots (Mabel Solomon, pers. comm., 2003). Replanting Propagules

As well as partial harvesting of rhizomes and other plant resources (a practice that allows the remaining parts to continue to grow and regenerate), people also systematically and purposefully replanted parts of the plants as they were harvesting or after the harvest was finished. Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm., 1996) and Dr Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1996) described this process for northern riceroot and yellow glacier lily respectively. Both of these elders had the opportunity of harvesting plants with their grandmothers, back in the 1920s to 1940s, and they learned many plant management approaches and practices from them. It was Adam Dick’s job – as a boy of around eight or nine years working with his grandmother and mother at their t’əkkillakw (estuarine root garden) at Kingcome Inlet – to separate off the small sprouts, called gágemp (“grandfather”), growing from the bottom of large riceroot bulbs, and to replant them in the garden (see also Deur and Turner 2005) (figure 11-5). Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1996) remembered well her grandmother and mother breaking off the small appendages on the lower part of the glacier lily bulbs they were digging (actually small corms with rootlets growing from them), which they called the “whiskers,” and either planting them directly back in the ground or, when they were cleaning the bulbs in the evening at the camp, putting these “whiskers” aside in a little pile and then bringing them back up to the root-harvesting grounds the following day for replanting (see also Loewen 1998; and Peacock and Turner 2000). She also remembered replanting small bulbs of

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11-5  |  Small sprouts, called gágemp (“grandfather”), produced by the bulbs of northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis), which were replanted during the riceroot harvest by Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) when he was a boy. The sprouts are surrounded by the rice-like bulblets that give this plant its name. Each is capable of producing a new plant.

glacier lily and chocolate lily (Fritillaria affinis) as well as pieces of the crown of Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi) root so that the plant would resprout from this part. Other evidence for replanting includes planting the “navel” (embryonic plant) part at the top of the bitterroot, which was said to regrow the following year (Bandringa 1999), and replanting small pieces of “wild carrot” (Conioselinum gmelinii) roots and springbank clover rhizomes (Compton 1993a), as well as Pacific silverweed roots, small individual bulbs of camas, corms of spring

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beauty, and roots of balsamroot (Peacock and Turner 2000; Turner and Peacock 2005). This was obviously a widespread and longstanding practice, especially related to “root” harvesting and production, which likely led easily and obviously to transplanting and seed-planting practices. Transplanting and Scattering Seeds, Fruits, and Propagules

There is little way of proving the extent to which humans have knowingly established new plant populations in places where they were not growing in past centuries and millennia in northwestern North America by transplanting seedlings, roots, or other propagules or by scattering seeds and fruits in new locations.36 However, evidence suggests not only that such practices occurred but also that in some cases they were widespread and longstanding. The translocation of salmon eggs and young salmon, oulachen, herring, trout, young deer, and other animal species is also part of people’s oral histories in various places (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 2000; Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2009; Linda Smith, pers. comm., 1986; Pauline Waterfall, pers. comm., 2002; George 2003). Table 11-4 incorporates notations about culturally important plant species having been brought from one area and planted in another. Examples include: • transplanting of one (tall) variety of saskatoon berry from the Merritt area to Spuzzum (Annie York; see Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990); • transplanting of camas (Camassia quamash) bulbs from the Victoria area to the meadow behind Hesquiat Village in Clayoquot Sound (Alice Paul, cited in Turner and Efrat 1982); • transplanting of hazelnut bushes from the Kitselas Canyon to around Kitsumkalum (McDonald 2005) and from the Pemberton area to Lillooet (Edith O’Donaghey, pers. comm., 1987); • transplanting northern riceroot from Port Essington to Robintown (Chief Don Roberts, pers. comm., 2008); • transplanting wild lily-of-the-valley (Maianthemum dilatatum) as a medicine into gardens at Yakutat (Moss 2005); • transplanting wapato from the Fraser Valley to lakes in the Gulf Islands and between other locations (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 1999; Haeberlin and Gunther 1930); • transplanting soapberries from interior Alaska (Chilkat) to sites on the coast and from southeastern Alaska to northern sites (de Laguna 1972, 409); • introducing young western redcedar trees to Botanie Valley and interior Nlaka’pamux territory as gifts from the downriver Nlaka’pamux (Jim Stafford, pers. comm., 2008);

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• transplanting springbank clover from Kimsquit to the Kitlope Valley (Ken Hall and Simon Hall, pers. comm., 1993, 2007) and around Nuuchah-nulth territory (Craig and Smith 1997); • relocating cattail to Hesquiat Lake (Alice Paul, cited in Turner and Efrat 1982); • relocating prime stinging nettle plants for cordage from village to village along the Northwest Coast (Tina Robinson, pers. comm., 2003); • transplanting Canada blueberry (Vaccinium myrtilloides) from the Fraser Valley to Vancouver Island (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983) and the Sechelt Peninsula (see Bouchard and Kennedy 1977a; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972); and • transplanting highbush cranberry from meadows up the Kingcome River to gardens at Kingcome (Clan Chief Adam Dick, cited in Deur and Turner 2005). Most of these examples are from recollections of contemporary elders, who either were told about these plants being brought or participated themselves in transplanting them. John Ross (2011, 297) reports a rather unusual type of transplanting by the Spokan, who used trailing blackberry plants to create pathways for animals leading into traps: “When available, the strategically placed long branches of trailing blackberry branches served effectively to direct animals into traps and snares … women would carefully remove the root system with digging sticks, wrap the roots in moist buckskin, and transport them to an intended site for replanting (heł qw’olłq).” Another example of probable transplanting, likely occurring many generations ago, is suggested by the discovery, in 2012, of an extensive population of sweetflag (Acorus americanus) growing in the vicinity of a traditional Neskonlith (Secwepemc) campsite in the Salmon River estuary of Salmon Arm. This is a blue-listed species (i.e., vulnerable in its habitat) found in only a handful of locations mostly in the northern part of the province. Its presence as an isolated population in an estuary at the edge of Shuswap Lake – at a site where the Nes­ konlith people have gone for many generations to hunt ducks, dig wapato and water-parsnip, and harvest various edible berries, Indian-hemp, and cattail (described in chapter 8) – probably reflects a human-assisted extension of its natural range, as part of multifaceted traditional resource management. As noted in chapter 4, possibly it was brought in by Cree or Sekani, who used sweetflag extensively and had ventured into Secwepemc territory in the past (Teit 1909). There are also numerous examples of the contemporary transplanting of introduced berry bushes, rhubarb, or garden flowers from one garden to another. It will take focused genetic survey work to determine the antiquity of such practices, as well as the sources and interrelationships of specific populations of native plants.

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Intentional, and often ceremonial, scattering of seeds, fruits, and other propagules was also a known practice, as described by contemporary Indigenous consultants. In at least one case – the ritual scattering of the ripe stems of súnt’iny (spring beauty, or mountain potato) by recently bereaved widows of the Xeni Gwet’in Tsilhqot’in – dissemination by people was directly attributed by the elders to the wide range and density of spring beauty in the Potato Mountain area above Chilco Lake. In Tsilhqot’in tradition, especially if a recently widowed woman was having trouble recovering from her husband’s death, she was urged by the other women in her community to go up on the mountain, pull up the mature stems of mountain potatoes from a place where they grew thickly, and spread them onto the bare areas of a place where they were not growing. These stems, which remain fleshy and greenish after flowering, contain fruiting capsules that will ripen and produce viable seed even after they are pulled up from the ground. Gilbert Solomon explained that a recently widowed woman had a special energy, which was why she was asked to do the work to make more súnt’iny grow (Mabel Solomon and Gilbert Solomon, pers. comm., 2003; see also L.R. Smith 2008b). Individuals from the Secwepemc and Spokan Nations, during the course of annual berry picking, have also practised the routine scattering of handfuls of blueberries and huckleberries in places where the bushes were not growing (Dolores Bebbington, pers. comm., 2006; J.A. Ross 2011), and this was conceivably quite a widespread practice.37 There are other instances of humans distributing seeds and other propagules for ceremonial and conservation purposes. For example, Kim Recalma-Clutesi (pers. comm., 1994) explained that Kwakwaka’wakw harvesters of q’əxmín (“Indian celery”) seed for ceremonial and medicinal purposes intentionally waited for the stage when many of the seeds break loose and drop to the ground before or during the harvest, thereby ensuring continued populations of this highly valued plant. Some of the traditional narratives from different nations also hint at the idea of individuals or groups spreading plants and influencing their distributions and densities. These include the well-known Nuxalk story of the introduction of soapberries to the Bella Coola Valley (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 88), the Tlingit narrative “The Boy Who Shot the Star,” involving the translocation and transformation of berries through magical means (Swanton 1909, 210; Thornton 1999), the Sinixt (Lakes Okanagan) story of four Mountain Goat brothers bringing a gift of black huckleberry bushes to Eagle and her grandmothers (Nancy Wynecoop, pers. comm. to William Elmendorf, 1935-36, cited in Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980, 103), and the Ktunaxa story of a culture hero, Yaaukuéikaam, who steals “serviceberry” (Amelanchier alnifolia) from the grizzly bear and spreads it all over the country so that the people can have arrow wood (Boas 1918, 93) (see chapter 13). Additionally, in a story explaining why the Nlaka’pamux site in Botanie Valley is a prime location for digging many kinds of edible roots, a powerful

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woman who lived at Lytton was taken away to marry a great chief, possibly the Sun. Before she left, she dropped edible roots at Botanie as provisions for her people, saying, “Roots will grow in abundance in this place” (Steedman 1930, 477). These, along with other origin stories – for tobacco, bitterroot, camas, cactus, highbush cranberry, Indian-hemp, and many other species (Schaeffer 1940; Spier 1938; Swanton 1905; Teit 1912) – may symbolically portray ancient but actual routes by which certain important plants travelled to new destinations along with their human agents, just as there are stories today of modern introductions, such as the importation of Himalayan knotweed (Persicaria wallichii; syn. Polygonum polystachyum, called halaxsaʔnaxʔnóx, “spirit plant”) to Hartley Bay gardens (Turner and Thompson 2006). Other Measures That Protect Growing Species

There are other, diverse practices associated with harvesting or producing particular foods and other products that were aimed at protection and conservation of the individual populations and that would therefore have been part of an overall management system at the species and population levels. One example is the convention of carefully covering over areas from which mushrooms, such as pine mushrooms (Tricholoma magnivelare), or particular “roots” like spring beauty corms were harvested so as to protect the underlying soil and “root” systems from exposure to sun and heat and to keep them moist and viable (see also R.T. Richards 1997). Another is the cutting or burning of tent caterpillar nests from chokecherry and other fruiting bushes, as recalled by Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas.38 This type of individual care matches the pruning, selective harvesting, and other focused practices that led to enhanced health and productivity of the species on which people relied. The combination of these practices that played out for individual species and populations, taken together and across many species, would have had significant cumulative – and, in terms of resource enhancement, positive – effects over entire localities and specific habitats. Diversification as Management

Having “fall-backs” in the event of depletion of a given resource (from any number of causes) is an important strategy in resource management. An example is from the late 1700s when the Kwakwaka’wakw people of the Nimpkish Valley transferred their major food source from salmon to clams at a time when the salmon failed to come up the river to spawn. The Kwakwak’awkaw chiefs decided to move the villagers from the valley to the estuary of the Nimpkish River in order to enable the people to live on clams and other seafood until the salmon returned. This is akin to allowing a resource area to lie fallow so that it can rejuvenate without the pressure of human harvesting. There is evidence that people even longer ago than this episode were turning to alternative food

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resources at sites like Namu on the central coast. Here, and elsewhere, archaeologists have observed fluctuations over the past 6,000 years or so in people’s reliance on major resources, such as when salmon and herring use has been alternated with more diversified exploitation of other fish, shellfish, marine mammals, deer, and small land mammals (Ames and Maschner 1999). In terms of plant resources, people everywhere in the region practised such alternative harvesting as necessary for many different applications. For example, fuel – a critically important resource – can be drawn from a wide variety of woods of trees and shrubs. The archaeological record shows many places where variations existed in fuel use over millennia, apparently related to the changing availability of certain species. It could be that particular fuel woods were depleted through overharvesting, necessitating a shift to other species, or that changes in climate resulted in vegetation shifts over time, reducing opportunities to use certain woods and increasing the availability of others (see Lepofsky 2004). In any case, the ability to utilize and adapt to a range of different fuels has helped people to cope with resource fluctuations and has possibly directed a trend toward sustainable fuel production from living trees, as with the selective harvesting of the outer barks of Douglas-fir and cottonwood, mentioned previously. Berries often have undulating cycles of productivity, contingent on such factors as weather conditions. Unusually cold winters can kill back the flower buds, heavy spring rains can suppress pollinator activity or encourage fungal infestation, and cool, damp, or excessively dry summers can prevent optimal ripening of the fruit. Each species, and even different varieties within a species, have different environmental requirements and vary in tolerance to stress from weather conditions, insect pests, and other factors. Thus having knowledge of and access to a whole range of usable species strengthens a group’s resilience and its ability to withstand variations in particular resources. Similarly, having access to – and being able to modify or create – diverse habitats at different elevations and in various geographical areas also increases available resource diversity. Rotation of burns at different sites across the landscape is one example of how people diversified their available resources by creating sites of different successional stages and therefore of different species combinations with different levels of availability and productivity (Lepofsky, Hallett, et al. 2005; Turner 1999). Habitat-Level Management

As described in chapter 8, Indigenous people did not confine themselves to only one place but moved over their landscapes and territories in patterned seasonal rounds that were choreographed to key productive resource sites in different ecosystems and that were mediated by growing cycles, weather, and other

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environmental factors. Virtually every type of prime productive habitat, from coastal beaches to coniferous forests and montane meadows – and every successional stage of vegetation – was known to and influenced by Indigenous managers. Within these general habitat types were favoured locales, known widely for producing the largest, sweetest berries, the most succulent greens, or the biggest and best-tasting roots. Many of these sites are places where people have been harvesting intensively since time immemorial and that bear the evidence of human management, such as periodic clearing and burning, with associated archaeological features including hearth sites, pit-cooking and pithouse depressions, camping areas, altered and disturbed soil, culturally modified trees, rock alignments, rock carvings or paintings, fish weirs, and areas with evidence of drying and processing food. Two good examples of such places are the Indian Heaven huckleberry-picking grounds near Mount Adams and the Tsilhqot’in areas for harvesting spring beauty corms and blueberries on Potato Mountain, but these are only two of hundreds of focal cultural sites. The exceptional quality of the berries, roots, or other resources identified with such places could well be due, in part, to generations of occupation, use, and tending (Peacock and Turner 2000). All of the practices referred to in the previous section have implications for habitats in general. Weeding and clearing, transplanting, tilling and pruning, and other management activities, when enacted toward groups of individuals or collectively on different species of roots or berries growing in a given plant community, affect entire suites of species. Sometimes, for example, Straits Salish people cleared their camas beds of large rocks and brush by pulling shrubs and seedlings out by hand. Removing competing species and converting rocky ground to level soil patches would have improved the growing conditions not only for camas but also for onions (Allium spp.), wild caraway (Perideridia gairdneri), false onion (Triteleia spp.), chocolate lily, bracken fern, and other root vegetable species, as well as possibly for wild strawberries, trailing blackberry, and other low-growing fruits. It also would have enhanced habitat for deer and elk by providing prime forage grounds. Physical alterations in specific places – clearing land and building terraces for houses, moving large rocks (such as for clam garden construction or other purposes), and installing walls and fences – would have affected water and nutrient regimes (e.g., nitrogen and phosphorus levels), soils and sediments, and ultimately, the assemblages of plants and animals and the habitats themselves (Deur 2000, 2002b, 2005). These practices are therefore part of an overall habitat management regime. For example, weeding and clearing undertaken in wetlands for wapato production (Suttles 1955) would have affected an entire habitat and community of species, influencing the growth and production of willow, cattails, tule, cranberries, and cedar, as well as of fish, waterfowl, muskrat and beaver, in various ways. In the tidal estuarine gardens such as at Kingcome Inlet,

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removal of rocks and large clumps of grasses and sedges would have enhanced the growth of all of the traditional root garden species (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2004; see also Turner and Peacock 2005). Weeding peat bogs to improve the production of Labrador tea and clearing riverside areas like at the Ecstall River of northern British Columbia of excess vegetation to promote riceroot and bracken fern production (McDonald 2003, 57–8) would similarly have affected the entire ecosystem. The ultimate result of these activities would have been the creation of “patches within patches,” where specific growing areas were situated within a matrix of culturally important sites that had been cleared or thinned of certain undesirable species in order to improve the production of others. Each household, clan, or village group had leaders and individuals who were skilled in identifying and overseeing exceptional resource locations, who were knowledgeable in the techniques, such as clearing and burning, that would produce higher concentrations of resources – patches of the largest roots or the tastiest berries – and who were able to achieve easier access through trail building and land modification (McDonald 2003; Turner 1999). Prime locations, such as berry patches growing near camps, might be specially selected for enhancement through burning and other practices. One example of such a site is a “berry garden” at Roscoe Inlet in Heiltsuk territory, as described by the late Cyril Carpenter39 and by Pauline Waterfall (both pers. comm., 2002; see also Turner 2005), both of whom had learned about this site – a wide, bushy ledge beside a waterfall above a campsite – from their respective grandmothers, Bessie Brown and Beatrice Brown, who were related. In this and similar sites, people identified areas that had optimal exposure to sunlight at certain hours of the day but were protected from the extreme prevailing winds and located beside waterfalls, where there was always sufficient moisture from the mists. Here, they fertilized and mulched existing blueberry, huckleberry, and salal bushes with herring eggs and with remains from cleaning and dressing their salmon, deer, and other game by digging holes around the bushes and burying the organic material near their roots. People also scattered ashes around the berry bushes from the fireplaces of the long houses, as well as adding clamshells. They also used to transplant berry bushes from surrounding areas to these productive sites, and when they did, they added crushed clamshells to the holes. Cyril Carpenter recalled being told that the berries from these bushes were healthier, bigger, more productive, and tastier than untended berries; one could harvest them from the branches “by the handful.” Such berry gardens were apparently created and maintained in various places along the coast but were seldom noticed or recognized as “gardens” by anyone beyond the peoples who created and cared for them. Forests and woods, too, can become specially managed habitats, depending on the extent and intensity of human interactions within a given area. Even

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the practice described by Mary Thomas (2001) for the Secwepemc of preferentially selecting dead and downed trees to remove and use, rather than cutting down living trees, would have affected entire forest habitats by helping to clear and thin woodland areas, thus making them more accessible for humans and deer and more productive for berries and the trees that remained. Cedar stands where bark strips, roofing sheets, or planks are harvested similarly bear the mark of human interactions, sometimes over centuries. Many are, in fact, managed habitats that are owned and monitored by individuals or lineages. Not only the trees themselves but also the undergrowth, berry bushes, ferns, and other species are all affected by humans’ continued presence within the entire area. Even when whole plants were removed, as in cutting trees, it was done with care and purpose. The trees cut down around villages to be used for house construction, canoes, or totem poles, for example, offered habitats on their stumps for salal, trailing currant, red huckleberry, and blueberries, and thus the area became a berry garden for the people of a village (Captain Gold, pers. comm., 1996; Turner 2004a). Estuarine root gardens serve as another key example of managed habitats, being carefully selected, established, and maintained over generations. Known in Kwak’wala as t’əkkillakw (“place of manufactured soil”) (Clan Chief Adam Dick and Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 1997; Deur and Turner 2005; Lloyd 2011) and in Nuu-chah-nulth as tł’ayaqak (“place for roots or berries”) (Arima et al. 1991; Sapir 1913–14), these productive gardens once extended over many estuarine habitats of the Northwest Coast but are perhaps most remarkable, or at least best documented, from the territories of the Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chahnulth, and Nuxalk.40 Situated in the upper intertidal zone, these plots were, and in some cases still are, owned and inherited by individual family or clan units, with the entire area being part of a community’s territory. Their boundaries were marked out by natural features or by posts, logs, or rocks placed by the owners. The root vegetables produced in these “gardens” included springbank clover, as described at the beginning of this chapter, Pacific silverweed, northern riceroot, and other species.41 Soft sandy-loam soil was preferred for growing these root vegetables because they were easier to dig and, especially, because the roots tended to grow long and straight in this environment, making them culturally more desirable (Deur 2000). As previously noted, the plots were often weeded of grasses and other competing vegetation in the springtime, with the edible roots being harvested mainly in the fall but also to some extent in the winter and early spring months before the plants sprouted up again. Sometimes these root gardens were actually built up with rock and log walls, which functioned to trap floating marine algae and other tidal detritus brought in by the highest tides, as well as silt and organic materials washed down the rivers and deposited during flooding, thus contributing mulch and enriching the soil (Deur 2000, 2005). The nutritious roots of the tidal garden patches also

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11-6  |  Crabapple tree from Robintown “orchard garden” showing partially cut top.

attracted ducks, geese, and swans and were sometimes deliberately used as bait for these waterfowl (Edwards 1979). Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm., 2009) noted that bears and even seals also eat the clover and other edible roots from the t’əkkillakw (estuarine root gardens) of Kingcome. Generally, too, Pacific crabapple trees and sometimes highbush cranberries, blueberries and huckleberries, and salal line the moist shorelines just a little higher than the root gardens, thus extending the array of food available for harvest in the fall. As well as weeding these plots, management techniques applied to enhance the productivity of the root foods, as described in the references cited previously, included tilling, partial and selective harvesting, and replanting propagules. These highly productive root gardens were extensive enough to provide food for over 500 people of the Tsawataineuk clans living at Gwa’yee on the lower Kingcome River, as well as to provide a certain quantity of the roots for trade.

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Adam Dick (pers. comm., 1999) said that at one time “there wasn’t one square inch” of that tidal flat at the Kingcome River estuary that was not under care and ownership of the people of Gwa’yee. Each family had long rectangular plots, bordering the river on both sides, that were marked out with pegs and carefully tended, especially by the women and children.42 Another, similarly complex managed habitat can be seen at Robintown, a now-vacated settlement, which was occupied by the Kitsumkalum Ts’msyen until the mid to late 1800s (Downs 2006; McDonald 2003). This village site, which can be termed an “orchard garden” because of its mix of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plant populations, features several large terraces still supporting an array of habitats and many culturally important species that would have been owned and tended when people were living there. As well as dozens of Pacific crabapple trees, the site sustains many other key plant resources. The crabapple trees still show the effects of pruning and cutting at the tops, which causes them to partially fall over and then regrow closer to the ground, allowing easier access to the fruit (figure 11-6). Another prime species of the “orchard garden” is hazelnut, which may have originally been transplanted as saplings to this site, as they were known to have been distributed from the Kitselas Canyon to other sites, including the town site at the mouth of the Kitsumkalum River. As McDonald (2003, 57) notes, “people now consider the presence of [hazel]nut trees and crabapple trees to be a sure sign of an old residential community or camp site.” Northern riceroot is also still common along the terraces and was said to have been introduced to Robintown from Port Essington (Chief Don Roberts, pers. comm., 2008). Over fifty other plant species of known cultural significance can be found in the Robintown orchard gardens, including: • material species: western redcedar and skunk-cabbage; • medicinal species: licorice fern, wild ginger, wild lily-of-the-valley, false Solomon’s-seal, sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis), devil’s-club, black snakeroot (Sanicula marilandica), and stinging nettle; • edible fruits: saskatoon berry, bunchberry (Cornus canadensis and/or C. unalaschensis), black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii), wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca, F. virginiana), gray currant (Ribes bracteosum), Nootka rose, wild raspberry, thimbleberry, salmonberry, red elderberry, blueberries (Vaccinium alaskaense, V. ovalifolium), black huckleberry, red huckleberry, and highbush cranberry; and • other edible species: fireweed, northern riceroot (said to have been transplanted there), and cow-parsnip. Few sites anywhere can compare in the number of important plant resource species within a limited area – a tribute to the ingenuity of the people who lived

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there and who used and apparently cared for these species (Downs 2006; Mackin 2009; McDonald 2003; Turner, Deur, and Lepofsky 2013). To the north, evidence of managed “gardens” of culturally important plants has been found for the Aleuts (Reedy-Maschner and Maschner 2012), as well as for the Tlingit and other Alaskan peoples (Thornton 1999, 2008). Other major evidence for tended crabapple gardens comes from a petition written by three Kitamaat Haisla leaders to the chief commissioner of lands and works of British Columbia on 10 November 1897 (Kitamaat Indians 1897). This letter was a plea to the commissioner to reinstate their precious “Crab Apple Gardens” as part of their reserve lands. Their letter speaks for itself: Sir – We the undersigned Indians of Kit-a-maat humbly petition you and ask your kind and just intercession with assistance, in securing our ancient, and, as we think, just right to our old Crab Apple Gardens, planted by Nature in the old time for the use of Indians for both food and medicine. These Crab Apple flats held for ages, equal to all past time, by our forefathers, from generation to generation, and frequently bought and sold by Indian families; are in our part of the Country, situated in the valley of the Kit-a-maat River in seasonal small patches of low land aggregating in all about ___ acres in the River Valley, and about ___ acres in a small Inlet near our village named Kil-dalla. These Apple Gardens always jealously guarded by their Indian owners, were overlooked by the Honourable Peter O’Reilly, Reserve Commissioner, and the few Indians who were at home when he came here years ago to reserve some land for us. Unfortunately at that time but few of our people (old men) were at home to meet the Commissioner, and they did not understand fully what was being done, and never for a moment suspecting that the Indians might lose their consistent right to use the fruit patches always heretofore held by us Indians and found so necessary for our health and strength failed to ask, or secure their reservation. These few patches of fruit trees producing apples not valued by white men, are now in danger of being included in Land Claims made by strangers to us, and if allowed by you and our Governor to be taken from us and destroyed by clearing of the land will greatly inure us and destroy our faith and trust in the Justice and Friendship of our government. We hopefully ask you to protect our Old Rights to those small parts of our valley here so useful to us. We enclose herein a rough sketch plan of the different spots where the Crab Apples always grow – and we fully trust you to take proper steps to secure to such of our Families as can show ancient right to those Gardens, protection against their loss.

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And your petitioners will ever pray: Signed: – Chief Jsosie [?] Morrison Chief Wm Young Charlie Adams Landscape Burning

Fire has been used as a tool for vegetation management in many different ecosystems across the study area, from the boreal forest (Johnson 1997, 1999; H.T. Lewis 1982; H.T. Lewis and Ferguson 1988) to Douglas-fir woodlands, camas prairies, and subalpine parklands (Boyd 1999b; J.A. Ross 2011; Turner 1999). Forestry and government regulations from the early 1900s, in both the United States and Canada, discouraged and then banned intentionally lit fires, so there are very few people in the southern part of the area who remember the intricacies of landscape burning. Even lightning-ignited fires, which would have formerly burned over some areas and from which people would have learned about fire behaviour, have been actively suppressed in the past century, so contemporary people often know less about the effects of fire in different environments than did their ancestors. One of the most detailed accounts of the practice of landscape burning, from the Lil’wat (Lower Stl’atl’imx) of the Pemberton-Lillooet area, is in a narrative told by Baptiste Ritchie of Mount Currie, called “Burning Mountainsides for Better Crops” (recounted first in the Stl’atl’imx language to linguist Leon Swoboda in the 1960s and then translated by Baptiste Ritchie, cited in Turner 1999). Baptiste Ritchie described the circumstances when people used to light fire to a given mountainside: “When it get’s too bushy.” He and his friends, Charlie Mack Seymour of Mount Currie and Sam Mitchell of Xaxl’ep, both also Stl’atl’imx, confirmed that fires were generally lit in the fall, immediately after the huckleberries and other high-elevation berries were harvested (as confirmed by other elders like Nlaka’pamux plant specialists Annie York and Hilda Austin), and that they “rarely burnt the big trees” (ibid., 189). A couple of years following a burn, root vegetables like nodding onion, spring beauty, yellow glacier lily, and tiger lily were known to grow very productively, and berries like blackcaps, soapberries, and blueberries and huckleberries fruited abundantly. Around six or seven years later, when the bushes started to become too dense, the people would burn the area over again. This practice was carried out in multiyear cycles, with mountainsides being burned in alternating years so that there were always good berry-picking sites available to people at any one time (L.R. Smith 2008b; Turner 1999; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). The timing of burns often depended on the type of habitat; generally, burning might take place in the spring at lower elevations and in the fall at higher elevations. Huckleberry areas might be burned over in the late spring, when the

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normal soil moisture was higher and heat penetration shallower (J.A. Ross 2011). For prairie burns, the grass might be ignited early in the morning, and those overseeing the burns would be careful to watch the winds in order to ensure the fire did not become too hot. On the coast, even watching the tides was important because winds are influenced by rising and falling tides (Dr Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 2011). Farther north, along the Skeena and Nass Rivers, for example, burning was usually done in the early spring, when low air temperatures and high humidity created shorter flame lengths and when lower fuel temperatures made fires easier to control (Johnson 1999). Dry grasses and dead twigs provided a limited fuel load, enough to carry the fire but not so much that it would blaze uncontrollably. Streams and snowbanks served as barriers to the spread of the fires. The burned-over slopes above the villages often became prime habitat for grazing and browsing deer, elk, and moose, as well as for the production of nodding onions, berry bushes (huckleberries and blueberries, saskatoon berries, currants, and gooseberries), and hazelnuts. Keeping the areas around settlements and camps clear of thick brush had the added advantage of protecting the sites against accidental fires in the summertime. This practice also kept open trails and campsites for better access and allowed easier lookouts against enemy attacks. The burning of slopes and hillsides in the Skeena region continued longer than in the southern part of the study area (Deanna Nyce, pers. comm., 2004). The burning was said to make the berries “fat and plump” (Pat Namox, quoted by A. Mills, cited in McDonald 2003, 55).43 All along the Northwest Coast, from Oregon to Alaska, even within the dense temperate rainforest, in which few natural fires occurred over centuries or sometimes multiple millennia (Gavin, Brubaker, and Lertzman 2003), people formerly burned over particular berry patches to enhance their growth and created meadows and clearings among the big trees, diversifying the habitats and thereby creating a higher diversity of resources.44 Here, burning to create openings in otherwise dense forests created desirable habitat for deer, elk, and bear, for ground-nesting birds, and in forest sloughs and wetlands, for geese and ducks (M.K. Anderson 2009). The grassy plains and savannahs of southeastern Vancouver Island (such as those seen by Captain George Vancouver as so pleasing to the eye), the wide prairies of the Olympic Peninsula (such as the Ozette Prairies), the Gulf and San Juan Islands, the Puget Sound region, the Skagit Valley, and the Willamette Valley also represented extensive human-modified landscapes, cleared by periodic burning and maintained by other cultural practices such as tilling, brush clearing, and pruning. Managed camas prairies also extended eastward to Idaho and Montana and south into Oregon and California. Depending on soil and moisture regimes associated with these areas, they were maintained as well-drained prairies, wet meadows, or even peat bogs, which were spotted around the

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country and interspersed with woodlands of oaks and other broad-leaved trees and with conifer forests – a rich and diverse mosaic of vegetation types, many of which were identified by European newcomers as highly promising in terms of potential as agricultural sites (M.K. Anderson 2009; Beckwith 2004; Boyd 1999b; Gill 2005b; Turner 1999; Weiser and Lepofsky 2009). Burning and clearing created the prime habitat for camas (Camassia spp.) and other spring-flowering roots, including chocolate lily, taper-tip onion (Allium acuminatum), bitterroot (in the interior), wild caraway, or yampah, and bracken fern, whose rhizomes were once a prized food (Norton 1979a, 1979b). It also enhanced the productivity of the berries, especially the trailing blackberries, wild strawberries, and blackcaps. Burning in these environments was undertaken mostly in the summertime after the spring-blooming species like camas had gone to seed and the strawberries, trailing blackberries, and other fruits had been picked. People knew just where and how to burn, and the fires tended to be quick and light, such that one could actually run through the line of flames as it moved across the prairie (Beckwith 2004; Gill 1983, 2005b; Norton 1979a; Turner 1999). Without repeated fires every few years, the meadows, open wetlands, and forest glades would gradually be taken over by tree saplings and eventually revert to second-growth forests with closed canopy and relatively low productivity of food species.45 Furthermore, fires helped to reduce the numbers of weeds, wasps, and other undesirable species (J.A. Ross 2011). Landscape burning is an art, requiring knowledge of fuel loads, expected patterns of ecological succession, responses to fire of individual species at various lifecycle stages, variability and cycles of productivity and regeneration of plants and plant communities, effects of different weather and wind conditions, soil moisture regimes, and so forth. Camas meadows might be burned over every year or two. Upland berry patches and coastal prairies within wet forests might be burned over in five- or six-year cycles (Turner 1999), with cranberry bogs burned over in ten-year cycles (M.K. Anderson 2009). Burning was usually overseen by experts, such as clan or house chiefs, who were often trained from a young age in the skills and practices they needed to take on responsibility for managing resource-harvesting grounds (Boyd 1999b; Johnson 1999; McDonald 2003).46 For example, for the Gitxsan, “When it is the right time, he [the chief] burns the berry patches so the berries are fat and plump. If he didn’t do that the berry patches would become old and overgrown and there would be berries but they would just be small. But he knows when to burn so that it cleans up just the berry patch and doesn’t spread to the trees” (Pat Namox, quoted by A. Mills, cited in McDonald 2003, 55–6). Sometimes it was women who were responsible for burning and carrying out other management practices. For example, one woman of the Straits Salish of Vancouver Island told anthropologist Wayne Suttles (1974, 60) that she was the one responsible for burning the camas area that belonged to her grandmother,

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a practice she undertook once they had finished harvesting for the season. Other people were allowed to harvest from this locality, but responsibility for managing it through landscape burning was clearly delegated to ensure continued productivity of the camas. For the Spokan, elder women and sometimes “two-spirited” men (those with female qualities) were designated to oversee the burning of tule and cattail patches following the harvest of these plants (J.A. Ross 2011). Selective burning of resource areas was called p’ʕapúleʔxw in the Spokan language, and the people who acted as burners were called sxwp’ʕápm (“one responsible for setting a forest fire”) (J.A. Ross 2011, 267, 271). The designated burners were afforded complete control over decisions regarding the frequency and strategies for burning.47 Different animals, however, were attributed special powers for burning, and it would be advantageous to have their assistance in this task. The black bear, for example, could give a neophyte – male or female – multiple powers, such as the ability to locate huckleberries and cure burns. Those having the guardian spirit power of the blue grouse, chipmunk, western meadowlark, or various woodpeckers would be assisted by these powers in prescribed burning (ibid., 271). Anthropogenic Landscapes

Taken in total, all of the practices and approaches for sustaining and enhancing plant and animal populations, species, and habitats and special ecosystems over the entirety of a people’s territory combine to produce anthropogenic landscapes: mosaics of geographic and ecological regions and sites where people participate in diverse ecological processes while still maintaining the overall biodiversity and productivity of the region. Apart from the practical strategies people apply to their resources and harvesting areas as a means to utilize resources yet sustain them, their belief systems, seasonal rounds, social organization, and systems of ownership and proprietorship for particular sites and territories apply on a broad scale to the sum total of all resources, which are interconnected in a seamless web of natural and cultural processes that extends across generations and millennia. Landscapes as distant as the Potato Mountain area of the Chilcotin region and the high meadows of Botanie Valley in the interior, as well as the seaside bluffs and camas meadows of Vancouver Island and the Kingcome River estuary and surrounding areas, can be considered anthropogenic, at least to some extent, having assumed their recent ecological status through a degree of human influence and management that potentially included the introduction and promotion of culturally important species. One such anthropogenic landscape is in Tlingit territory, around Glacier Bay, Alaska: the “berried landscape” described by Thornton (1999). Berries were said

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to “hold” or represent the landscape on which they occurred, and thus they symbolized the Tlingits’ material, social, and spiritual ties to their lands. These ties have had both practical and symbolic value. As inherited property, the berry patches – like the Ts’msyen highbush cranberry and crabapple places – were linked to the matrilineal clan and house system. Those who controlled the berry production through various means were enabled to participate in the ceremonial networks, including potlatching and feasting. A few special places in Tlingit country were called “berry land” and were widely known throughout and beyond Tlingit territory. One place on the lower portions of Glacier Bay was called Shákw Aaní (Strawberry Land), after the seaside strawberries growing there in profusion. Not only were these particular landscapes owned, defended, and celebrated, but they were also nurtured by means of heixwa (spiritual “magic”). It was essential in maintaining such a system that the land and the berries themselves – regarded along with other plants and animals as nonhuman persons – be attributed appropriate respect. If the plants were not properly treated, they would cease to make themselves available for harvesting and might even cause harm to those who did not follow the correct protocols. One basic tenet held by the Tlingit and other peoples was that berries “need to be picked”; not harvesting and appreciating them reflected disrespect and might cause them to disappear, or the plants might fail to bear fruit for a period of time. Thus it can be argued that the active use of berry resources was necessary for their renewal, an idea that has also often been tendered by Indigenous peoples for resource and land use in general. If people stop going to special places and using them as intended, the places will become less productive and more grown over (Deur and Turner 2005; Thornton 1999; Turner, Ignace, and Ignace 2000). Sometimes people showed respect to their berries through ritual feeding of their spirits.48 The Huna Tlingit similarly “fed” dog salmon eggs to their wild strawberries and nagoonberries (Rubus arcticus) to enhance the productivity of the berries in succeeding years. This practice could be termed ritual application of fertilizer, but it was instead looked on as an offering to the spirits of the berries, not as a directly practical measure (Thornton 1999). In such cases, environmental manipulation is so embedded in beliefs and customs that it is impossible to pull them apart; in combination, they conserve and perpetuate key resources. Other anthropogenic landscapes can be identified across the subalpine parkland environments of the Coast Mountains and Interior Plateau, such as those focused in places like Botanie Valley and Potato Mountain that include mosaics of plants and habitats managed in different ways and on different scales (Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). As noted previously, people travelled to these areas in the late spring through summer to harvest and process a rich array of root vegetables and upland berries, among other resources. Like the camas

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prairies, these montane meadows were maintained largely by controlled burns in multiyear cycles and were also affected by complexes of practices related to belief systems – such as First Roots and First Fruits ceremonies and the ritual scattering of seeds – with knowledge about them being passed on through narratives and oral history. Upland root- and berry-harvesting sites, managed by fire, tilling, weeding, selective harvesting, seasonal use, and rotating digging sites over multiyear cycles, would have been connected with: • nearby creeks, lakes, and wetlands that provided drinking water, fish, waterfowl, tule (Schoenoplectus spp.), cattail (Typha latifolia), willow (Salix spp.) and other resources; • upland forested areas where needed wood and bark for fuel and construction were harvested; • forest edges and openings where berries and roots were often exceptionally highly productive; and • grassy meadows where deer and other game came to graze and where marmots could be found, with the remains of weirs and traps, rock walls or deer fences, and other evidence of hunting and fishing now possibly present in the vicinity. Family campsites (identified by proximity to creeks, by hearths with charcoal and fire-cracked rock, and by remains of lodges and dwellings), sacred sites (possibly indicated by rock paintings and carvings), and burial sites might also occur within anthropogenic landscape complexes. Trails and boundary lines may be marked in some way by culturally modified trees, rocks, or simple evidence of wear from trampling. There may also be evidence of social stratification, social institutions developed to assist in management of resources, and division of labour – for example, with the presence of high-value goods or tools like digging stick handles generally used by women. Evidence of social activities, such as playing lehal and other games, may also reveal periodic occupancy. Oral histories reveal multiple place names for such diversified areas (Hunn 1996; L.R. Smith 2008b), as well as stories connecting them to ancestral use. Cultural Approaches to Plant Management Responsibilities for Management

As described by McDonald (2003, 50–1) for the Kitsumkalum Ts’msyen of the Skeena River, “Prior to the settlement of Terrace, the Kitsumkalum Valley and nearby lands were under the land management of the people of Kitsumkalum for the benefit and prosperity of each Waap [‘House’] and, ultimately the Galts’ap.

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Each family took care of its laxyuup [‘lands’] with the store of local ecological knowledge that they and their ancestors had accumulated over generations through experiment and observation … They had to ensure the conservation of the resources for future generations and they did so with management practices that enhanced the productivity of the laxyuup.” McNeary (1976, 61) described a similar situation for the Nisga’a: “To the Niska [Nisga’a], the Nass valley is far from a wilderness. It is a collection of familiar localities, each with its own particular resources. The ownership of each place is known and many old village sites and fish camps dot the valley. There is a richness of historical and supernatural associations which make the landscape virtually a textbook of Niska history and religion.” Within the territory of each major group, people tended to undertake their seasonal rounds as smaller family units or clans, spreading out over the land to different salmon streams, clam beds, river valleys, or mountainsides. This scattering of the population helped to reduce pressure on individual resource locales, ensuring enough resources for everyone. As noted for the Sahaptin, in the spring, “The women climbed to the ridges above to dig bitterroot and Lomatiums … when the local supplies were exhausted … the people moved camp further upstream to the next tributary canyon” (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990, 123). Furthermore, the social ties and the kinship and clan linkages were always maintained to provide backup systems in the event of failure or diminishment of resources in one territory or another – in other words, to maintain overall adaptability of a group (A.G. Marshall 1977; Suttles 1987a). Even when groups of families travelled together to the same general area, they often used separate campsites and harvesting sites but visited back and forth to socialize in the evenings and to help each other as required in order to ensure that everyone was able to harvest sufficient roots, berries, fish, or game for each family to survive over the winter (Turner 1992b). Thus, while people were dispersed over their territory, the “social safety net,” woven of kinship and other kinds of relationships, continued in place, strengthening resilience and assisting the collective management of their lands and resources. Everywhere, too, people held an overall philosophy of stewardship over, or caretaking responsibility for, the resources and places they relied on for survival. Sanctions against waste predominated, and children were taught from an early age not to overharvest or take more than they needed or more than they were able to process and preserve at any one time, whether it was food, medicine, basketry materials, or other resources. Respect and care for the species – the “relations” – that provided for people and the importance of sharing with others were teachings that led to an ethic of conservation or resource management at a broad level (M.K. Anderson 2005; Cruikshank 2005; Thornton 1999; Turner 2005; Turner, Ignace, and Ignace 2000; see also chapter 13). As described by Nuu-chah-nulth elder Roy Haiyupis,

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The idea and practices of over-exploitation are deplorable to our people … Respect is the very core of our traditions, culture and existence … Respect for nature requires a healthy state of stewardship with a healthy attitude. It is wise to respect nature. Respect the Spiritual … it is not human to waste food. It is inhuman to over-exploit. “Protect and conserve” are key values in respect of nature and natural food resources. Never harm or kill for sport. It is degrading to your honour … it challenges your integrity and accountability. Nature has that shield or protective barrier [that], once broken will hit back at you. (Cited in Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995, 6–7) Along the same lines, people were widely encouraged to use the resources that made themselves available to them, such as driftwood logs, dead snags and fallen trees in the forest, and roots and bark for basketry from trees that had fallen over or whose roots were already exposed (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001; Lepofsky, Heyerdahl, et al. 2003; Lepofsky, Moss, and Lyons 2001; McDonald 2003). Self-pruned fallen limbs of trees, particularly Douglas-fir and black cottonwood, were preferred fuels, routinely harvested from the forest floor (Lepofsky 2004). Many of the culturally special places – artifacts of many generations of focused resource use and manipulation – were given specific names in recognition of these practices. For example, in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, there is a site in Hesquiaht territory named shishp’iqa (“cultivated”), so called because of the way people used to look after the beds of Pacific silverweed there, as noted by Alice Paul (cited in Bouchard and Kennedy 1990, 43). Another place in the vicinity is called t’iikwuwis (“root-digging beach”) (Stanley Sam, cited in ibid., 335). In the interior, there is a flat area in Botanie Valley (a famous root-harvesting locale in Nlaka’pamux territory) called k’em’k’em’ats-útsiyem’tsw after the yellow glacier lily, sk’ém’ets, which grows there in abundance and over which people would have assumed a caretaking role (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). These are only a few of hundreds of such examples (Johnson 2010; Johnson and Hunn 2010; Kari 2007). Rights, Privileges, and Controls in Traditional Management Systems

The lands and territories of First Peoples in northwestern North America cannot be considered open “commons,” with resources “free for the taking.” Although the strategies for control over lands and resources varied from group to group, some form of proprietorship was always present to some extent. For the peoples of the central and northern Northwest Coast, the territories and resource sites belonged to specific houses or clans, and their use and occupancy were overseen by the hereditary chiefs and their designates (Richardson 1982). The boundaries

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of each chief ’s specific resource areas were known and often marked out or signified by well-recognized natural features. The rights and privileges of a Nuu-chah-nulth chief that relate to rivers, fishing and hunting areas, and plantharvesting sites, for example, are bound up in a concept known as hahuułi. In the past, it would be unthinkable to violate a chief ’s hahuułi. A chief of the Nuu-chah-nulth or some other Northwest Coast group might bequeath to an individual or family specific rights to, for example, goose hunting over one half of a lake, with the other half being apportioned to another, separated by known and recognized markers such as a creek estuary, a distinctive rockslide or cliff, or an artificial marker such as a line of posts or rocks. Others might be given the rights to pick bog cranberries or highbush cranberries, to harvest cedar bark, or to fish for sockeye around the same lake. All kinds of prime harvesting sites – from root gardens in the tidal flats to clam beds, fishing locations, berry patches, and crabapple stands – were known as belonging to a family, clan, or individual. Table 11-4 identifies particular plant resources that were known to have been specifically “owned” (usually along with other forms of management) in one area or another in northwestern North America. The owner of a resource – often a chief, matriarch, or designate – must be asked for permission to use these areas. Rights to certain resources are determined by people’s ancestral origins as well as by membership in a community, clan, or family, social status, marriage ties, and gifts and other formal exchanges. Nuxalk tribal members, for example, trace their descent from the original ancestral families, as determined by Ałquntam, the Creator. It is by having names from, or being a member of, these ancestral families that a person can claim the rights to use certain territories (McIlwraith 1948). Similar affiliations between ancestral origin narratives and rights to lands and resources are seen with other Northwest Coast groups, such as the Gitxsan: “For us, the ownership of territory is a marriage of the Chief and the land. Each Chief has an ancestor who encountered and acknowledged the life of the land. From such encounters come power. The land, the plants, the animals and the people all have spirit – they all must be shown respect. That is the basis of our law” (Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw 1989, 7–8). Although Coast Salish peoples like the Straits and Halkomelem recognized private ownership of key harvesting locations such as reefnet sites, duck- and deer-hunting sites, and wapato and camas beds (Babcock 1967; E. Claxton and Elliott 1994; Suttles 1955), they also included many areas that were open to general harvesting. Even people from other communities or other nations like the Ditidaht, especially if they had marriage connections, were allowed to come and harvest salmon and camas at some places (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). In the Interior Plateau similar protocols were observed, enacted by the chief of a community or band, as described for the Secwepemc by Teit (1909, 573) in

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a passage quoted in full in chapter 9: “Berry-patches were tribal property; but picking was under tribal control. All the large and valuable berrying-spots were looked after by the chief of the band in whose district they were situated.” Concerning Secwepemc hunting and fishing grounds and resource sites in general, Teit (ibid., 582–3) observed, “All land and whatever grew upon it … belonged to the nobility.” Elsewhere, however, Teit (ibid., 573) noted, “Root-digging grounds were all common tribal property. Some people of the Northern Fraser River bands laid a claim on the root-digging grounds of Quesnel Lake, where very large [tiger] lily-roots grow, but their claims were not recognized by the rest of the tribe.” Teit (ibid., 583) also explained that “In a great many places … the more distant hunting-grounds and root-digging and berrying places were looked upon as tribal property; and the nobility of the bands either did not claim them, or, being unable to enforce their claims, had decided to leave them as common property.” As Teit suggested, it is often the case that areas more distant from settlements and campsites might be more generally available to people from a given group or community. The situation, however, varies not only from group to group but also over time as social inequities become more engrained or societies become more egalitarian. In general, in both interior and coastal locations, it was the highly productive, highly valued, and well-localized resources that were “owned” or recognized as belonging to certain individuals, families, lineages, or communities. For such places, one was obliged to seek permission from the owner or a designate to harvest high-quality berries or other resources. Outsiders without specific rights to an area could normally obtain such resources only through trade. It would be a grave offence to harvest in some places without permission, with transgressions potentially punishable by confiscation of the harvest, destruction of one’s canoe, or even death. In circumstances where property rights were strictly enforced, one would need to seek permission just to pass through another group’s or a chief ’s territories (Johnson Gottesfeld 1994).49 Less prestigious, less productive, or more widely dispersed species or populations in general tended not to be as carefully controlled. Ownership with Social and Resource Management Responsibilities

There was more to ownership than simply receiving the benefits and the prestige of hosting a feast, gifting, or accruing surplus goods for trade and exchange. Chiefs and clan leaders applied their knowledge of and authority over local berry patches and other resource areas to organize, facilitate, and supervise groups of harvesters and to ensure that they adhered to the necessary protocols and harvested the resources only at the prime stage of ripeness and only if the supply was abundant enough to withstand intensive harvesting. They were

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also charged with resource stewardship and support of community members. As Nuu-chah-nulth cultural specialist Roy Haiyupis explains, regarding hahuułi, the Nuu-chah-nulth system of hereditary leaders, “Ha hoolthe [hahuułi] … indicates … that the hereditary chiefs have the responsibility to take care of the forests, the land, and the sea within his ha hoolthe, and a responsibility to look after his mus chum or tribal members” (cited in Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995, 9). Ownership thus carried with it obligations. A person who “owned” productive patches of Pacific silverweed and springbank clover or other resources would indeed receive a prime portion of each harvest but was, in return, expected to share these food resources with his village on behalf of his family or clan. In some cases, he was obliged to host feasts for particular groups or societies within the community (Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 1997; Blackman 1990; Boas 1921; Drucker 1951; Johnson Gottesfeld 1994; Thornton 1999; Turner and Kuhnlein 1983; Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). For example, Boas (1921, 560) reported that among the Kwakwaka’wakw (Southern Kwakiutl), “When the people have a winter dance, the owner of lily-bulbs [Fritillaria camschatcensis] promises a lily-bulb-feast to the Sparrow Society.” The situation is described for the Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) as follows: An owner of a berry patch would ask or invite several people to pick berries in this patch. The owner would provide the transportation and food while picking berries. The first basket, we say “uusil,” that an invited guest picks goes to the owner of the patch. The owner of the patch may end up with several barrels of berries. Especially if the owner insists that the people he has invited must pick until he is satisfied that it is enough. The understanding is that the owner is obligated to give a feast, a “lulgit,” usually during the winter at which time the berries will be served. (Hartley Bay School 1997, 7) For their part, those who responded to a chief ’s invitation to pick berries or dig roots in his sites, and who conformed to the requirements and codes of behaviour, effectively legitimized the leader’s prerogatives to control and oversee a territory of the community or clan group. Harvesters of plant resources who took on this role might include relatives of the chief himself, mainly but not exclusively women, as well as nonkin slaves. When large quantities were needed of high-value, highly productive crops for which there was a limited harvest time, entire families, including men and children, might also participate in the labour (Thornton 1999). Because of the high social status they imbue, productive berry patches are situated in the midst of institutions of status and ownership, requiring the application of particular protocols, as explained by Thornton (ibid., 30):

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Traditionally among the most celebrated of gifts were heaping quantities of berries, especially bearberries, blueberries, huckleberries, nagoonberries, salmonberries, soapberries and strawberries … that had been preserved (typically through drying) and were served with fish oil or seal grease in huge feast dishes … Ritual protocol calls for the hosts to honor prominent guests by providing them with a large feast dish brimming with fruit and then formally inviting them to eat it du xwaa x’utín (… “with pals and buddies”). In this way the honoree and his family and friends are “recognized” and compensated for their role in the ritual cycle. Clans, houses, and their chiefs who owned rights to certain valued resources were able to capitalize on those resources in terms of trade.50 Belief Systems and Management of Plant Resources

The ritual “feeding” of berry plants by Tlingit berry harvesters, described previously (Thornton 1999), is one example of the close interdependence between beliefs and sustaining harvests of plant resources. As discussed further in chapter 13, spiritual beliefs can be regarded in many instances as providing allinclusive codes of behaviour that pertain to any situation and thus constitute elements of a “conserving” religion or ethic.51 They connect inextricably with the recognition of all species and environmental entities as sentient nonhuman persons or beings with powers to affect human affairs positively or negatively depending on how they are treated. The beliefs require a general respect for all species but are particularly focused on prime “cultural keystone” species such as camas, balsamroot, and huckleberries (Garibaldi and Turner 2004; Turner and Atleo 1998). In many cases, the practices these beliefs engendered were undertaken by women, as the main harvesters of plants, and paralleled the practices of men when they embarked on hunting or fishing missions. Just as hunters followed, and still do, special protocols and rituals – prayers, bathing or using the sweat lodge, sexual abstinence, and cleansing of their gear with devil’s-club or other purifying solutions – women often undertook ceremonial preparations prior to, and following, berry picking or root digging.52 Young women undertaking puberty rituals often prepared themselves spiritually – through prayer and special tasks such as digging trenches – for finding, digging, and preparing roots and for berry picking and other food harvesting (Teit 1909). Ritualized acts like the ceremonial scattering of berries or the careful timing of harvests of species like “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule) to ensure dissemination of some of the fruits during harvest, as mentioned previously, show direct and obvious connections to management systems.

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Linda Smith (2008b, 136–7) describes some of the ritual practices of Tsilhqot’in people in relation to the care and perpetuation of súnt’iny (spring beauty) and other edible roots:53 After harvesting súnt’iny ‘spring beauty corms’, èsghùnsh ‘yellow glacier lily’, sáchén ‘tiger lily’, and chìnsdàd ‘silverweed roots’ [Argentina anserina], nímính individuals [ritually sensitive or powerful people, such as twins, parents of twins, or recently bereaved widows] are to gather the plants and return a handful of the harvest back to the fields. The ones still attached to the plants are replanted and covered over with soil. The remaining plants are strewn about with their seeds intact, and are told, “Łàn tsínsh nàghùndláx” ‘become plentiful.’ These observances are called nàts’ègùts’àd ‘the area is treated with a ritual’ and this ensures continuous plant yields. If these procedures are not followed by harvesters who are nímính, the plants will not grow well. There would be decreased yields and smaller bulbs, corms, and roots in the years following the harvest. Parallel practices were observed by the Spokan, as described by John Ross (2011, 346): “Before departing the harvest area, each women would give some of the berries back to nature (xáq’l’eʔxwi); not to do so was considered gluttonous and disrespectful, a rude affront (chsłtsut) to the plant, which may not produce again.” Cedar-bark harvesters took care not to girdle cedar trees when harvesting their bark so that the tree would continue to live and, with time, heal over itself.54 There is a similar prohibition against harvesting the “mother” stalk of devil’s-club for medicine; many people maintain that only the side branches of devil’s-club should be cut, leaving the main stalk intact so that it will soon sprout more branches (Lantz, Swerhun, and Turner 2004; Turner 2004a). The Gitga’at and others always limited their harvest of devil’s-club at any one time to just four stalks, out of respect and consideration for the plant and its conservation (Turner and Thompson 2006). Leaving the “mother” balsamroot plant when harvesting balsamroots for food is also a recognition both of the value of this plant and its need to continue its life and of its spiritual power (Peacock 1998). The taboos against picking certain flowers that influence the weather or against ruthless destruction of “flowers, plants and grass” as “the covering or blanket of the earth” (see chapter 13) are also a part of a religion of conservation. “Keeping it living” thus represents a philosophical approach to plant management, as well as a practical one (Deur and Turner 2005). Conclusions Traditional Land and Resource Management for any group of people can be viewed as a subset of a system of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and, as such,

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is more than just a suite of practices based on empirical knowledge (Berkes 2012). Rather, as shown in this chapter, activities that relate to resource use and production are deeply embedded in belief systems and are modulated by webs of interrelated social, cultural, and ecological influences. Spiritual values, along with human population fluctuations, governance and social organization, seasonal rounds, anticipated ecological cycles, and unforeseen environmental change are all factors in the development and enactment of resource use strategies over time and across geographic space. Even seemingly mundane and straightforward activities, such as picking berries, digging roots, and harvesting cedar bark, have intensely spiritual and social components that are seen to be critical to their short- and long-term success. For the well-being of both the harvesters and the harvested resources, it has been stressed, these activities must be undertaken with care, must be guided by longstanding conventions, and must adhere to generally held cultural practices. The practices, effects, and outcomes of Traditional Land and Resource Management also come into play at different ecological and social levels and on different temporal and spatial scales. Their extent ranged, for example, from one-time pruning, tending or weeding around, or transplanting of an individual berry bush to the development of routine and systematic burning regimes over particular patches of prairie or meadow in multiyear cycles, sometimes over many generations in a given territory. Aspects of belief systems, such as the concept of kincentricity – the “kinship” relationship between humans and all other living things and environmental entities (see chapter 13) – have even more far-reaching and long-lasting influences, which ultimately affect the composition, productivity, and sustainability of entire suites of resources and living landscapes. Enacted by a given cultural group over its whole territory, these approaches of kinship and reciprocity collectively result in long-term maintenance and perpetuation of standing forests, productive wetlands, and entire marine and terrestrial food webs, in concert with human occupation. Indigenous management systems – based on locally referenced knowledge, practice, and belief and guided by culturally embedded institutions – came into conflict with perspectives and management systems imposed first by missionaries, settlers, and colonizers and later by provincial and national governments and by corporations holding tenure rights assigned by those governments. In some cases, people adapted their Indigenous management approaches to accommodate the new situations. Thus it is probably no coincidence that, when the European style of gardening was adopted in the Ts’msyen, Nuxalk, Straits Salish, and other First Nations territories around the Northwest Coast in the late 1700s, these new types of gardens were often established on the same sites where people had originally tended their camas beds and root gardens, and the original practices of Indigenous plant cultivation were transferred to the successful growing of potatoes and other crops (McDonald 2003; Moss 2005; Suttles 2005).

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The more that is uncovered in the archaeological record, the more we reassess and re-evaluate the information about plant use already documented in journals and ethnographies, and the more we observe and listen – carefully – to what elders like Dr Mary Thomas and Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) have described and demonstrated from their own personal experiences, the clearer it becomes that the practices and perspectives of Indigenous peoples that relate to resource management, far from being rare and unique, were as ubiquitous as they were complex. Every one of the practices documented by M.K. Anderson (2005) as having been applied by Native Californians in managing their plant resources (i.e., burning, pruning and coppicing, cleaning, selective harvesting, tilling, transplanting/replanting, and ceremonial management) has been known to at least some of the First Nations of northwestern North America (Turner, Deur, and Lepofsky 2013). Furthermore, these diverse modes of resource use and management have been documented over a wide spectrum of ecosystems. Virtually every habitat, from coastal beaches and tidal marshes to coniferous forests, montane meadows, and all successional stages of vegetation, was known to and influenced by Indigenous resource managers. Management practices that matched the rhythm of the growing and lifecycles of plants and animals were applied to many different species and were mediated by fluctuations in climate and resource productivity as well as in human populations and overall lifeways. Many of these practices have been little recognized beyond the knowledge of the peoples who carried them out, yet collectively, they have been key elements within the dynamic social-ecological systems of Indigenous peoples of the study area and have significantly influenced not only the people themselves but also the structure, function, and composition of ecosystems across the entire region, converting them in many cases into truly “cultural landscapes.”

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Part four

Underlying Philosophy

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12 Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge

And my ancestor ts’eqamey [c’eqamey] was told that this flood was coming, and he was told how to prepare for it. And he was told to go to look for a large cedar tree, and to hollow it out … And so that’s what he did. He prepared the tree and he put all the food and all the things he would need in the tree, and then he sealed himself and his family in this tree … When he entered the cedar tree, his name was hawilkwala, which means “cedar tree,” but when he came out, he was told, “you will no longer be hawilkwala; your name will be ts’eqamey, which means that you will be the first person to ever perform the cedar-bark ceremony” (Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 1994; see also Sewid-Smith and Dick 1998).

Introduction Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth), Kwakwaka’wakw historian, culture, and language specialist,1 shared her family’s origin story, about how her ancestor from ancient times, hawilkwala (“cedar tree man”; cf. wəlkw, “a full-grown cedar tree”), renamed ts’eqamey, survived the Great Flood through supernatural help and guidance by taking refuge inside a colossal western redcedar tree. Only hawilkwala, his wife, his daughter, and his four sons were directed to enter the cedar tree; of his whole tribe, only they were meant to survive. During the time they were sealed inside the tree,2 hawilkwala was taught about the sacredness of the cedar and about the ceremonies to be enacted from that time forward to honour and respect the cedar. Assuming the new name ts’eqamey, he was the first one ever to perform the Sacred Cedar Bark ceremony. As a child, Mayanilth (pers. comm., 1994) was told this story many, many times by her grandmother, Qwiqwasutinuxw noblewoman Agnes Alfred (ʔAxuu). Mayanilth explained, “Every tribe has their origin, what they call their sacred

origin, and they talk about how they originated, and how their ancestors came down. And that’s exactly what they call it, gelgalis – how they originated, and how they survived after the flood.” Since that day back in time immemorial, when ts’eqamey came out of the cedar tree after the floodwaters had receded, he performed the Cedar Bark ceremony according to instruction, and through him the ceremony, called ts’eqa, spread among all the Kwakwaka’wakw people. It is always performed slowly and regally, with great dignity; every stage of its preparation and performance is done with solemnity, befitting the sacredness of ts’eqamey’s teachings. Only certain individuals are entitled to harvest the cedar bark for the potlatch or perform the sacred winter rituals that comprise the Cedar Bark ceremony. Mayanilth’s family’s story of the origins of the Kwakwaka’wakw Sacred Cedar Bark ceremony exemplifies the inextricable ties between narrative, belief, ceremony, and the plant world that infuse Indigenous cultures in northwestern North America, as in many other parts of the world (see Reed and Calman 2008). The discussions in this chapter focus on the ancient narratives, as Mayanilth (pers. comm., 1994) would say, “from the beginning of time,” or from what is sometimes called the “myth world” or the “spirit world.” The roles of plants and knowledge about plants in the context of these stories are the focus of this chapter. It is important to acknowledge at the outset that, as my friend Nuu-chahnulth hereditary chief and scholar Dr E. Richard Atleo (Umeek) has emphasized, these stories are true. They reflect different dimensions of truth, serving as parables and ways of remembering the past, encoding memories, lessons, and approaches, and passing them on to future generations in an effective and meaningful manner. Storytelling is about conveying truths at a metalevel and is therefore highly important as a means of transmitting critically important ideas and information in a given cultural context. In the ancient times that are portrayed in the origin stories, the world was a much different place. The spiritual side of existence was more evident; mountains, rivers, animals, and trees and other plants had obvious human persona and societies like those of humans of today. There were different worlds that were relatively easily transcended – a sky world, an under-ocean world, and a place where ghosts and dead people resided, living lives that paralleled those of people on the earth. Many different supernatural beings, some of them benevolent, some fearsome monsters, but all very powerful, wandered the earth, moving through the different worlds and using their mystical powers to shape and change the world into its present form. There were notable culture heroes, who had the ability to transform themselves from their supernatural or spiritual existence into human form. Conversely, human ancestors, with careful training and supernatural help, often crossed into the spirit world, interacting with animal societies like the Bears, the Wolves, or the Mountain Goat people and venturing into the sky country and the country under the ocean. These

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connections with the spirit world and with long-ago times are recognized and acknowledged today not only through stories but also through special places or sacred sites, through ceremonies and dances, through clan, house, and family crests as exhibited on masks and dance regalia, totem poles, and many other items, and through names that are passed by way of inheritance from generation to generation. Right up to the present time, many people, like Mayanilth, tell and retell these special time-honoured stories to their children and grandchildren. Such narratives are usually the property of a clan, house, or lineage and must be acknowledged as such. Not just anyone has the right to tell many of these stories. The narratives, together with the rituals and ceremonies they engender, form the foundation of a people’s sense of their place and belonging and of their relationships with each other and the natural world. The stories place humans – together with plants and animals, fish, birds, rivers, and mountains – firmly as active participants within the environment, not apart from or above it. There is an immense body of published texts and narratives that bring these ancient “myth-times” to life in oral histories.3 The stories embody teachings and reinforce beliefs that govern human behaviour toward the environment as well as fostering an appreciation of the gifts brought to humans through great effort and sacrifice – even of the lives – of ancestral beings (R.E. Ignace 2008; Turner and Berkes 2006). The stories are the basis and a reflection of the “kincentric” approach that Indigenous peoples often embrace: all of the other species – plants and animals – are our relations, or kin, and their welfare affects the well-being of humans in countless and interconnected ways (Cajete 1994; Martinez 2008; Salmón 2000; Turner 2005; Turner and Atleo 1998). It must be understood at the outset that, as well as being the intellectual property of particular individuals and their lineages, the narratives were originally told, and ceremonies enacted, in their own Indigenous languages. As described by Linda Smith (2008b), the names, terms, and phrases used in these narratives often do not translate readily or accurately into English, no matter how much effort is put into the translation. The stories referred to here fall into this category, and in some cases, such as those of Boas (2002), they represent not just one translation but sometimes two or three.4 Some of the original meaning is bound to be lost under such circumstances. Furthermore, as emphasized by Dr Ron Ignace (2008), oral histories cannot “stand alone.” They cannot really be separated from their historically and culturally constituted meanings and experiences. The moral and social messages they embody need to be carefully explained, and they may be contextual, varying both with the storyteller and the audience. Narrative “provides a framework for experiencing the material world and how local stories intersect with larger social, historical and political processes” (ibid., 28). The traditional stories integrate factual and historical information with lessons and guidance. They

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provide details of past geological and social events, of ecological relationships among plants and animals, and of specific resources and environments that are intertwined with both human and environmental history. At the same time, however, they offer broader and deeper interpretations of the spiritual qualities and metaphysical powers of the world, imparting not only practical but also moral and social messages and metaphors that can guide people’s decisions and approaches in their lives (R.E. Ignace 2008; see also Cruikshank 1998, 2005; H. Robinson and Wickwire 1994; and Turner and Berkes 2006). Plants play a broad range of roles in these Indigenous narratives, including as items of everyday cultural use, as entities possessing or embodying magical or supernatural properties, and as active persona of stories, with their own human or superhuman characters and characteristics. References to plants used as food, materials, or medicines can convey some ideas about their relative importance in more recent times, as well as the possible antiquity of various cultural roles. Supernatural or magical properties attributed to plants, and positions of plants as actors in narratives and stories, can also serve as indicators of their cultural significance. In general, those species featured in traditional narratives also tend to have other attributes that identify them as “cultural keystone” species (Garibaldi and Turner 2004). The nature and frequency of these various roles reflect their relevance and cultural salience in a way that parallels plant names, as discussed in chapter 3. Belief systems and worldviews in Indigenous cultures are further addressed in chapter 13 as a central component of systems of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, inextricably linked and interwoven with practices and strategies for sustainable resource use and with the modes of communicating both this practical knowledge and the ethical and moral principles that underlie it (Berkes 1999; Turner, Ignace, and Ignace 2000). The present chapter focuses on how traditional narratives – those stories drawn from ancient times – are linked to plant knowledge and use and how the patterns of narratives relate to the acquisition and transmission of ethnobotanical knowledge, practices, and ideas across time and space. Narratives are both a major venue for this development and exchange and a major reflection of the past connections between and among peoples over countless generations. Reaching back into the mists of time, many of the stories from northwestern North America have themes and episodes that are common to narratives in other parts of North America, and even to those of Asia and Europe, yet, as will be seen, they are often locally situated and compellingly relevant to today’s world (see E.R. Atleo 2011). Widespread as these narratives are, they also show a great deal of local consistency and conformity in many ways. Storytellers are trained, often from a very young age, to carry forward the important oral histories of their families, clans, and communities.5 It is no wonder, therefore, that certain themes would have held true across countless generations, cultures, and languages, with just

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the embellishments shifting over time to match the places and cultural norms of the storytellers. Overarching Themes Involving Ethnobotanical Elements in Indigenous Narratives Indigenous narratives from northwestern North America and beyond are full of references to plant use in everyday life: women going out to pick berries or cooking roots, men using cedar roots and branches to make rope, women making mats, men cutting down trees for firewood, healers and shamans using plants for medicine, and hunters and those in training bathing and rubbing themselves with evergreen boughs. Such references, although commonplace, are informative because they reflect the cultural embodiment of ethnobotanical knowledge and practice in all facets of peoples’ lives. Table 12-1 provides a few examples – by no means exhaustive – of plants or plant products employed in “everyday” activities and applications, as referred to in various sources, most notably the diverse collection of Indigenous narratives recorded by Boas (2002). As shown in table 12-1, three key themes involving plants and plant products appear over and over in narratives from throughout the region: fire, food, and famine. Fire

It is no wonder that the gift of fire dominates many Indigenous narratives. Fire has been such an important element for all of humanity; the ability to control and apply fire and to cook food is a key to human and cultural development (Lévi-Strauss 1975; Pyne 1995, 2001). Stories about how fire was captured for people by cultural heroes, or sometimes provided by the Creator, are found in almost every cultural tradition across the region. References to fire, tinder, and firewood, and to roasting and boiling food, are almost universal. According to stories from northwestern North America, in the very early days of the world all of humanity was suffering from a lack of fire, and it was up to one of the animals or other beings with supernatural qualities to “steal” fire by some ruse and bring it to people. Firedrills, fire-sticks, torches, and glowing coals are all featured in stories about how fire is given to humans for comfort, warmth, and cooking. A Comox story typifies this time and event. First, the daughter of a supernatural chief was able to obtain a fire-stick for her father from a huge whirlpool (the ocean’s navel) in which rubbing-sticks for fire making were swirling around. Then Deer wanted to steal fire from this chief. Deer split resinous wood and put the slivers in his hair. Then he offered to entertain the chief by dancing and singing for him. He danced so close to the fire that the resinous splints in his hair ignited. At this point, he leapt out of the house and ran away, thus bringing fire to the people (Boas 2002, 203).6

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Table 12-1  |  Examples of plants or plant products employed in “everyday” activities and applications, as referred to in Indigenous narratives of northwestern North America Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Berries, as food

Four women left Coyote to watch the house while they were picking berries; Raven and his sisters, Bluejay, Crow, and Snail, went to gather berries; many women went into the forest to gather berries; “We will give people everything they need -- berries, shellfish and fish”; “Once two women wanted to bring a box of berries to a friend in a distant village; made all kinds of berries and gave them to people. They dried and ate them and their hearts were glad”; Masmasalániq (Son of Raven) showed people where to get berries; chief ’s daughter used to go with the other girls into the forest to pick berries; Mink’s wife, Grizzly Bear, ate berries; Raven scared his sisters away and then ate all of the berries; women gathering berries; berries and berry cakes as feast food and everyday food; Old-One taught the women to gather berries and cure them

Nlaka’pamux (Boas 2002, 88) Comox (Boas 2002, 198, 201) Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 246, 259) Nahwitti (Boas 2002, 385, 388) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 452) Ts’msyen (Boas 2002, 581) Comox (Boas 2002, 191; Kennedy and Bouchard 1983) Nuxalk (Boas 2002, 505, 510) Haida (Swanton 1905, 32, 300) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 315) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 250)

Many references to travelling by canoe, paddling; canoe capsizing; transformer showed a man and a woman how to hold canoe paddles and paddle their canoe; Raven (as a baby) cried for a canoe and paddle from the chief who owned the sun; Masmasalániq (Son of Raven) made canoes and paddles for the people he had carved from cedar wood; Raven taught people how to construct canoes; people had canoes at the time of the Great Flood

Comox (Boas 2002, 198, 211, 213) Kwakiutl (Boas 2002, 361) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 444–5, 452) Heiltsuk, Nuxalk (Boas 2002, 483, 490, 504) Ditidaht (Joe Edgar, cited in Kennedy and Bouchard 1994, 44–5)

Bow and arrows

Canoes, paddles

Many episodes of story heroes shooting with bow and arrows; Raven (as a baby) cried for a bow and arrows from the chief who owned the sun

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Comox (Boas 2002, 189, 203) Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 268, 272) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 444–5) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 307)

Table 12-1 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Digging stick

Mother of the dog children hung her cedar-bark cape on her digging stick (to fool her children); Old-One made a digging stick and showed women how to dig roots

Nuxalk (Boas 2002, 532, 34) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 324)

Firewood

Going into the forest to fetch wood; log of driftwood to split up; a chief owned twelve slaves who always had to cut firewood for him; Bear women collected good dry firewood; big tree for firewood; old man with a big belly splitting a tree with wedge; different woods tested for their burning capacity

Fish spear/ harpoon

Man was catching salmon with a harpoon; Old-One created a fish spear from saskatoon berry wood

Comox (Boas 2002, 211) Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 272) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 472) Ts’msyen (Boas 2002, 581, 585) Nuxalk (Boas 2002, 527) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 307)

Healing herbs

Provided to people by Transformer

Net (fishing)

Raven made a net of cedar bark; many references to nets from nettle fibre and other materials; often made by Spider; Old-One taught the men how to make nets; old woman in sky country (Spider) makes a net of Indian-hemp

Pitch

A man chewing pitch (in the form of a dog); going into the forest to get pitch; chewing pitch to spit on eyes of blind women; pitch chewed to form the shape of whales, sharks, sea lions; octopus chewing pitch; used by Coyote

Firedrill

Masmasalániq (Son of Raven) made a firedrill so that people would have fire; Wren used his firedrill to make a fire inside Grizzly Bear; Mink stole a firedrill from the Wolves; Beaver showed people how to use a firedrill; Old-One made a firedrill and showed men how to use it

/continued

Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 452) Nuxalk (Boas 2002, 522) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 126) Ditidaht (Kennedy and Bouchard 1994, 18–24) Nlaka’pamux (Maud 1978c, 102; Teit 1912, 324)

Lower Fraser (Boas 2002, 100) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 324)

Nuu-cah-nulth (Boas 2002, 246)

Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 446, 452) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 84–8) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912) Halkomelem (Maud 1978a, 141, 146)

Sliammon (Boas 2002, 227) Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 291) Nahwitti (Boas 2002, 430) Comox (Boas 2002, 184, 185)

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Table 12-1 | continued Example

Roots, edible

Tinder, for fire

Wood, for carving

Wood, for salmon weir

Details of reference

Group (reference)

to glue Grouse’s eyes shut; a woman always got her pitch from a particular tree; used by Cannibal Woman to seal the eyes of children she steals

Secwepemc (Kuipers 1989) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 492) Many groups (Boas 2002)

A man went out with some women to collect roots; Crow went with his sisters to dig roots; four blind girls sitting around a fire, in which they were heating a stone in order to cook four roots in a wooden pot; Masmasalániq (Son of Raven) made edible roots; Mink’s wife, Grizzly Bear, wanted to feed him only roots; Old-One taught the women how to dig roots; Crow was determined to try to get some roots from the people; Sandhill Crane gives a man roots to eat Chewed fern roots as tinder; shredded inner cedar bark inside a mussel shell or clamshell; Masmasalániq (Son of Raven) beat inner cedar bark for tinder; Wren used ball of pulverized wood as tinder to light a fire inside Grizzly Bear

Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 268) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 452) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 126)

Two girls building a salmon weir near a strong rapid and driving poles into the cracks and holes of the rocky shore to brace their weir; young people built themselves a house and a salmon weir; man and his wife and sons had a salmon weir; Wren taught people to make salmon weirs

Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 285) Nimpkish (Boas 2002, 317) Kwiksootainuk (Boas 2002, 343) Halkomelem (Maud 1978a, 56)

Women made a bowl out of a piece of driftwood (who was Coyote in disguise); Raven carved four fishes from cedar wood; Masmasalániq (Son of Raven) went into the forest to seek a cedar tree, made a stone axe to cut down the cedar, made a box to store dried salmon

Algae, mosses, and ferns

Algae, marine

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana)

Kwakwaka’wakw (Boas 2002, 361) Nahwitti (Boas 2002, 412, 430) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 452) Comox (Boas 2002, 191) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 250, 266, 326–7) Halkomelem (Maud 1978c, 139)

Various kinds mentioned in stories

Raven and his brother were found as babies in a kelp patch; kelp used as halibut fishing line

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Nlaka’pamux (Boas 2002, 88) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 446, 452)

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 1) Nahwitti (Boas 2002, 422)

Table 12-1 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

“Raven’s mustache” (unidentified seaweed)

Poor material for harvesting herring eggs in one story

Haida (Walter McGregor, cited in Swanton 1905, 135)

“Fern” roots (probably wood fern, Dryopteris expansa)

Mountain goat hunter eating fern roots; women gathering fern roots for winter; during a famine, people lived on fern roots

Bryophytes (moss)

Abandoned daughter cried and cleaned her nose with moss

“Fern” (probably bracken, Pteridium aquilinum)

Chief ’s sons secretly looking for fern roots and eating them

Conifers

Yellow-cedar (Chamaecy­paris nootkatensis)

Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis)

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia)

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

Comox (Boas 2002, 207)

Comox (Boas 2002, 238) Lekwiltok (Boas 2002, 294) Nuxalk (Boas 1916, 166) Comox (Boas 2002, 181)

A root-digging stick of the side branch of a yellow-cedar was chosen as the best after “all sorts of sticks,” including western redcedar, had been rejected; mentioned in other Haida stories; spear for sea lions from the wood

Haida (Swanton 1905, 181; Turner 2004a) Northern coast (M.L. Beck 1989)

Two heroes bathed in a lake every day and then washed with fir boughs until they had become purified and had no human smell about them any more (see also under Thuja and Tsuga); bark broken off by Bear used as fuel

Pentlatch (Boas 2002, 239) Hesquiaht (Nuu-chahnulth) (Turner and Efrat 1982, 20)

Wa’walis took a rope of cedar branches to lower himself to the bottom of the sea; Magpie’s wife said she was going to get inner cedar bark; woman went to peel inner cedar bark; three beautiful

Nuxalk (Boas 2002, 534, 527) Nlaka’pamux (Boas 2002, 97)

Used by dancers; mentioned in a variety of roles in Raven stories

Club of yew wood; spear of yew wood; harpoon of yew wood; yew tree with deep roots; yew tree uprooted as a test of strength; yew wood used to make a baby’s swing; yew wood made into a bow by Old-One

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Lekwungen (Boas 2002, 170) Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 247) Kwakwaka’wakw (Boas 2002, 310, 372) Ditidaht (Kennedy and Bouchard 1994, 18–24) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 324)

/continued

Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge  |  239

Table 12-1 | continued Example

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)

Details of reference

Group (reference)

daughters who used to sit in front of the house plaiting mats; Crow went with sisters to forest to gather cedar bark; Raven sent four women into the forest to fetch cedar bark; Raven had his sisters make mats on which salmon were served; cape of inner cedar bark worn by mother of dog children; young woman who wants to marry the Sun and her slave purify themselves on their journey by swimming in lakes and rubbing themselves with cedar branches; Eagle and Woodpecker sent their youngest sons into the forest to bathe and rub themselves down with cedar boughs in order to become strong; son of chief bathed and rubbed himself with cedar branches to gain strength and power; Raven made a net of cedar bark; Raven had his sisters make mats on which salmon were served; chief tied up with ropes of inner cedar bark by his slaves; cedar-withe rope used during the Great Flood

Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 279) Lekwiltok (Boas 2002, 298) Nahwitti (Boas 2002, 412) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 444, 450) Nlaka’pamux (Boas 2002, 83) Lower Fraser (Boas 2002, 114) Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 263) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 446, 450, 472) Ditidaht (Joe Edgar, cited in Kennedy and Bouchard 1994, 44–5) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 308; Boas 1916, 251)

Young man purified himself with hemlock branches (see also under Pseudotsuga and Thuja); inner bark eaten; hemlock boughs used for collecting herring eggs

Flowering plants

Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum)

Canoe material in story (Haida); found to be the longest burning wood in test of different firewoods

Nodding onion (Allium cernuum)

Eaten by the woman in the story “Sès Ts’íqí Ghàghìndá” (The Bear Who Married a Woman)

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)

Woman who married a Bear was eating saskatoon berries; wood made into a fish spear by Old-One

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Nimpkish (Boas 2002, 338) Ts’msyen (Boas 1916, 205; Boas 2002, 586) Haida (Turner 2004a; Walter McGregor, cited in Swanton 1905, 135) Haida (Swanton 1905; Turner 2004a) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 307)

Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008a, 42) Tsilhqot’in (Smith 2008b, 42) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 324)

Table 12-1 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum)

Old-One showed men Indian-hemp and how to make nets; nets made by old woman in the sky

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912) Halkomelem (Maud 1978c, 141, 143)

Pacific silverweed (Argentina egedii)

Four blind women, who are Ducks, cooking tłɛqsɛm with hot stones; food of Goose Woman

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera)

Old-One taught the women how to make birch-bark baskets

Nimpkish (Boas 2002, 308) Haida (Walter McGregor, cited in Swanton 1905, 264)

Camas (Camassia spp.)

Silverweed (Argentina anserina)

The woman who married a Bear was harvesting silverweed roots (chìnsdàd); Bear will only eat uncooked silverweed roots

Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008b, 42)

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 324, 326–7)

Pinegrass, or “timbergrass” (Calamagrostis rubescens)

Bedding used by the Bear in the story “Sès Ts’íqí Ghàghìndá” (The Bear Who Married a Woman)

Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008b, 42)

Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata)

Women out camping and digging camas (“Star Husband” tales); camas bulbs dug by daughters of Swan in Hoopach’asʔath country, used to give a feast Woman in the “Dog Children” stories went out to dig “mountain potato”; food of grizzlies and black bears

Saanich (Violet Williams, pers. comm., 1990; Jenness n.d.) Nuu-chah-nulth (Arima et al. 1991, 233–5)

Yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum)

Eaten by the woman who married a Bear; food of grizzlies and black bears

Northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis)

A Kitkiata (Gitga’ata) hunter found a valley where “not only game and salmon were plentiful, but also there was a plenteous supply of berries and fruits and wild rice.”

Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008b, 42) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 321, 331)

Sea milkwort (Glaux maritima) “Grass”

Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008b) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 321, 331)

Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 217–19)

Roots as food for Duck women

Comox (Boas 2002, 182)

Frequently mentioned in stories (e.g., eaten by mountain goats)

Haida (Turner 2004a) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 246)

Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge  |  241

Table 12-1 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva)

Three owl sisters (three different owl species) were out digging bitterroot

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 347)

Seaside lupine (Lupinus littoralis)

Roots mentioned as a feast food

Haida (Swanton 1905, 300)

Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca)

Mentioned as a food and feast food in a number of stories

Indian celery, or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule)

Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus)

Q’əxmin seeds sprinkled into the fire as an incense

Skunk-cabbage as food of Deer; during a famine, people baited their halibut hooks with skunk-cabbage roots; used to cover food in cooking pit

Klahoose (Boas 2002, 223) Saanich (Jenness n.d.)

Haida (Swanton 1908, 446, 574) Ts’msyen (Boas 1916, 68) Haida (Swanton 1905, 300) Ts’msyen (Boas 1916, 240)

Single delight (Moneses uniflora)

Eaten as medicine, along with devil’sclub, to bring luck in gambling

Old-One showed the men tobacco and taught them how to smoke

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912)

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus)

Devil’s-club eaten as medicine to bring luck in gambling

Haida (Swanton, 1908, 689–700)

Cottonwood (Populus balsamifera spp. trichocarpa)

Best trees for starting fires; Beaver throws fire on them

Nlaka’pamux (Maud 1978a, 102)

Sagebrush buttercup (Ranunculus glaberrimus)

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 378)

Wild rose (Rosa sp.)

Wolf taught hunters how to poison their arrows with the flower, nkukaxemús (nkwəkwaxm’-ús)

Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008b, 42)

Wild currants (Ribes sp.)

Bushes were used by the Bear for bedding in the story “Sès Ts’íqí Ghàghìndá” (The Bear Who Married a Woman) Favourite food of bears

Reference to salmonberry bush in relation to Swainson’s Thrush; reference to salmonberry blossom in Raven story; many references in Haida stories

Haida (Walter McGregor, cited in Swanton 1905, 264)

Comox (Boas 2002, 205) Nahwitti (Boas 2002, 382) Haida (Turner 2004a)

Coyote tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata)

Salmonberries (Rubus spectabilis)

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Haida (Swanton, 1908, 689–700)

Table 12-1 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Willows (Salix spp.)

Abandoned boy makes a bow and arrows, with a bowstring from willow bark; the Salmon people taught the Saanich how to make a reefnet (of willow)

Nlaka’pamux (Boas 2002, 94) Saanich (Jenness n.d.)

Mentioned in various narratives as a food and feast food (e.g., berries served by a boy’s grandmother to a supernatural guest); feast food in Nuxalk origin story

Haida (Swanton 1905, 32, 301) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 315) Nuxalk (McIlwraith 1948)

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa) Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis) Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskjolidii)

Used to anchor canoes at mountaintop in the Great Flood; red elderberries seen carried by Raven as a sign of spring

Rhizomes mentioned as a food; Black Bear goes out to dig clover roots; roasted on stones by Slug Women; food of Goose Woman

Ditidaht (Joe Edgar, cited in Kennedy and Bouchard 1994, 44–5) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 255)

Haida (Walter McGregor, cited in Swanton 1905, 264; Turner 2004a) Nuu-chah-nulth (Boas 2002, 272) Nuxalk (Boas 1898, 111; Boas 2002, 530)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica)

Used to make nets; mentioned in Haida stories; used by Coyote to kill Willow Grouse (by stinging)

Blueberries (Vaccinium alaskaense, V. ovalifolium)

Raven and his sisters went to pick blueberries

Nuxalk (Boas 2002, 505) Haida (Turner 2004a)

Highbush cranberries (Viburnum edule)

Medicine in stories, used by shamans for protection

Mentioned in various narratives as a food and feast food (e.g., berries served by a boy’s grandmother to a supernatural guest)

Eelgrass (Zostera marina)

Shoots eaten by Goose Woman

False hellebore (Veratrum viride)

Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 84–8; Johnson 1997, 138–9) Haida (Turner 2004a) Secwepemc (Bouchard and Kennedy 1979, 15–18)

Comox (Boas 2002, 198) Haida (Swanton 1905, 32, 300) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 315)

Haida (Swanton 1905, 264)

Note: The Indigenous groups are listed more or less in the order of the episodes cited, and their names are those given in the sources. Nahwitti, Nimpkish, and Kwiksootainuk are Kwakwaka’wakw subgroups cited by Boas (2002).

Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge  |  243

In a Fraser River Halkomelem story, “The Origin of Salmon and Fire,” it was Beaver who stole fire from the Salmon people (see Boas 2002, 128–9). In other stories, it was Mink who brought fire. In a Snuneymuxw (Nanaimo) story, for example, Mink went to fetch fire with his grandmother. He stole the child of the supernatural chief who was keeping fire, and he used the child as ransom to exchange for a firedrill; “Thus people obtained Fire” (ibid., 152). A similar story is told in the Ditidaht oral tradition, in which Mink ransomed the baby he stole from the Wolves in exchange for fire (Kennedy and Bouchard 1994, 18–24). In another Fraser River Halkomelem narrative, Beaver gave fire to the Ghosts, and Mink went to get it. He cut off the head of the Ghost chief and then used the head as a ransom to get a firedrill (ibid., 130). In a Quw’utsun’ (Cowichan) story, the Creator, Qäls (Xe’ls), after performing many different transformations, encountered a group of Lekwungen people near Victoria who were catching flounders but didn’t know how to cook them. Qäls gave them a firedrill and taught them how to make fire and roast their fish (ibid., 138). Another common episode occurs after fire is initially acquired, but it also demonstrates how essential fire is for survival. In this episode, a young person’s family and village abandon him or her as punishment for a transgression. Often this happens to a young woman who has become pregnant through deceit on the part of another and is consequently abandoned by her father and all of her family. As part of this abandonment, the father extinguishes all of the fires before leaving, with the assumption that the girl he is punishing will not be able to survive. This theme is prevalent in a widely known and very ancient cycle of stories referred to as “The Dog Children,” to be discussed later. Another, similar, widely occurring theme is of a boy – often the son of a chief – who shames his family by stealing or begging for food and who is therefore abandoned and left to perish. In both cases – of the shamed girl and the gluttonous boy – the abandoned one is aided, usually by a grandmother, who takes pity on him or her and leaves a “slow match” hidden somewhere, often together with a bit of food.7 Usually with some kind of supernatural help, the glowing coal is retrieved and used to rekindle a fire. An example of the “shamed girl” theme is the Sec­we­ pemc narrative “Lynx and the Girl” (Boas 2002, 73), paraphrased and abridged as follows: A girl who had many suitors lived in an underground house. Lynx, who was an old man, used trickery to sleep with her and make her pregnant. Her father made her marry Lynx, and then he and the girl’s entire family abandoned the woman, Lynx and their child. “They extinguished all the fires and left. But the girl’s grandmother, Magpie, pitied her. She placed a glowing coal in a mussel shell, added some food and hid it.” (Later, the shell called to her.) “She took the coal and the food and lit a fire …” With

244 | part four – underlying philosophy

fire and a little food, she and her child were able to survive and, eventually to thrive. (See also the Nuxalk version, in ibid., 532) A version of the “abandoned boy” story is from the lower Fraser River Halkomelem: A boy was always begging, and was abandoned by his family. “Only the abandoned boy’s old and blind grandmother took pity on him.” She took some chewed fern-roots [probably bracken fern rhizomes], wrapped a glowing ember in them and put them in a shell, which she hid under a board. She told the dog to scratch the board so he’d find the fire. The boy wept when he found he had been abandoned, but then he found the fire. He made a bow and arrows, with a bowstring of willow bark, and he used this to shoot many birds. With the skins he made a cape so beautiful that the Sun came and asked to swap his supernatural mountain goat skin cape with the boy’s bird cape. The Sun’s cape would immediately fill with schools of herring when the corner of the cape was immersed in the river. Using this magical cape, the boy was able to catch and dry many herring, and eventually became rich. (Ibid., 93–5) In a Nlaka’pamux story (Charles Hill-Tout, in Maud 1978c, 101–2), not only does Beaver bring fire to the people and show them how to kindle fire with a drill, but he also shows them how to carry fire as a “slow match,” comprised of glowing coals encased in a rope (a story recounted later in this chapter). Seeking good fuel wood is also a prevalent topic in traditional narratives. For example, in the Ts’msyen story “Tsag.atilâ’o [Tsagatiláo]” (The Woman Who Married a Bear), the Bear women always went out to collect “good dry wood” so that they could have a bright fire ready for their husbands when they arrived back from fishing. These women collected great bundles of firewood and propped them up against a tree (Boas 2002, 581). Another persistent element in relation to fire and firewood is the episode of a young man who marries the daughter of a powerful supernatural chief, usually in the sky country or under the ocean, and who is then threatened and challenged by his father-in-law. The chief tries to kill him by a number of different means. One of these is by sending him out to split a tree (for firewood), held apart by wedges, which the chief then knocks out, assuming that the split will close up and kill his son-in-law (or prospective son-in-law). But the young man, with the aid and advice of supernatural helpers, thwarts the plan by jamming a hammer into the tree so that it won’t press together.8 This episode occurs in stories of the Tlingit and Ts’msyen, the Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth, the Nuxalk, Comox, and Halkomelem, and even the Chinookans. Boas (2002, 641)

Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge  |  245

suggested that the story originated on the central coast and that its components gradually disintegrated toward the north.9 Food

Food and the quest for food are also predominant subjects of narratives in the study area, often associated with fire, as well as with famine, when food is not forthcoming. Many of the ancient stories refer to specific types of food and activities related to food – for example, picking berries and cooking roots. Animals are often associated with particular foods in these narratives, reflecting ancient and enduring knowledge about the habits of certain animals and birds. Stories about Salmonberry Bird (Swainson’s Thrush), with his magical abilities to ripen salmonberries, for example, are found all along the coast (see chapter 8). Another episode that occurs over and over, with many variations, marks the association of mallard ducks and Canada geese with estuarine roots. Mink or some other culture hero travels to the sky country, where he encounters two or more blind women sitting by a fire and cooking root vegetables – usually Pacific silverweed or springbank clover – by roasting them or using red-hot rocks to steam them. The hero gives the women their sight and then transforms them into ducks or geese. One example of this episode is the Nuxalk story “The Visit in the Sky” (Boas 2002, 531), paraphrased and abridged as follows: A young man, “Mōk.oa’nts” [Mok’oánts], shot many birds and covered himself with bird skins. He ended up being blown up to the sky country in the shape of a big feather. When he arrived in the sky, he found a path and followed it. After some time he saw a number of blind women sitting around a cooking box in which they were cooking roots (tqsos) [t’xwsus, “springbank clover”]. They were Ducks. He took one of the roots away from them and tasted it. Thereupon the women shouted, “I can smell Mōk.oa’nts, he must be here.” The root made the saliva collect in his mouth. He spat into the eyes of one of the women and she could see again … He then brought the sight back to the others. Then he rid them of their pungent smell. Then he threw them down to the earth and said, “Henceforth you shall serve as food for mankind.” This theme occurs not only in several versions in the Nuxalk area (see also McIlwraith 1948, vol. 2, 472) but also in various forms in the Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Comox, Fraser River Halkomelem, and Secwepemc traditions (Boas 2002). A comparable story is the Haida narrative “Goose Woman.” This woman ate only silverweed roots, wild clover rhizomes, and eelgrass. When the people in her husband’s village were starving, she transformed herself into a goose and brought the people a large amount of these roots. The woman later

246 | part four – underlying philosophy

fled when someone in the town said, “They think a great deal of goose food” (told by Walter McGregor, cited in Swanton 1905, 264). Berry picking is another activity often mentioned in ancient stories. For example, the stories of the “Bear Husband,” widely told in different languages and cultures of the study region, almost always begin with a young woman of high standing going to pick berries with a group of women. The Ts’msyen narrative “Tsag.atilâ’o [Tsag’atiláo],” mentioned earlier in connection with the importance of firewood, begins, “Once upon a time there was a chief who had a beautiful daughter. In autumn, when the time to gather berries had arrived, she used to go with the other girls into the forest to pick berries.” She ends up being taken as a wife by a Bear and goes to live with the Bears (Boas 2002, 576; see also McDonald 2003, 95–100; and L.R. Smith 2008b). Another theme, involving both cedar-bark gathering and the origin of edible berries, relates to a jealous husband who strands his wife (by tying or impaling her) at the top of a cedar tree to kill her, after which her blood (from her wounds or from menstruation) runs down the tree and transforms into berry plants. The woman’s brothers hear her death song, try in vain to rescue her, and then one of them, masquerading as their sister, takes revenge on her husband. This story, known variously as “The Revenge of the Brothers” and “The Jealous Husband,” is widespread on the coast (Boas 2002), but the detail of the creation of berries from the woman’s blood is found only in a few versions. In the Lower Nlaka’pamux, Lushootseed, and some other versions, it is trailing blackberries or blackcaps that are created from blood (Fleisher 1980, 203; Teit 1912, 286), whereas in the Nuu-chah-nulth version, it is bunchberries (Cornus canadensis). Alice Paul of Hesquiaht, who shared her version of the story, told about how the woman, near death, decreed that her own blood that was running down the cedar’s trunk would become bunchberries. She said to her brother when he saw her blood turning into bunchberries, “Don’t be afraid! You can eat this. I made it. It is good to eat. It will always grow around that [cedar] tree.” Alice Paul noted that today one always finds bunchberries growing at the base of cedar trees (cited in Turner and Efrat 1982, 64) (figure 12-1).10 Bears – both black bears and grizzlies – are often associated with eating berries (Turner 1997b), as well as with digging and eating roots. For example, Teit (1912) recorded a Nlaka’pamux narrative, “The Four Black Bears,” in which a hunter living near the famous root-digging grounds of Botanie (Beta’ni) Valley had two wives, Grizzly Bear and Black Bear. Grizzly became jealous of the man’s attention to his Black Bear wife: “One day she said to her husband, ‘I am going to dig roots. Come along with me, so I may not feel lonely! You can do shooting at the same time.’” She wanted to kill Black Bear’s children, so she told her own children to entice the young Black Bears by saying, “Let us play at feasting!” and then setting a basketful of “nqáux” (ngexw), a “pudding” of roots and berries,11 in front of them and inducing them to eat heavily so that they would

Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge  |  247

12-1 | Bunchberries (Cornus canadensis) at the base of a cedar snag.

lose their strength (Teit 1912, 218–21; see also 321, 331). In another Nlaka’pamux story, Skunk asked his wife to cook ngexw and fish for his guests (all of the other animals) so that they would have plenty to eat (ibid., 233). The Tsilhqot’in version of the “Bear Husband” tale, “Sès Ts’íqí Ghàghìndá” (The Bear Who Married a Woman) (recorded and interpreted by L.R. Smith 2008a), contains important references to foods that are known to both people and bears: chìnsdàd (silverweed roots, Argentina anserina), saskatoon berries, yellow glacier lily bulbs, spring beauty corms, tiger lily bulbs, and nodding onion bulbs. The Bear husband liked only raw silverweed roots, not cooked ones. Black bears also like wild currants (Ribes sp.), and in one Haida story, they went to war with the Land Otter people over these berries.12 Another example of human food that animals and birds also eat is in a Secwepemc story (Boas 2002, 71) where Coyote encounters Foolhen’s children

248 | part four – underlying philosophy

(Ruffed Grouse, Prairie Chicken, and Blue Grouse), and they explain that their mother is “in the forest, searching for berries.” In another Secwepemc story, Magpie collects wíle (black lichen, Bryoria fremontii) from pine trees and roasts it, before giving it to her children along with deer fat (ibid., 74).13 In yet another story, Mountain Goats make a large basketful of soup of “black and white moss” (the lichens Bryoria fremontii and Alectoria sarmentosa, the first of which is edible by people) (Teit 1912, 260). Fish and fishing – especially for salmon – are themes alluded to many times in traditional narratives of the region (Boas 2002). Plants and plant products (as the materials needed in fishing technologies) feature strongly in episodes related to fishing. The origin and construction of fishing weirs, fishing nets and spears, canoes and paddles, and implements for drying and cooking fish are topics central to many stories that incorporate plants (e.g., Boas 2002; Cove and MacDonald 1987; Maud 1978a, 1978c; and Swanton 1905). Significantly, too, a number of narratives on the Northwest Coast (e.g., Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, and Kwakwaka’wakw) describe how salmon were actually created from cedar wood, cedar bark, alder bark, or some other plant material (see Boas 2002, 503, 536). In one Nimpkish story, cedar-bough tips were transformed into herring (ibid., 310). In a story from the Kwagiulth, the Transformer turned four “pine needles” into four kinds of fish: silver salmon (coho), dog salmon, trout, and humpback (pink) salmon (ibid., 358). A ’Nakwaxda’xw (Nahwitti) story describes how Raven stole the sun because the world was dark and how he also created all of the lakes and rivers. Then he carved a wooden fish and ordered it to swim up the river because he wanted it to be a salmon. But it soon turned around and became a halibut. Then he took a salmonberry blossom and made a salmon from it. But it became a red snapper. Raven finally made salmon and instructed his slaves to build a salmon weir, and he caught many salmon (ibid., 385). In some of the Haida and Tlingit stories, as recounted by Mary Beck (1989), it was Fog Woman14 who called the salmon back each year from the open ocean to the streams of their birth. They followed her call in such abundance that the people could take all they needed for food, and still there were salmon. At one time, it is said, there were no salmon, and fishermen had to try for cod, halibut, or sculpin. Fog Woman, who was married to Raven, captured all of the fog in Raven’s spruce-root hat. Then she used that same hat to capture all of the different kinds of salmon and showed Raven how to pit-cook salmon, wrapping it in skunk-cabbage leaves, and how to smoke it. Another example of how plants feature in stories that relate to fishing is the Saanich story “Origin of Salmon,” as recorded by ethnographer Diamond Jenness (n.d., 94): Once there were no seals and the people were starving; they lived on elk and whatever other game they could kill. Two brave youths said to

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each other, “Let us go and see if we can find any salmon.” They embarked in their canoe and headed out to sea, not caring in what direction they travelled. They journeyed for three and a half months. Then they came to a strange country. When they reached the shore a man came out and welcomed them, saying, “You have arrived.” “We have arrived,” the youths answered, though they did not know where they were. They were given food to eat, and after they had eaten their host led them outside the house and said, “Look around and see what you can see.” They looked around and saw smoke from q’əxmín15 that the steelhead, sockeye, spring and other varieties of salmon were burning, each for itself, in their houses. The youths stayed in the place about a month. Their hosts then said to them, “You must go home tomorrow. Everything is arranged for you. The salmon that you were looking for will muster at your home and start off on their journey. You must follow them.” So the two youths followed the salmon; for three and a half months they travelled, day and night, with the fish. Every night they took q’əxmín and burned it that the salmon might feed on its smoke and sustain themselves. Finally they reached Discovery Island (kttses),16 where they burned q’əxmín all along the beach; for their hosts had said to them, “Burn q’əxmín along the beach when you reach land, to feed the salmon that travel with you. Then, if you treat the salmon well, you will always have them in abundance.” Now that they had plenty of salmon at Discovery Island they let them go to other places – to the Fraser River, Nanaimo, etc. Because their journey took them three and a half months, salmon are now absent on the coast for that period. The coho said to the other salmon, “You can go ahead of us, for we have not yet got what we wanted from the lakes.” That is why the coho is always the last of the salmon. The young men now had salmon, but no good way of catching them. The leaders of the salmon, a real man and woman, taught them how to make sxwələʔ (reefnets),17 and how to use q’əxmín. They also told the young men how their people should dress when they caught the salmon, and that they should start to use their purse net in July, when the berries were ripe. So today, when the Indians dry their salmon they always burn some q’əxmín on the fire (or on top of the stove); and they put a little in the fish when they cook it. Also, when they cut up the salmon, before inserting the knife they pray to the salmon, that they may always be plentiful. This story not only explains the origin of the different kinds of salmon but also identifies the important ceremonial role of q’əxmín (“Indian celery,” Lomatium nudicaule), whose seeds are widely used in the region as a protective incense

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as well as a medicine for colds and respiratory diseases (see chapter 7). Finally, it alludes to the ingenious fishing technology of the Saanich reefnet, which is constructed from Pacific willow bark and various other plant materials and is unique to the Straits Salish peoples (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994). Another key plant in relation to fishing technologies is stinging nettle, which is the single most important source of fibre for nets and short fishing lines on the Northwest Coast.18 There are multiple narratives that relate to the origin of nets, particularly nettle nets. A good example is the Gitxsan story of the origin of nettle fibre, “Prince of Spiders.”19 This story is set in early spring on the coast near the present site of Metlakatla. There was a general famine at the time. The people tried many times to catch salmon with stone traps on the sea coast, but the spots for traps were few and were often controlled by only a few families. Also, there had been many days of storms and cold weather, making food even harder to get. Many people were starving and were moving around to try to find food. Two people, an old woman and her daughter, were left behind when the others left their village. They began to gather roots and wild rose hips, which still remained on the bushes through the winter. They made a shelter at the foot of a large spruce tree and managed to get enough food to keep themselves alive. They saw many salmon but had no way of catching them, and they were both near death from starvation. Then the young woman dreamed that there was someone sleeping with her. It turned out to be a handsome young man. He said to her, “Today we will gather much nettle and clean and dry them, then I will show you how to catch the spring salmon.” So they gathered a huge pile of stinging nettles. He told her, “Take off the leaves and the outer skin … Now take this stone and shred the stalks into these fibres and then hang them where the hot sun will dry them. When you have them nearly dry, sprinkle saltwater on them from the sea and then dry them on the racks I have made over the fire place.”20 The man took all of the nettle fibre and began to make a net, saying to the young woman, “This you will call net.” He showed her how to fasten the net across the creek to catch the spring salmon. Every day from that point, they caught salmon in these nets, and they had a plentiful supply of food. Soon a baby boy was born to them, and through his father’s supernatural abilities, he grew extremely quickly. His father showed him how to hunt and snare animals and how to make nets to catch fish. One day, after their son was grown, the father told the mother he was going to leave her, saying, “My son shall become a famous chief among his people, who had scorned you.” Before daybreak, the woman awoke and saw her husband leaving through the doorway. But although she arose quickly and followed him outside, she saw no one there, only a large spider climbing up into the sky. Then she knew that it was a supernatural spider whom she had married and who had fathered her child.

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The mother, son, and grandmother returned to their village with all of the boxes of food that the son had caught, which the mother had prepared and dried. Their canoe was filled with all of the different kinds of food – dried salmon, dried halibut, smoked seal meat, smoked deer meat – as well as many robes of different animals, and “above all they had a large net.” The people who had originally deserted the woman and her mother were in the throes of another famine, so the three shared their food with the people. They went back and retrieved more food that they had left behind, and the chief, who was the woman’s maternal uncle, prepared a great feast with this food for all of the Ts’msyen tribes, all of whom were suffering from the famine. The chief told the people the story of the supernatural spider, saying, “The spider showed my niece many methods of gathering food and among these was the net. No longer need we wait till the salmon goes into the river. We will now be able to gather it while it is in the saltwater, and so for the other kinds of fish as well. You will be able to use this net and make it, as my grandson will show you.” The grandmother spoke: “The great chief of the heavens had pity on us, so he sent down one of his sons to marry my daughter and thus teach us how to gather many different foods which we have been unable to get before … he was the Prince of Spiders. My daughter saw him going into the heavens as a giant spider.” All of the guests at the feast were presented with gifts of food. The young woman then began to show the method of making nettle fibre as her husband had taught her, as well as how to make fibre from the fireweed. The story ends, “When all of the people learned this method of making nets, they began catching much salmon, and soon the Ts’msyen became traders in this food to many of the other tribes.” This narrative is a pivotal one, as it details a crucial innovation in peoples’ collective history – the processing of stinging nettle and other types of fibrous materials and the technology of net making. This discovery possibly extends back to the earliest times on the coast, with at least indirect archaeological evidence for nets during the Early Holocene (see Ames and Maschner 1999, 251; and also chapter 2). This special knowledge of making twine, rope, and nets, so important for the survival of the ancestors, is almost universally associated with spiders (figure 12-2).21 The interior equivalent of the stinging nettle and fireweed as fibrous materials on the coast is Indian-hemp, widely known as sp’éts’n in Interior Salish languages (see chapter 6). Stories from the Interior Plateau that connect plant fibre to spiders and fishing nets invariably allude to sp’éts’n rather than to nettle. For example, there is a Nlaka’pamux narrative recorded by Charles Hill-Tout (in Maud 1978c, 141, 146), with other versions recorded by Teit (1912), of Coyote’s son travelling to the sky country and encountering an elderly couple, who turned out to be the Spider people. They were busy rolling sp’éts’n on their legs

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12-2  |  Orb spider weaving its web, said to have been the inspiration for the original fishing nets, according to a number of origin stories.

to make twine, but they were having difficulty because the only Indian-hemp plants nearby were short and scrubby. They were kind to Coyote’s son, so he pulled out hairs from his own abdomen and threw them on the ground. “Immediately three or four acres of the land adjoining the stream became covered with fine sp’éts’n” (Maude 1978c, 90–1).22 Famine

As in the Saanich story “Origin of Salmon,” previously recounted, food shortages and famines are referred to many times in stories from northwestern North America (Cove and MacDonald 1987; Boas 2002) and must have occurred regularly, far back into cultural memory, especially in late winter and early spring. Two examples from the Boas narratives are provided here: There once was a severe winter. It stormed, rained and snowed incessantly so that the people were unable to catch fish. They dug for shellfish and cooked them, but were unable to find enough and many starved to death. (Nuu-chah-nulth legend, in Boas 2002, 269)

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Once there was a famine in a village and all the supplies had been exhausted except for a box of dried fish eggs. The people lived on fern roots which they had gathered laboriously in the forest and on which they survived wretchedly. (Lekwiltok legend, in ibid., 294) These passages detail the use of shellfish and “fern roots”23 as famine foods. Plant foods (along with clams and other shellfish) have had a particular role as famine foods because their locations are predictable. Thus, especially for roots and other underground storage organs of plants, if one knows where to look, they are available year round and are generally most nutritious in their dormant period, from fall through early spring until they start to sprout (see Turner and Davis 1993). Springtime greens like fireweed, cow-parsnip, and prickly pear cactus are also known famine foods (e.g., Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990; see also chapter 5). Fireweed features in a Ts’msyen account, for example, in which a fireweed plant appeared miraculously through the snow at the southern boundary of a newly claimed hunting territory, and “from that day Guell Haast [K’ilhaast], the single fireweed, has had its place on the totems to tell of the time of famine and how the salvation of the people was wrought” (recounted in the late 1930s by Walter Wright, a Ts’msyen chief of the Kitselas people, cited in Johnson 1997, 140; see also chapter 9). Famines and food shortages, deeply embedded in the ancient narratives and origin stories, are also known from more recent times, within the memories of contemporary elders. It is likely that the stories themselves, by naming the plants that people can seek out at such times – roots, greens, and winter fruits – serve as a “safety net,” helping to remind people of what to do when they face a food shortage. In a similar vein, the Haida story “The Famine of Ti’An”24 provides possible advice for others facing famine: “Since they had nothing with which to catch fish, they baited their hooks with skunk-cabbage roots,” and they caught lots of halibut with this method. Origin Stories

Origin stories, or creation stories, are often long and complex. A single narrative may be recounted over several days and/or nights by a skilled and trained orator. In their entirety, these chronicles encompass and explain multiple aspects of cultural practices of a people. Children, and the entire audience, are expected to listen carefully, for there are many lessons woven into the accounts, embedded instructions necessary for survival and proper cultural behaviour. Two of these stories, one from Nlaka’pamux traditions and one from Oowekeeno, illustrate how ethnobotanical knowledge is firmly embedded within such fundamental narratives.

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“Old-One and the Earth, Sun, and People” (Nlaka’pamux, or Thompson) A long time ago, before the world was formed, there lived a number of people together. They were the Stars, Moon, Sun, and Earth. The latter was a woman, and her husband was the Sun. The Earth-woman always found fault with her husband, and was disagreeable with him, saying he was nasty, ugly, and too hot. They had several children. At last the Sun felt annoyed at her grumbling, and deserted her. The Moon and Stars, who were relatives of the Sun, also left her, and moved over to where the Sun had taken up his abode. When the Earth-woman saw that her husband and his friends had all deserted her, she became very sorrowful, and wept much. Now Old-One appeared, and transformed Sun, Moon, and Stars into those we see in the sky at the present day, and placed them all so that they should look on the Earth-woman, and she could look at them. He said, “Henceforth you shall not desert people, nor hide yourselves, but shall remain where you can always be seen at night or by day. Henceforth you will look down on the Earth.” Then he transformed the woman into the present earth. Her hair became the trees and grass; her flesh, the clay; her bones, the rocks; and her blood, the springs of water. Old-One said, “Henceforth you will be the earth, and people will live on you, and trample on your belly. You will be as their mother, for from you bodies will spring, and to you they will go back. People will live as in your bosom, and sleep on your lap. They will derive nourishment from you, for you are fat; and they will utilize all parts of your body. You will no more weep when you see your children.” After this the earth gave birth to people, who were very similar in form to ourselves: but they knew nothing, and required neither food nor drink. They had no appetites, desires, knowledge, or thoughts. Then Old-One travelled over the world and among the people, giving them appetites and desires, and causing all kinds of birds and fish to appear, to which he gave names, and ascribed to them certain positions and functions. He said to the people, “Where you see fish jump, there you will find water to drink … It will quench your thirst, and keep you alive.” He taught the women how to make birch baskets, mats, and lodges, and how to dig roots, gather berries and cure them. He taught the men how to make fire, catch fish, shoot, snare, trap, and spear game. He taught them how to make nets, beaver-spears, and snares. He showed them the spátsan-tree [sp’éts’n, “Indian-hemp”], telling them the bark from it was the best for making thread and rope. He taught them how to make dead-falls for marten, and showed them the white and the black arrow-stone, telling them it was best for making knives,

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spear-points, and arrow-heads. He taught them how to snare grouse, and use the feathers on arrows so that they might go straight. He also told the people how to cook and eat salmon and other food, and showed them tobacco and pipe-stone, and how to smoke. He also taught the people the relationship of the sexes, how to have sexual intercourse, and how to give birth to children. When he had finished teaching them, he bade them good-by, saying, “I now leave you; but if you forget any of the arts I have taught you, or if you are in distress and require my aid, I will come again to you. The sun is as your father, and the earth as your mother. When you die, you will return to your mother’s body. You will be covered with her flesh as a blanket, under which your bones will rest in peace.” (Teit 1912, 321–3, citing one of several versions; see also 324–7) The theme of the “world’s parents” (Sky-Father and Earth-Mother) – including the creation of the earth from a human, with her bones becoming rock, her hair becoming the vegetation, and her blood the water – is one of the central elements of many origin stories from the northwestern part of North America according to Archambault (2006). “Nōak.aua and Masmasalā’niq” [Noak’awa and Masmasalániq, or Wise One and Son of Raven] (Oowekeeno)25 After Raven had freed the sun, Nōak.aua and Masmasalā’niq descended from the sky in order to make everything beautiful and well. Nōak.aua thought, “Oh, if only Masmasalā’niq would separate the land from the water.” And Masmasalā’niq separated the land from the water. And Nōak.aua thought, “Oh, if only Masmasalā’niq would create the eulachon.” And Masmasalā’niq created the fish rich in oil. Then Nōak.aua thought, “Oh, if only Masmasalā’niq would make a path leading up yonder mountain.” And Masmasalā’niq made it. And again Nōak.aua thought, “Oh, if only Masmasalā’niq would make a cave in this mountain and would create many berries on its summit. Oh, if only he would carve people from cedar wood, men and women, and would make canoes and paddles for them.” And Masmasalā’niq executed all the thoughts of Nōak.aua.26 And Nōak.aua thought again, “… oh, if only he would go into the forest to seek a cedar tree; oh, if only he would make the stone axe to cut down the cedar; if only he would make the box to store dried salmon. Oh, if only he would make the firedrill, so that the people would have fire, and if only he would look for the yellow cedar wood which has lain in the water for a long time, in order to set it alight by friction; oh, if only he would make the inner bark beater and would beat the inner cedar bark until it is soft enough to use for tinder.” And Masmasalā’niq executed all the thoughts of

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Nōak.aua. And Nōak.aua thought again, “Oh, if only Masmasalā’niq would make a net so that the people might catch fish.” Masmasalā’niq tried, but without success. So he went to ask Spider to make a net for him … Spider also made the neck-ring of red inner cedar bark for the winter dance, and the basket, and taught Masmasalā’niq how to peel cedars … Masmasalā’niq sharpened a bone and Spider used it to split the cedar bark. Then, at Nōak.aua’s wishes, Masmasalā’niq made edible roots, houses, paintings, carvings and masks. When everything was done, Nōak.aua and Masmasalā’niq brought people to life, told them to marry, and told them “When you find no more berries at the foot of the mountain, use the path made by us. Ascend it and you will find many berries up there.” They taught people to make traps in order to catch raccoons and bears. Then the story continues with a narrative of how Deer successfully captured fire for the people by having dry fir wood stuck into his tail: “And the fire dropped to the ground everywhere and the people kept it carefully. Deer called to the wood by the wayside, ‘Hide the fire.’ It accepted the fire and since that time is combustible.” Nōak.aua and Masmasalā’niq then conspired to kill Thunderbird by fashioning a wooden whale coated with pitch to entrap Thunderbird and all of his family. The two heroes eventually went back to the sky but then returned to earth as droplets of blood that impregnated all of the women, “and consequently all gave birth to children” (paraphrased and abridged from Boas 2002, 451–4). The creation or formation of the world through the efforts and sacrifices of supernatural beings who provide for and teach humans how to survive, ensuring that they have access to sunlight, water, fire, food, and essential materials, is one of the overarching narrative themes throughout the region. Many people recognize particular supernatural figures, especially those who come from above, as ancestors of their own clans, houses, lineages, or families, and it is by way of descent from these beings, traced through hereditary chiefs and recounted in oral histories, that settlements and tribal territories are validated (K.T. Carlson 2001). Plants as Supernatural Actors and Magical Substances Many ancient narratives feature either humans with supernatural powers or “animal-people” – animals in human form who are endowed with supernatural qualities – as the main actors. Plants are also often cited in stories but usually in the context of their natural roles as sources of food, materials, or medicines used or created by the supernatural beings and heroes around whom the stories revolve. The applications of plants in fire making, as fuel, as food, or in ceremonial contexts have already been mentioned. Many other and more specific roles

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appear in various stories: western redcedar limbs twisted to make rope, yew wood for wedges, highbush cranberries and crabapples served at feasts, or some kind of medicinal plant used to gain strength or cure sickness (see table 12-1 for more examples). Such references are highly informative because they are often indicators of some longstanding applications of particular species within a particular culture. Sometimes, too, they can give clues about the origins and relative importance of certain practices related to plants. Perhaps even more interesting, however, are the stories from many different language groups that give clues about the underlying spiritual or supernatural qualities of plants and that define a different relationship between humans and the plant world – one of gratitude, appreciation, and even mystery – that is the underpinning of peoples’ attitudes about plants and even their traditional management practices. A good example of such a story is the Haida narrative “The Artisans,”27 which features Skunk-Cabbage as a persona. In this story, a young man has been abandoned by his entire village, except for his grandmother. Returning home one day, he comes across a big skunk-cabbage plant in a swampy area. He digs a trench around the plant to allow water to accumulate, in case he should be thirsty another time when he passes. The next day, when he returns to the spot, a sockeye salmon is swimming in the trench he dug. He makes the ditch a little bigger, and then he takes the salmon home to his grandmother, and they eat part of it. The next day when he returns to the ditch, there are two salmon. Again he enlarges the trench. The next time, there are three, then five, ten, twenty, and finally, “a great quantity” of sockeye. Each time he digs the trench a little larger. Then one day he notices that someone has come and is eating all of the salmon in the ditch – a large person with a big stomach. The boy shoots arrows at him. Later, he discovers that this was a supernatural being, Skunk-Cabbage, and that it was he who had been helping the boy by giving him the salmon. This is only one segment of the story, yet not only does it convey to the audience the essential features and habitat of skunk-cabbage, but it also tells of a survival technique known to the Haida that could be used to obtain drinking water. Most important, it features Skunk-Cabbage in a respected and appreciated role as a helper and provider for humans. The story has an interesting counterpoint in a Kathlamet (Chinookan) story from the Oregon coast recorded originally in the Kathlamet language by Boas (1901, 50), as told by Charles Cultee, one of the last speakers of this language: The people of mythical times were dying of hunger. They had only sagittaria-roots [wapato, Sagittaria spp.] to eat. They had only small sagittaria-roots and skunk-cabbage [rhizomes] and … rush roots [possibly cattail, Typha latifolia] to eat. In the spring of the year the Salmon went up the river. They had first arrived with many companions … Then

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the Skunk-Cabbage said: “At last my brother’s son has arrived. If it had not been for me, your people would have been dead long ago.” Then the Salmon said, “Who is that who is talking there?” “Oh, that is the Skunk-Cabbage who is talking.” “Let us go ashore.” They gave him five elk skins and put war clubs under his blanket, one on each side … Then they carried him inland and placed him among willows. Table 12-2 presents examples of the range of plant species featured in “actor” roles in Indigenous narratives. Based on a survey of traditional narratives from across the region, those in which plants are persona or key actors are relatively few. However, these stories are significant reminders that plants, too, are relatives, or kin, of humans – living beings to be treated with respect – with powers to affect humans in various ways. Several of these stories involve trees as humans in a transformed state, and it is often Raven or Coyote who is involved as a co-actor and who enacts their transformation. The Hesquiaht (Nuu-chahnulth) story of the Yellow-Cedar sisters, told by Alice Paul (cited in Turner and Efrat 1982, 33), is a good example: Three young women were down on the beach drying salmon. Raven came along and wanted their salmon, so he kept asking them if they were afraid to be there by themselves – if they were afraid of bears, or wolves or other such animals. They kept saying, “No” to everything he asked them about until he said, “What about owls?” At this they said, “Oh, don’t even talk about owls to us. We are afraid of owls.” Raven went away, but hid in the bushes nearby and began to imitate owl sounds. When they heard this sound, the women were so frightened they ran away into the woods. They kept running until they came part way up the side of a hill. They were so tired, they decided to stop and rest. They said to themselves, “We’d better stand here now on the side of the mountain; they will call us ʕałmapt.” And they turned into yellow-cedar trees. Raven snuck out and ate all their dried salmon. That is why yellow-cedars are always found on the mountainsides, and why they are such nice looking trees, with smooth trunks and few branches, because they used to be attractive young women with long, shining hair. This story not only tells about the physical and ecological characteristics of yellow-cedar in Hesquiaht territory – not to mention the cunning, deceitful, and gluttonous side of Raven – but also conveys both a fear of owls, which many people hold (because of owls’ association with death and witchcraft), and the value of the gift that was bequeathed to people by the Yellow-Cedar sisters. It is no wonder that yellow-cedar bark is so highly appreciated and that basket weavers, even today, are careful when they harvest the bark not too take more

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Table 12-2  |  Examples of plants or plant products featured in “actor” roles, as well as in an array of supernatural or magical roles, in Indigenous narratives of northwestern North America Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Pitch

Mink wanted to marry Pitch, but Pitch melted in the sun and stuck to Mink; Pitchman is a fisherman in a number of stories, who has to come home before the sun comes out so he won’t melt; Pitchman killed by Raven

Trees

All the trees were formerly people, transformed into trees by Xéls, the Creator, who said, “you shall all be trees and Fir shall be your boss.”

Comox (Boas 2002, 180, 189) Nawhitti (Boas 2002, 389) Quwuts’un (Arvid Charlie [Luschiim], pers. comm., 1999) Tahltan (Teit 1919, 210) Tlingit, Ts’msyen, and others (Boas 2002) Saanich (Jenness n.d., 63)

Algae, fungi, and ferns

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana)

Mink wanted to marry Kelp, but in the Great Flood, when he hung onto his wife, he almost drowned

Comox (Boas 2002, 189) Kwakwaka’wakw (Boas 2002, 335)

Horsetail, or scouring rush (Equisetum hyemale)

Horsetail helped Coyote by stopping the wind and was paid with dentalia, which he stuck on his body to make the white joints

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 307)

Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa)

An old blind woman named Skaiya’m was transformed into a wood fern by her angry husband because she had allowed her grandson to be kidnapped; fern root transformed from a girl’s body caught in a landslide, with her head becoming the fern root and her body a marmot

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 283–4) Stl’atl’imx (Hill-Tout 1905, 177) Tlingit (Swanton 1909, 180)

Tree fungus (Ganoderma applanatum or other similar species)

Giant horsetail (Equisetum telmateia)

Sword fern (Polystichum munitum)

Steersman for Yaał (Massett dialect) (Raven) in Haida “origin of women” story

Haida (John Sky, cited in Enrico 1995, 62–3; and in Swanton 1905, 126)

Formerly a woman who was always drinking water; changed into a plant by the Transformer

Ditidaht (Lena Johnson, cited in Kennedy and Bouchard 1994, 25–7)

Fern Woman is a prominent supernatural being, often associated with shrews and mice, which are in several stories; Sword Fern was a

Haida (Turner 2004a) Kwakwaka’wakw (Turner and Bell 1973)

/continued

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Table 12-2 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

supernatural person who controlled the weather and had a hairy face, earrings of dentalia, and cheeks smeared with red ochre Conifers

Yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis)

Three young women changed themselves into yellow-cedars

Western larch, or “tamarack” (Larix occidentalis)

A people-eating monster that was vanquished and turned into a medicinal tree by Coyote

Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis)

Spruce Tree fathered a son with a young woman

Tlingit (Swanton 1909, 443)

Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

A tree who turned himself into a man; cedar bark and cedar wood transformed into Salmon

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 285; Boas 2002, several stories)

Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa)

Pine Cone (presumably this species) is an old man hunting muskrats in one story

Flowering plants

Red alder (Alnus rubra)

Supernatural woman; wife of Coyote (short, dark-skinned)

Cow-parsnip, or “wild celery” (Heracleum maximum)

Formerly a person who offended Raven by speaking angrily and was transformed into a food by Raven

Desert parsley, or hog-fennel (Lomatium macrocarpum)

This root was said to be the father of one of the Salishan Transformers, Child-of-Hog-Fennel

Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus)

Supernatural plant; a fat-bellied person who gave gift of salmon to hero; food for early people and rewarded by the salmon

Hesquiaht and Nuu-chahnulth (Alice Paul, cited in Turner and Efrat 1982) Okanagan (Pierre John, pers. comm. recorded and transcribed by Randy Bouchard and translated by Larry Pierre, October 1969)

Ktunaxa (Boas 1918, 261–5)

Haida (Turner 2004a) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 223; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 57–8) Tlingit (Swanton 1909, 20)

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 224, 351; Maud 1978c, 76, 106) Stl’atl’imx (Charlie Mack, pers. comm. to Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, translated by B. Ritchie, 1972) Haida (Swanton 1908) Kathlamet (Boas 1901)

Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge  |  261

Table 12-2 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca)

Kusganmelks (Little Crabapple Tree) was one of four Mucus children, who eventually married; Crabapple married West Wind’s daughter

Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 50–5)

Devil’s-Club Man is a supernatural being who brings luck in hunting, gambling, etc.; Devil’s-Club is a beautiful young woman who helps a young hunter who isn’t able to get game by teaching him how to use devil’s-club for purification

Haida (Turner 2004a; Boas 2002) Ts’msyen (Boas 2002; Cove and MacDonald 1987, 79–80, 82–3)

Tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata)

Transformed by Coyote from a monster into a useful plant

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 281)

One of Coyote’s wives (tall)

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 223)

Trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides)

One of Coyote’s wives (light-skinned)

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 57–8) Tlingit (Boas 2002, 671)

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa)

Raven shook a raspberry bush and transformed it into a man, who became his speaker

In the story “Ghosts of the Volcano,” one of the ghosts was Elderberries, a chief with half an elderberry bush protruding through his face; Elderberry Bush was a woman who gave birth before Stone

Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 149; Boas 1916, 62)

Nettle was a supernatural woman who stung Tsamsem’s penis and made him ill when he tricked her into having intercourse; also widely associated with spiders and spider webs

Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987)

Berries were “goggle-eyed little boys” who taught a woman proper berrypicking behaviour

Nuxalk (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 691)

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus)

Cottonwood (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa)

“Raspberry bush” (Rubus parviflorus or Rubus sp.)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica)

Blueberries (Vaccinium alaskaense, V. ovalifolium) Edible valerian (Valeriana edulis)

The root, called mesái, was a woman with two daughters. She wanted them to marry rattlesnakes, but the rattlesnakes would not accept them because they smelled so strongly

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 339)

Note: The Indigenous groups are listed more or less in the order of the episodes cited, and their names are those given in the sources. Nahwitti, Nimpkish, and Kwiksootainuk are Kwakwaka’wakw subgroups cited by Boas (2002). 262 | part four – underlying philosophy

than a strap of bark from any one tree so that the tree will continue to live (see Turner, Ari, et al. 2009; and chapter 13). Another primary actor in a story about human origins is Tree Fungus Man, featured in the Haida story of the origin of women.28 In this story, Yaał (Raven) wanted to go on a journey to a certain reef to fetch “certain short objects,” which were female genitalia, which he wanted to place on his sister, Siwaas, in order to create the first women: Then they say he left there. While he was going along, they say he managed to pick up his sister. He let her off at this wife’s place. Then they say he left. He asked Junco to be crew for him and took him with him. He also took a spear. The female genitalia were climbing on each other on the reef there [like chitons]. When the canoe got near it, Junco became deranged. Then Raven went back with him, they say. He asked Steller’s Jay to be crew for him and set out with him, too. When they got near it, Steller’s Jay too just flapped his wings around. Raven failed with everything [that he asked to accompany him] and he drew a design on a bracket fungus and sat it in the stern. Then, “Keep your eyes open and backpaddle every once in a while,” he said to him. Then he left with him. When the canoe got near the reef, the fungus just shook its head. He [Yaał] speared a big and a little one [female genitalia] and put them aboard and went back with them. He landed and summoned his wife and stuck one on her. Then he put one on his sister too. In this story, Tree Fungus was the only one strong enough to withstand the power of the female genitalia, and without him, Raven would not have been able to create women. Another story involving a plant actor – this time one that was harmful to humans and had to be transformed by Coyote – is the Nlaka’pamux narrative “Coyote and the Tobacco-Tree” (Teit 1912, 304). This Tobacco-Tree killed men: “Whoever went under its shade, or plucked its leaves, died. Having made a stone pipe, [Coyote] went up into the shade of the tree, and, plucking some of the leaves, put them in his pipe, and smoked them. He said, ‘Henceforth you will be ordinary tobacco, and people will pluck and smoke your leaves without harm.’”29 A similar narrative, from the Okanagan, “Tamarack, the People Eater,” is about how tamarack (western larch, Larix occidentalis) came to be used for medicine: Fox traveled along, but he hadn’t gone far when he met again with Coyote, and told him about a long, tall tree, growing high up in the mountains, which was a people-eater. This tree was Tamarack. Tamarack killed people by grabbing them when they got too close – around the base of each of these tall trees were the bones of many victims.

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Coyote went over to the place where Tamarack could be found. He took with him a large club, so that he could smack the tree when it bent down to grab him. He got close to Tamarack. The tree began to bend down, but before he could hit it, Tamarack smashed him and threw him a long ways. Coyote died. As usual, Fox knew that Coyote had been killed – he came over to the spot where Coyote lay, and stepped over him, bringing him back to life. Coyote scolded his partner, “Why did you bother me? I was just lying down to rest.” “No,” said Fox, “You were killed by Tamarack, that people-eater. I’ll help you – I’ll give you a weapon, tipped with black flint. When Tamarack tries to grab you, hit him with this, and he’ll bother you no more.” So Coyote went back to Tamarack, with his new weapon. Tamarack bent down to grab him, but Coyote yelled out, “Don’t kill me yet! I have something to say to you!” When Tamarack hesitated, Coyote whacked the top of the tree. Coyote then passed judgment: “Henceforth, when the transformed people come to this land, you will not be a people-eater. You will be used as medicine. Today, the tops of the tallest tamarack, high up in the mountains, are all bent; this is because Coyote made it that way. (Told by Pierre John, Upper Similkameen, cited in Bouchard and Kennedy 1969–72) Another Coyote narrative theme is of certain trees being wives of Coyote or of Coyote’s son: one is dark-skinned (Alder), and one is light-skinned (Trembling Aspen) or tall (Cottonwood) (Teit 1912, 223). There are other stories of men taking wives of wood, such as the Ts’msyen story “The Kitkiata and His Wooden Wife” (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 217–19). In ancient times, according to Haida belief, crabapple trees (and other types of trees) were said to have been human beings as well (Dawson 1880). Western redcedar is also sometimes represented in stories as originally having a human form or, conversely, as being transformed into a generous human, who in one story gives a woman a large bundle of cedar bark (Stewart 1984; Teit 1912, 285). Even wild blueberries (figure 12-3) are endowed with a human persona, as in the Nuxalk story “The Woman Who Befriended a Wolf ” (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 691): Not many hundred years ago … a woman [named Ksninsnimdimut] was picking blueberries. As she started to climb a steep bank to a shelf where she saw that the fruit was plentiful, she heard one of the berries speaking to its companions. “Let’s hide,” it said, “that foul-mouthed woman is coming.” The berry was referring to her … as “foul-mouthed” because of her habit of

264 | part four – underlying philosophy

12-3  |  Oval-leaved blueberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium).

munching berries as she picked instead of putting all in her basket for future consumption. She hurried up the bank so swiftly that many of the berries were unable to hide, and she saw them in their human forms, a host of goggle-eyed little boys sitting on the berry shoots. On that occasion, she obtained more than any of her companions. Thanks to her sight of the berries in human forms, she was thenceforth able to see them in their hiding places and was accordingly always fortunate. She respected the wishes of the fruit, never eating as she picked, but chewing dried salmon instead.30

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It is, indeed, considered inappropriate to eat while one is picking berries or harvesting food. Generally, the harvester eats sparingly and only when finished his or her task. Children recall being reprimanded by their grandmother for eating berries before they had filled their baskets (e.g., Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001; and Turner and Thompson 2006). Lena Johnson’s story “The Transformer’s Travels in Nitinat Lake” (cited in Kennedy and Bouchard 1994, 25–7) provides a final example of a plant-person. The Transformer, kwiikwistupsaap, was going along the beach, changing things. “And then baʔax spoke and said, ‘I’ll be baʔax a horsetail plant. I’ll be near the water. I’ll be in those puddles because I’m always drinking. I’ll be a baʔax,’ so that’s what she became. Then Horsetail put on her big cedar bark cape, tsiisakaadib, a big cape. That’s why baʔax has a reddish brown section on top, because of the cedar bark cape” (figure 12-4). Plants with Other Magical or Supernatural Properties as Described in Narratives Aside from the personification of trees and other plants as described in the previous section, there are many more instances in stories where plants and products made from them have magical or supernatural properties attributed to them or are transformed magically from one state to another. For example, in the Haida narrative “He-Who-Got-Supernatural-Power-From-His-Little-Finger,” told by artist Charlie Edenshaw to Franz Boas, “an old rotten tree with long roots” belonging to Master Canoe-Builder is transformed into a large canoe full of crying geese as paddlers, simply with the words, “Go into the water, canoe of my father!” (cited in Swanton 1905, 250). Often such supernatural traits are in connection with activities of one of the culture heroes, Tricksters, or Transformers, like Raven, Coyote, or Mink. Table 12-3 provides some examples of magical or supernatural plants and plant products. There is another story of a magical tobacco tree from which Haida tobacco originated.31 The story of the Haida tobacco tree, which was apparently not harmful like its Interior Plateau relative in the previous tobacco story, was recorded by Dawson (1880, 152): Long ago the Indians32 had no tobacco and one plant only existed, growing somewhere far inland in the interior of the Stickeen [? Tahltan] country. This plant was caused to grow by the deity, and was like a tree, very large and tall. With a bow and arrows a man shot at its summit, where the seed was, and at last brought down one or two seeds [probably the globular fruits of this type of tobacco], which he carried away, carefully preserved, and sowed the following spring. From the plants thus procured all the tobacco afterward cultivated sprung.

266 | part four – underlying philosophy

12-4  |  Giant horsetail (Equisetum telmateia).

Table 12-3  |  Examples of plants or plant products having magical or supernatural qualities as reflected in Indigenous narratives of northwestern North America Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Berries

Berries mixed with crabapples served at Wolves’ feast; berry cakes food of supernatural beings at a feast

Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 275) Haida (Swanton 1905, 300)

Pitch

Sometimes used to impregnate women who chew it; people long ago said to make canoes from pitch

Ts’msyen, Comox, Nuuchah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw (e.g., Boas 2002, 227, 287, 381)

Algae, lichen, ferns, and fern allies

Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera)

Piled elk hides from undersea shamans turn into kelp fronds when brought to the surface

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Edible seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae; syn. Porphyra abbottiae) (Sutherland et al. 2011)

Spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa)

Raven made ferns green and layered, as food for the people, because before, “In Raven’s time the butts of ferns … were already cooked”; hunter taught to watch out for “green fern roots” that grow wherever there are grizzly bears

Supernatural kelp stalk leads to house in undersea world; doubleheaded kelp known as marker of entrance to undersea home of a supernatural being in stories; boxes of grease from undersea shamans turn into kelp floats filled with water

Comox (Boas 2002, 231) Haida (Swanton 1905, 52, 245; Turner 2004a)

Supernatural seaweed spirit cured a man’s sick wife by introducing seaweed as a medicine

Haisla/Hanaksiala (A. Davis, Wilson, and Compton 1995)

Black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii)

Created by Coyote from his hair braid

Okanagan (Mourning Dove 1933, 121–5)

Horsetail, or scouring rush (Equisetum hyemale)

Black bears crossed the river in a canoe made of horsetail

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 221)

Associated with shrews and mice, which are in several stories; fern clump entrance to home of supernatural Mouse Woman

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana)

Sword fern (Polystichum munitum)

268 | part four – underlying philosophy

Tlingit (Swanton 1909, 18–20, 358)

Table 12-3 | continued Example

Conifers

Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Culture hero chopped down this tree (“cedar”) as bow wood and scattered it so that the “bow wood of the people” would grow everywhere

Ktunaxa (Boas 1918, 109)

Salmon created from cedar wood or bark; bough tips transformed into herring; cedar bark used as a sponge by Raven to bring water for creating creeks and springs

Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nimpkish (Boas 2002, 310) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 446)

Inner bark highly important food of supernatural beings; needles feature in some stories; Raven changes into a hemlock needle (or other conifer); top of tree magically bent by Wiget, the Transformer

Haida (Turner 2004a) Oowekeeno, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk, Tlingit, and many others (Boas 2002) Gitxsan (Johnson 1997, 140)

Magical spruce tree splits itself into fragments of just the right length for a fire

Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 315)

Old-One magically created a bow from yew wood

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 324)

Flowering plants

Saskatoon berry, or serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifola)

Berries produced magically by the Bear in the story “Sès Ts’íqí Ghàghìndá” (The Bear Who Married a Woman) by slapping his rump; Old-One created a fish spear from a saskatoon berry bush by motioning at it with his knife; stolen from Grizzly Bear by a culture hero and spread around the country to make arrow wood

Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008b, 42) Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 324) Ktunaxa (Boas 1918, 93)

Served the Saanich people as an anchor during the Great Flood

Saanich (Philip Paul, pers. comm., 1993)

Indian-hemp (Apocynum cannabinum)

Magical Indian-hemp plants were created in the sky country by Coyote’s son

Nlaka’pamux (Maud 1978a, 90–1)

Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)

Berries used for eyes by Coyote

Secwepemc (M.B. Ignace, Turner, and Ignace forthcoming)

Arbutus (Arbutus menziesii)

Silverweed (Argentina anserina)

Food of Bear in story; Bear will eat only raw roots

Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008b, 42)

Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge  |  269

Table 12-3 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Pacific silverweed (Argentina egedii. pacifica)

Food of Goose Woman in story

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Old-One magically created a birch tree (the first tree) and a basket from a roll of birch bark

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 324)

Leaf was a magic spoon for Wiget, the Transformer

Gitxsan (Johnson 1997, 140)

A fireweed miraculously appears through the snow during a time of famine; fireweed planted by a house grows up to the sky by the next day

Ts’msyen and Gitxsan (Johnson 1997, 140)

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera) Spring beauty, or mountain potato (Claytonia lanceolata)

Queenscup (Clintonia uniflora) Bunchberry (Cornus canadensis)

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) Yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum)

Northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis)

“Grass”

Beach pea (Lathyrus japonicus or Vicia gigantea)

Giant wildrye grass (Leymus cinereus)

Said to have originated from cones scattered in the mountains by Little Dog; planted on Potato Mountain by the wife of Mount Ts’ilʔos; produced magically by the Bear by slapping his rump in the story “Sès Ts’íqí Ghàghìndá” (The Bear Who Married a Woman)

Tsilhqot’in (e.g., L.R. Smith 2008b, 42)

Created as food from her own blood by a woman stranded up in a cedar tree by her jealous husband

Hesquiaht (Nuu-chahnulth) (Turner and Efrat 1982, 63)

Said to have originated from sticks scattered in the mountains by Little Dog; produced magically by the Bear by slapping his rump in the story “Sès Ts’íqí Ghàghìndá” (The Bear Who Married a Woman)

Tsilhqot’in (e.g., L.R. Smith 2008b, 42)

Used in story to “vanquish” Salmon people

Haida (Turner 2004a)

“Oldest One on Earth” transformed into a big stone; his hair was transformed into grass and earth

Nawhitti (Boas 2002, 421)

“[Raven’s] canoe” in story of Xuyaa (Raven) travelling

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Coyote transformed the stalks into dentalium for a necklace

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 307)

270 | part four – underlying philosophy

Table 12-3 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Dunegrass (Leymus mollis)

Featured in several stories, including “Master of Stories” narrative

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Smoke from burning seeds is food of Salmon people

Saanich (Jenness n.d.)

Gambling stick material in story

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Beach lupine (Lupinus littoralis)

Food of ancient supernatural beings

Haida (Swanton 1905, 300; Turner 2004a)

Pacific crabapples (Malus fusca)

Served as food in the land of the dead (really human eyes); magic comb transformed into a crabapple thicket; crabapples as food of supernatural beings; ceremonial use for women at puberty and in mourning

Indian celery, or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule) Black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata)

Wild lily-of-thevalley (Maianthemum dilatatum)

Food of supernatural beings in story

Single delight (Moneses uniflora)

Plant eaten by people for luck and power by supernatural characters in stories; Cannibal Woman transformed into a “woodland flower,” probably this species

Haida (Swanton, 1905, 212–13; 1908, 745) Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 464)

Water-parsley (Oenanthe sarmentosa)

Haida tobacco (Nicotiana quadrivalvis)

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Oowekeeno (Boas 2002, 460) Heiltsuk (Boas 2002, 494) Ts’msyen (Boas 2002, 586) Haida (Swanton 1905, 300)

Mentioned many times in narratives; derived originally from a magic tree; said to be first planted on Haida Gwaii by Xuyaa’s (Raven’s) sister; given out at feast of supernatural beings

Haida (Turner 2004a; Dawson 1880; Swanton 1905, 300)

A charm in a narrative on stealing daylight

Ditidaht (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983, 93–4)

Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus)

Often mentioned in stories as used by shamans for protection against evil and to gain supernatural help

Fragile prickly pear cactus (Opuntia fragilis)

Salmon threw cactus onto the prairie as food for the coming people

Haida (Swanton 1908, 689–700, 742) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 23, 25, 167, 280, 311; Boas 1916, 175) Southern Okanagan (Spier 1938, 225)

Narratives in Transmission of Ethnobotanical Knowledge  |  271

Table 12-3 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Mock-orange (Philadelphus lewisii)

Coyote transformed the leaves into shells to make a necklace

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 307)

A Stl’atl’imx (Lil’wat) man had cherry bark as his special power to give him supernatural strength and jumping ability

Lower Stl’atl’imx (Charlie Mack, cited in Bouchard and Kennedy 1977b, 35)

Swainson’s Thrush has magical ability to ripen berries even in the middle of winter; salmonberry blossom transformed into a red snapper fish; salmonberries are the berries of the Ghost people

Comox (Boas 2002, 205) Nahwitti (Boas 2002, 382) Haida (Turner 2004a) Ts’msyen (Cove and McDonald 1987, 152)

Bitter cherry (Prunus emarginata) Wild rose (Rosa sp.)

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)

Trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus) and/ or blackcap (R. leucodermis)

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa)

“Cut grass” (Scirpus microcarpus)

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis)

Waxberry (Symphoricarpos albus)

Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii)

False hellebore (Veratrum viride)

Coyote transformed rose hips into beads

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 307)

Created as food from the blood of a woman stranded up a cedar tree by her jealous husband

Nlaka’pamux (Teit 1912, 286; see also under Cornus)

“Roots” is the name of a special gambling stick in one story

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Apparently “Raven’s knife” in a Haida story

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Common food of supernatural beings; introduced to Bella Coola Valley by Raven

Haida (Turner 2004a) Nuxalk (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 88)

Berries are the saskatoon berries of the people in the land of the dead

Stl’atl’imx (Teit 1906)

Often mentioned in Haida stories as used by shamans for protection against evil and to gain supernatural help; mixed with “fern roots” to make powerful supernatural medicine of Wolverine

Haida (Turner 2004a) Ts’msyen (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 80–1)

Rhizomes eaten by Goose Woman in story; elder brother in the sky country came to a number of blind women sitting around a cooking box cooking these roots

272 | part four – underlying philosophy

Haida (Turner 2004a) Nuxalk (Boas 2002, 530)

Table 12-3 | continued Example

Details of reference

Group (reference)

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum edule)

Cranberries ripened by Swainson’s Thrush for sky chief in the middle of winter; cranberry bushes sprouted from his naval and he died; berries highly important food of supernatural beings; most frequently mentioned plant food in Haida stories (e.g., through magical transformation, a single cranberry becomes an entire meal for a supernatural hero); introduced to Haida Gwaii by Raven

Comox (Boas 2002, 185) Haida (Swanton 1905, 300; Turner 2004a)

Eelgrass (Zostera marina)

Name of village of T’anu on Moresby Island; food of Goose Woman in story

Haida (Turner 2004a)

Note: The Indigenous groups are listed more or less in the order of the episodes cited, and their names are those given in the sources. Nahwitti, Nimpkish, and Kwiksootainuk are Kwakwaka’wakw subgroups cited by Boas (2002).

This narrative – similar to a version from the story “He-Who-Was-BornFrom-His-Mother’s-Side” (told by John Sky, cited in Swanton 1905, 233) – is particularly important for those interested in the plant management practices of northwestern North American Indigenous peoples because of its explicit reference to sowing seeds and cultivation. Tobacco has long been considered the only example of plant domestication and cultivation through seed on the Northwest Coast, although we now realize that people had many sophisticated practices for enhancing and promoting the growth of perennial species (see chapter 11). Raven Stories

Raven, the Trickster and Transformer who evidently came from the north, is credited with many heroic deeds, as well as being ridiculed for his greed and gluttony and his constant efforts to imitate the talents of others. Many of his adventures involve plants in one way or another. Raven has already been introduced as the one who conscripted Tree Fungus Man to help him create women in a Haida story and as the one who scared away the three Yellow-Cedar sisters in a Hesquiaht story so that he could eat all of their food. Raven performed many important tasks in making the world a good place for humans. In his famous feat of bringing daylight to the people, he travelled to a land where a powerful chief was holding the sun (or, in some cases, the

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moon) encased in a box. Raven magically turned himself into a small conifer needle (hemlock, pine, or some other kind) and floated on the surface of the water where the chief ’s daughter came to drink. She inadvertently swallowed the needle as she drank and then gave birth almost immediately to a baby, who was, of course, Raven in disguise. The baby, Raven, cried and cried until his grandfather, the chief who owned the sun, allowed the box holding the sun to be opened so that the baby could play with it and would stop crying. Raven promptly grabbed the sun and, turning into his bird form, flew out of the house with it. He then placed the stolen sun up in the sky so that, at last, there was daylight and people no longer had to go about their lives in the dark. This story, occurring in some version among many different peoples in the study region,33 was made famous by Haida artist Bill Reid’s masterful illustration “Raven Steals the Light” (see Bringhurst and Reid 1996). Boas (2002) concluded that the story originated in the north, with Tlingit, Ts’msyen, and Haida, along with the other Raven “creation” episodes. For the Ts’msyen, Raven, known as Txamsem (Clever One), was accompanied by a brother, Lagabula (Lazy One). They were two babies found in a kelp patch and adopted by a chief ’s wife and a supernatural being from the region of Prince Rupert Harbour. Born at a time when there was no daylight, only dusk, the brothers disguised themselves in mallard skins and flew to the head of Nass River country, where they went inside a mountain to get sunlight. Here, Txamsem, who could change freely from animal to bird to human, transformed himself into a “pine” needle, to be swallowed by the daughter of the chief who guarded daylight, who then gave birth to him as a baby. The baby cried for the ball of daylight, and when it was finally given to him, he took on his Raven form and flew away with it. He came up the Nass River, where people were harvesting oulachens by torchlight. Txamsem later burst the ball of daylight, and immediately it became very bright on the Nass River, and the light spread over all the world (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 1). An Oowekeeno version of the story (Boas 2002, 444–6) contains some interesting variations related to coastal technology. Raven decides to steal the sun, changes himself into a “pine” needle, and drops into the well where the eldest daughter of the chief who owns the sun comes daily for water. She scoops up the water, and Raven slips into her container as a needle, but she blows the needle aside when she drinks. Then, the wily Raven transforms himself into shiny berries. The girl, who sees their reflections in the water, desires to eat them, which she does. Four days later she gives birth to a son, Raven, who grows up rapidly and is able to speak from his first day. He screams and cries to his grandfather to give him various things: a salmon weir so he can catch salmon, then a bow and some arrows, then a paddle, and then a canoe from the skin of sea lions. He plays with all of these things, but then he demands the small box hanging from one of the roof beams, in which his grandfather keeps daylight. He won’t calm

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down until he is allowed to play with the box. Finally, the box is opened, and the sun escapes and lights up the earth. Raven brought highbush cranberries to Haida Gwaii, as recounted in chapter 3. He also introduced soapberries to the Bella Coola Valley, once more using his magic (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 88): Long, long ago, Sləxləkwailx, a mountain in the Carrier country above Burnt Ridge, was a chief, possessing human characteristics. Buffalo berries [soapberries] flourished on his slopes, and he wanted to keep these for food for his guests. On one occasion he invited all the animals and birds, including Raven, to a feast and dance. His house was the interior of the mountain, and when all had assembled he carefully closed every opening so that none of the berries could escape. Raven determined to obtain some of this food for the Bella Coola, and accordingly, used his power to force one of the guests to go outside. As soon as a door was opened to let him out, Raven seized some of the whip and flew away, scattering drops of it in his flight. Berries grew wherever the drops fell, and since that time everybody has been able to make this luxury. Sləxləkwailx was very angry, but could do nothing. Raven has many other adventures, using plants and parts of plants in ways that are, in some cases, still reflected in their names. The elongated pods of giant vetch (Vicia nigra ssp. gigantea) and beach pea (Lathyrus japonica), for example, are known in Haida as “Raven’s canoe” because of their canoe-like shape and because Xuyaa (Raven) used them to rescue a supernatural woman from the ocean: Xuyaa [Raven] saw a “woman” sticking out of the water at the mouth of Bentinck Arm. He made three attempts to reach her, with three different kinds of canoes, but every time he approached, she sank into the water. Then he opened a wild pea with a stick and used the pod as his canoe. This time when he drew near, she did not sink. He took her into his canoe and set her ashore at Haida Gwaii on the west arm of Cumshewa Inlet. The woman was known as jilaa kuns “Creek Woman.” (Told by John Sky, cited in Swanton 1905, 115; see also Turner 2004a) Xuyaa (Skidegate dialect) or Yáał (Massett and Alaska dialects) (Raven) often used plant materials in magical ways. For example, he took stems of dunegrass (Leymus mollis), covered them with moss, and stretched them across a chasm to trick Eagle into thinking they were fallen logs so that he would walk across them and fall to his death. He used spruce needles to trick Low Tide Woman into thinking she was being pricked by sea urchins so that she would make the tide

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12-5  |  Swainson’s thrush, known as “salmonberry bird,” whose singing is said to ripen the salmonberries and other berries all along the coast.

go down. Another time, he used spruce cones with grass stuck on rotten logs to simulate canoe loads of enemies (Swanton 1905, 126). Yet another widely told narrative involving Raven and plants is one of the “bungling host” series, in which Raven tries to imitate Swainson’s Thrush, known as “Salmonberry Bird” (figure 12-5), who has the ability to produce and ripen salmonberries (Rubus spectabilis) (figure 12-6), which are the first berries of the season to ripen. A good example is the Saanich version, told by Violet Williams and Elsie Claxton (pers. comm., 1991, cited in Turner and Hebda 2012, 103). Swainson’s Thrush, called Xwexwálesh in the Saanich language, sings “xwexwelexwelexwelexwesh” in rising notes, and as she sings, the berries ripen: One time, Swainson’s Thrush invited Raven to her house for a meal. She told her kids to take their baskets out to pick berries. She started singing her song [referring to the four colour forms of salmonberry: nenel’q’xelíqw (darkest), nenel’pq’íqw (very light), nenel’kwemíqw (ruby), and nenel’pxwíqw (golden)], then, “xwexwelexwelexwelexwesh” (‘ripen, ripen, ripen, ripen!’). As she sang, her children’s baskets filled up. Afterwards, Raven said, “You come to my house.” Swainson’s Thrush did. Raven told his children to go

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12-6 | Salmonberries (Rubus spectabilis) of dark, red, and golden colour forms.

out with their baskets. They did that for their dad. Raven sang and sang and the baskets never got full. Versions of this story are told from Haida Gwaii to Bella Coola and Puget Sound, sometimes referring to other kinds of berries but mostly to salmonberries. Another example is from the Nahwitti (Kwakwaka’wakw). In this version, Swainson’s Thrush holds a feast. When the guests are assembled, he beats his behind four times and then sits on a big kettle, which he fills up with berries for the people to eat. Raven tries to fill up the kettle with berries in this way, but for him, the kettle fills only with his excrement (Boas 2002, 387).34 In these narratives, Raven loves berries. He is always trying to find ways to eat the berries of his sisters and other women. Almost every group that features Raven stories has some account of his greediness related to berries.35 One example is the following Nuu-chah-nulth story: Once two women wanted to bring a box of berries to a friend in a distant village and asked Raven to escort them. They started off, with the box of berries in the middle of the canoe, with the women paddling and Raven

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steering. On the way Raven became greedy for the berries, but the women wouldn’t give him any. He then thought of a ruse. After awhile, he called “There’s a canoe coming. I see that they are our enemies who want to kill us!” He told the women to paddle to the shore and run and hide. As soon as they had gone, Raven gobbled up the berries. He pretended he was fighting off the attack, calling out “Oh, save me, save me!” Then he covered himself with juice and smashed the box. When the women returned and wanted to tend his wounds, he wouldn’t let them, saying it would only make the pain worse. Raven was sick for several days on account of the many berries he had eaten. (Boas 2002, 259) Coyote Stories

Coyote in the Interior Plateau is in many ways similar to Raven on the coast. Like Raven, he was both an important Transformer and, at times, a comic figure who was always making mistakes and bungling things. Coyote did not create the world himself; rather, he was sent by “Old-One,” the Creator or “Chief of the ancient world,” who “sent him to travel over the world and put things to rights” (Teit 1909, 595; see also R.E. Ignace 2008). As already illustrated by the stories “Coyote and the Tobacco-Tree” and “Tamarack, the People-Eater,” Coyote is intimately connected with plants of the interior. Like Raven, Coyote had the ability to transform plants and pieces of plants into other objects. In one Nlaka’pamux story, he transformed giant wildrye grass (Leymus cinereus) stalks into dentalium, rose hips (Rosa acicularis) into beads, and mock-orange leaves into shells to make a necklace (Teit 1912, 307). Coyote and his son are credited with having introduced Indian-hemp fishing nets in some areas, and he also provided food for the people directly, illustrated in an Okanagan story by Mourning Dove (1933), “How Coyote Made the Black Moss Food” (cited in Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980, 14–15). The “black moss” in this story is really the tree lichen Bryoria fremontii, called sqwel’íp in Okanagan, an important food and famine food for Interior Plateau peoples (S. Crawford 2007) (figure 12-7). In the story Coyote tries to catch some swans for himself and his son to eat. The swans fool him by playing dead, and he catches them easily. He then ties his son to the “dead” swans (so that he won’t stray) and climbs up a pine tree to get the pitchy top to use as a firedrill so that he can cook the swans. But the swans suddenly come back to life and fly away with Coyote’s son still tied on to them. Witnessing this from high up in the tree, Coyote tries to climb down in order to save his son, but his long hair braid becomes entangled in the tree branches. In frustration, Coyote cuts off his hair braid and drops to the ground. He then transforms his hair into sqwel’íp, saying, “You shall not be wasted, my valuable hair. After this you shall be gathered by the people. The old women will make you into food.”36

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12-7  |  Black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii), sqwel’íp in Okanagan, hanging from western larch (Larix occidentalis).

Coyote, like Raven, was always trying to imitate the talents of other animals. Another example is a Secwepemc story of how Coyote tried to imitate Grizzly Bear in harvesting edible cambium and inner bark from pine trees, but not knowing which tree to harvest from and confusing the outer bark (p’əlen) with the edible inner tissues (stiʔqw’əl’q), Coyote was unsuccessful (Teit 1909; see also Bouchard and Kennedy 1979).

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A widely distributed series of tales, full of ecological and ornithological lessons, is the cycle that can be called “Coyote Juggles His Eyes.” Ida William told a detailed version to Marianne Ignace (M.B. Ignace, Turner, and Ignace forthcoming). In this story, Coyote was gambling and kept winning, so the Bird people envied him. Raven persuaded Coyote to take out his eyes and throw them up in the air. Then the birds stole his eyes from him. Blinded and lost, he travelled a long way and felt around until he found kinnikinnick berries, which he used to replace his eyes, but he still could not see well. To find his way back home, he asked the trees, one after another, to identify themselves so that he would know where he was. Starting in the mountains, he encountered White Pine (seléwłp), Engelmann Spruce (tł’sełp), and Balsam, or Subalpine Fir (melénłp). Then, as he travelled to lower elevations, he came in turn to Cottonwood (mulx), Willow (qw’lséłp), and Trembling Aspen (meltéłp). Finally, when he came to Saskatoon Berry Bush (speqpeqełp), he knew he had arrived back where he’d started. At this point the Bird people gave his eyes back to him, and he could see once more. Other versions recount a different geographic and ecological trajectory for blinded Coyote,37 with different tree species, reflecting drier environments than that of Ida William’s home area. Inversion of Characteristics and Roles

Often, in narratives, plants and other products take on traits in other worlds – such as the land of the dead, the land of the Salmon people, or the land of the Wolf people – that are the antithesis of their traits in the “natural” world. For example, waxberries (Symphoricarpos albus), which are normally considered inedible, even poisonous, become the saskatoon berries and salmonberries of the people in the land of the dead in some Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc narratives (e.g., Teit 1906a). Crabapples in the Wolves’ world of the Ts’msyen are actually the eyes of dead people, and a man who was taken by the Wolves was warned by Mouse Woman not to eat crabapples when they were served. When food was brought to him by the Wolves – deer meat and salmon and then berries mixed with crabapples – he only pretended to eat.38 Another example of materials and products transforming as they moved from one world to another is in a Haida story where piles of elk skins obtained by a chief ’s son from undersea shamans turned into piles of seaweed, apparently giant kelp (Macrocystis) fronds, when taken onto dry land. In the same story, boxes of grease were converted into ordinary bull kelp heads filled with water, and the canoe carrying these articles turned into a rotten log (Turner 2004a). In an Oowekeeno story, “In the Land of the Dead,” western redcedar trees were very rare, and consequently, cedar wood was so precious and expensive that children were not allowed to play with it. Because there were no cedars for canoes, the supernatural chief, Ménis, gave the heroes his skin canoe to return to the land of the living. The dogs there were seals. The

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hero crossed back to his own land and brought back cedar and cedar bark “and a canoe filled with all kinds of things unknown to the chief ” (Boas 2002, 459–60). In another type of inversion, from an Oowekeeno story, pieces of a Cannibal Woman who was killed by poison were cut up and transformed into the woodland flowers called k’ak’atsumalás (possibly Moneses uniflora) (ibid., 464); in other versions, Cannibal Woman’s remains became mosquitoes. One of the most ancient episodes of transformation is known as “magic flight” (Boas 2002) – when a hero who is fleeing from a supernatural monster uses various objects, usually gifts provided by a supernatural helper, to thwart the pursuer. This theme has counterparts on the Northwest Coast from southern Alaska to the mouth of the Columbia River, as well as in eastern Asia, such as among the Kamchatka peoples (ibid.). The details vary but often include four objects or substances, such as a wooden comb or a piece of hair, being cast behind to transform magically into some kind of helpful barrier. One example is in the Heilt­ suk story of brothers fleeing from the Cannibal Monster, Baxwbaxwalanuksiwe. The brothers were first able to slow down the monster’s pursuit by throwing a stone behind them, which transformed into a mountain. Then they broke their arrows and dropped them behind, and the pieces grew into a dense forest. After this, they threw back a magic comb, which transformed into a crabapple thicket. Finally, they poured out some water, which transformed into a lake, allowing them to make it home before they were overtaken.39 Narrative Networks

Some of the narrative themes from the study region, like the previous “magic flight” episode, are very old, being widely spread geographically, culturally, and linguistically. Boas (2002) carefully analyzed the stories that he and others had recorded from the area and noted many commonalities and similar versions. Some of the prevalent themes and episodes involving plants and plant knowledge have already been mentioned here: Raven stealing the sun, the blind Duck women cooking roots, Deer or some other animal capturing fire for people, Spider teaching people to make fishnets, the berry-picking woman who marries a Bear, the kind grandmother who hides a “slow match” for an abandoned grandchild, Salmonberry Bird ripening the berries, and the woman stranded in a cedar tree who transforms her blood into edible berries. According to Mary Beck (1989), the story of the woman who married a Bear, or the “Bear Mother” narrative (e.g., L.R. Smith 2008b), is very ancient and is actually a reference to an Earth-Mother figure associated with the earliest peoples who occupied southeastern Alaska (i.e., in the Early Holocene). In an act of supreme generosity, the Bear husband in the end usually sacrifices himself to his wife’s people, instructing them on the protocols of hunting, and with this knowledge, his own sons grow up to become the greatest hunters.

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The “Dog Children” story is likewise very old. In this narrative, a girl is impregnated by a dog and gives birth to several puppies. Her father and the rest of her family are shamed by this and abandon her to her fate, but her grandmother leaves her some live coals hidden in a mussel shell (the “slow match” alluded to earlier), and she is able to survive and provide for her children by digging clams (coastal version) or edible roots (e.g., Tsilhqot’in version). At one point, as she is coming home from harvesting, she hears her children talking and laughing. She sneaks up on them and discovers them in their human forms, their dog skins cast off. When they hear her, they immediately put their skins back on and resume their dog forms. She then tricks her children by leaving her digging stick, with her cape and hat draped over it, at the clam beds or root-digging grounds. The dog children assume that this form is their mother still at work. Meanwhile, she steals back to the house, seizes the children’s dogskins before they know what is happening, and throws them into the fire before they can put them back on. Sometimes one, a sister, remains as a dog. All of the children, now as humans, help to hunt and provide for their mother, such that the family soon becomes wealthy in food, and the children grow up as very powerful ancestral figures. Linda Smith (2008b, 24) considers the “Dog Children” narrative to be “likely the oldest Tsìnlhqút’ín story,” and she notes that it is shared by most Dene (Athabaskans) as well as by other language groups on the Northwest Coast.40 It is said in the Tsilhqot’in traditions that Łin Desch’osh (Little Dog) from this narrative was the one who created the two most important Tsilhqot’in root foods: spring beauty, or mountain potato (sunt’iny), and yellow glacier lily, or beartooth (ʔesghunsh). He made these roots from cones and small sticks, respectively, which he scattered among the snow in the mountains (Quilt 1982, cited in L.R. Smith 2008b). Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm., 2007, cited in Turner, Recalma-Clutesi, and Deur 2013) tells a Kwakwaka’wakw version of the “Dog Children” story in association with the luxwxiywey (clam gardens). One of the dog children wants to help maintain the luxwxiywey for his mother, as mentioned in a song that Adam sings in Kwak’wala as part of this narrative. Another famous and widespread series of narratives involving plants is the “Star Husband” tales, about young women who travel to the sky country and marry stars. In its simplest form, the story is as follows: Two young women are sleeping in the open at night (often while out digging edible roots of one type or another) and see two stars. They make wishes that they may be married to these stars. In the morning they find themselves in the upper world, each married to a star – one of the stars is a young man and the other is old. The women are sent out to dig roots in the sky country and are usually warned against digging too deeply, but eventually they disobey and make a hole in the sky through which they see their old home below. They are seized with longing to return and

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secure help in making a long rope. On this, they eventually succeed in reaching home (Dundes 1965). An example of this narrative is from Violet Williams (pers. comm., 1990, cited in Turner and Hebda 2012, 122–3), told to her by her mother, who was a Hul’qumi’num woman from the Westholme area of southern Vancouver Island: “The Two Girls up in the Sky Country” There were three girls – two sisters and their cousin or friend – who were out camping with their families, digging camas bulbs. At night, the girls were lying awake. They were looking up at the stars and talking to each other: “I wish I had that Bright Eyes up there for my husband.” “I wish I were married to that Red Eyes.” They were talking like that, and then they fell asleep. The next morning, the two sisters woke up in a different country. It was very strange and beautiful. “Where are we?” they asked each other. Then, two young men appeared. “Who are you?” the girls asked them. “We’re your husbands,” was the answer. “But we are not even married!” they said. “Last night, didn’t you wish for stars as your husbands? We are the ones you wished for. We are star men.” The girls learned that they were up in the sky country. They were told when they went out to dig camas bulbs not to dig too deeply. If a bulb broke, they were not supposed to dig down to get it. One girl was curious and she did dig deep, and they saw a little hole. Then they saw why they were told that, for through the hole, they saw another whole world far down below. They realized that they were looking down at their own world. They were homesick and wanted to go back. They thought about how they could get back to their own land, and decided to try to make a rope. From then on, instead of digging camas bulbs every day like they were supposed to, they started gathering cedar bark. They kept making cedar bark rope, rolling it between their hands and their legs [i.e., rolling it along their thigh, with their hand] to make string. They did this day after day, until they eventually figured they had a long enough one to reach bottom. They lowered it down through the small hole they had made, and when they brought it up, a bit of moss was on the end of it, so they knew that it was long enough and had touched earth. One of the girls volunteered to go down first. She was lowered down and down. Her sister watched her going further and further. She looked like a little spider on the end of its web. Then she reached the bottom, and pulled the rope as a signal to the other. Then her sister came down, and they pulled the rope down after them. It is still lying in the mountains somewhere. From this day on, the girls never wished for star men with

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bright eyes or red eyes any more. Now, all girls are carefully looked after when they go out, and are told not to wish for stars or anything like that. Variants of this story, from Saanich (“The Sisters Who Married Stars”) (Jenness n.d., 141) and Lekwungen (“The Wives of Stars”) are very similar, but the latter mentions “onions” rather than camas as the roots being dug, notes that the sisters were allowed to harvest only the stalks of these plants in the sky country (not the bulbs), and identifies the place where the young women came down from the sky as Mount Ñgā´k.un (Nygák’un) (Knockan Hill) near Victoria (Boas 2002, 171). In all, there are over 100 versions of this story from all across North America – on the Pacific Coast from southern Alaska to central California,41 across the Interior Plateau and Plains from the Arizona–New Mexico border, south to Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana,42 north to the Canadian boreal forest,43 across to the Anishinaabe (Ojibway) of the Great Lakes region, and east to the Mi’kmaq (Micmac) of Nova Scotia (Boas 2002). Of eighty-six versions cited by Dundes (1965, 449), 95 per cent include a warning given to the women not to dig too deeply in the sky country while they are digging their roots, and 88 per cent have them descending to earth on a rope. In most cases, the repatriating rope is of sinew or skin, but in several versions it is spider web, and some (including Violet Williams’s version) feature cedar-bark or cedar-withe rope. In other regions, ropes of Yucca (soapweed), grass, roots, or vines were used, in accordance with the predominant local fibre of an area. The edible roots dug by the women vary with the region: “fern roots” (possibly bracken, Pteridium aquilinum) in a Lushootseed version, northern riceroot in a Ts’msyen version, “parsnip” (unknown species) in Sarsi, prairie turnip (Pediomelum esculentum) in Blackfoot (probably also Cree and Arikara), and “carrots” in Dakota (ibid.). Thus, as noted by Dundes (ibid.), the “Star Husband” tale adapted itself on many occasions to new conditions and took on new forms, but in spite of time and distance, it has maintained its basic pattern. The “Star Husband” cycle could be distantly related to the “Jack and the Beanstalk” theme from European folklore (Dundes 1965, 104; see also R. Brown 1873), but “Star Husband” seems to hold its own integrity as a North American theme. It does seem congruent, however, with the sky country adventures of Coyote’s son, mentioned previously, in which the son of Coyote encounters roots (spring beauty) that are really Stars, meets a Spider couple, creates a fine patch of Indianhemp for them from his own hair, and is lowered back down to earth in a basket, tied onto an Indian-hemp rope (Maude 1978a, 90–1; see also Boas 2002). The narrative theme is also reminiscent of the Ts’msyen story “The Boy Taken by the Star,” in which a boy kidnapped by the Chief-of-the-Skies was rescued by his father and lowered down onto a mountain peak on the cedar-bark rope.44 Another “matching” story is the Tlingit narrative on the origin of basketry:

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Back in Raven’s time, Sun’s beautiful wife, who was human, fashioned the first basket from some roots up in Sky-land at a time when she was longing for the earth-life for herself and her children. Sun, understanding her homesickness, increased the size of her basket until it was big enough for his wife and their eight children and gently lowered them down to the earth. The basket settled at a place near Yakutat on the Alsek River, and that is the reason that the first baskets [of Sitka spruce root] in southeastern Alaska were made by Yakutat women. (Paul 1991, 9) Perhaps it is no coincidence that the spruce-root hat found with the body of the young man in the Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį discovery (see chapter 2, figure 2-9) was so finely woven; it may have originated in this very region. The theme of baskets being used to lower visitors to the sky country back to earth occurs in stories as diverse as those of the Secwepemc and Chipewyan (a Dene [Athabaskan] language group of the boreal forest) (Boas 2002). Connecting the Patterns in Stories Narrative plots and themes are often far-reaching, many not being confined to single groups, languages, or language families but crossing all boundaries – geographic, ecological, social, and linguistic – while transforming themselves and adapting to new cultural and ecological situations as required. A number of the narratives resonate widely across North America, and in some cases even to eastern Asia – to Japan, Kamchatka, and beyond (Archambault 2006; Boas 2002; Dundes 1965). The presence of common narrative types and motifs in different societies indicates that the earliest peoples, although spread out in small groups on the landscape, would have maintained at least sporadic contact with each other. They would have exchanged not only oral traditions (Archambault 2006) but also numerous other innovations and technologies, as well as trade goods and even group members as mates. Just as in recent times, different groups of early peoples probably also shared some of their resource-harvesting grounds, meeting seasonally or occasionally at these common territories, and these encounters would have resulted in the acquisition of new goods, information, and ideas, including names, technologies, and beliefs related to plants.45 Narratives regarding the origins of certain plant species, such as the Haida story of the origin of highbush cranberry (see chapter 3) or the Nuxalk story of how Raven brought soapberries to the Bella Coola Valley, recounted in this chapter, may actually reflect expansions of the ranges of some species into previously glaciated lands during the Early Holocene. Conversely, such stories could indicate the presence of species that have since disappeared, such as in

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the reference to soapberries at “Peninsula Point” (Spit Point, at the southeastern entrance to Skidegate Inlet) on Haida Gwaii (Swanton 1905, 301).46 Boas (2002), after a detailed examination of the large corpus of stories he had recorded from a wide range of language groups in the study region, concluded that the legend of Raven as shaper of the world originates with the Tlingit, Ts’msyen, and Haida.47 Mink is another creator, akin in many ways to Raven. Boas suggested that the Mink legends essentially belong to the Kwakwaka’wakw and their immediate neighbours, with the roles of Mink and Raven being interchanged to some extent. Whereas Raven is characterized by his greediness and gluttony, Mink is always trying to seduce and marry different characters, including potential botanical partners: Kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana), Horsetail (Equisetum hyemale), and Pitch. The Wanderer, or Transformer, legends, in general, come in infinite variation (Boas 2002, 645). Transformer figures are common in Indigenous cultures across North America but developed most strongly in the southern region of the study area, yielding to the Raven cycle from the Nahwitti territory northward. These cultural deities (sometimes alone and sometimes in pairs or small groups) are creators of animals and plants and often transform individuals into strangely formed rocks that can still be seen around the landscape, such as in the Interior Plateau. The other Transformers do not perpetrate tricks like Raven or Coyote do; other animals like Mink take on this role (Boas 2002). One of the most widely told Transformer stories is the narrative relating how the Transformer encounters Deer and changes him into his animal form, despite Deer’s declaration that he has no intention of being changed by this Transformer, whom he has heard is coming. The knives or shells that Deer is holding at the time are put onto his head and become his antlers (see ibid.; and E.R. Atleo 2004). Dr Ron Ignace (2008) suggests that the Stspetékwll (Stspetékwł), or Transformers, in Secwepemc oral traditions may have actually been ancient travellers coming from other regions and entering the territory, individually or in groups, and meeting – and possibly settling among – people already living there. They would have brought with them new languages and technologies, new ways of looking at the world, and new stories. Ignace proposes that the Salishan peoples moving eastward from their lower Fraser Valley homeland between about 5,000 and 3,500 years ago merged with people already living in the Interior Plateau to form the Proto-Interior Salish and that together they developed the relatively stable Interior Plateau lifestyle known from the Late Holocene. In his immense compendium of narratives from across the study area, Boas (2002, 633–74) undertook a comprehensive comparison of the various shared and distinctive elements of the narratives across the groups represented. From this, he drew conclusions about the narratives’ historical affinities and evolution. His analysis is relevant here because one can assume that, in cases where

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story themes and episodes are shared and adapted across different groups, so too is knowledge about plants and other environmental and cultural elements. Boas (2002, 649) noted, for example, that the Nuxalk (Bella Coola) narratives he recorded still possessed elements from Proto-Salish times, when they were united with the other Salish tribes. The Nuxalk, he observed, share a larger number of episodes in their stories with the Secwepemc (Interior Salish) and with the Comox, Halkomelem, and other Coast Salish groups than with their Wakashan and Dene (Athabaskan) neighbours.48 Still, although the Nuxalk brought several Salish legends north with them,49 their whole system shows definite influence from Kwakwaka’wakw narratives; they have woven in the Mink stories from the south and the Raven cycle from the north. Stories of the Nuxalk also show influence from their Dene (Athabaskan) neighbours, which has extended through them to the Heiltsuk on the outer coast. However, the Nuxalk creation story – of the divine brothers who descended to earth – is their own (Boas 2002). Narratives of the Comox people, Boas (2002) found, show more influences from their northern neighbours than do the narratives of other Salishan groups. In fact, of all the groups that Boas included in his survey, the Comox had the highest level of mixing with other groups in their narratives.50 In turn, the influence of Salishan narrative themes generally extends northward only to the Nahwitti (except with the Nuxalk, who are Salish). Boas (ibid., 653) suggested that the profusion of languages and dialects in this region, and the close relations of the Comox with Nuu-chah-nulth and Chinookan narrative traditions, cannot be understood without assuming strong, relatively recent displacements among the Coast Salish in the area, probably leading the tribes living south of the Comox into their present sites, as well as possibly bringing about the separation of the Nuxalk from other Coast Salish peoples and their move northward. In contrast with the Comox, the neighbouring Kwakwaka’wakw share only a very small number of narrative elements with other groups and have many that are exclusive to themselves (Boas 2002, 654). Over time, by consolidation, the clans and lineages of the Kwakwaka’wakw developed, and since each lineage traced its crests and privileges back to an ancient supernatural ancestor, the number of such founding narratives grew very large. This might be why, Boas suggested, the Kwakwaka’wakw narratives are relatively self-contained. They include the Mink cycle and the Wanderer cycle, but most ancestor legends and clan descent stories contain relatively few animals; their ancestors are mostly supernatural beings who come from the sky, the earth, or the ocean. The Chinookan, Secwepemc, and Ts’msyen also show notable fidelity in their narratives. Boas (2002) found that the Chinookans share considerable material with the Nuu-chah-nulth and Comox alone, and from this he assumed that they were formerly in close contact. The Secwepemc and other Interior Salishan

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peoples show hardly any evidence of contact with the coastal tribes in their narratives, except with their Halkomelem neighbours on the lower Fraser River. The Fraser River narratives, in turn, show encroachment of narrative cycles belonging to the Interior Plateau and, indirectly, from the Dene (Athabaskans) through the Secwepemc. Both the Secwepemc and Chinookan, Boas suggested, likely share a close connection with the Coyote cycle of the Shoshones. The Ts’msyen, Haida, and Tlingit show only slight points of contact with the southern groups, with little influence on the development of other mythologies on the coast (Boas 2002). Based on various factors, including the numerous shared elements of Ts’msyen from Haida and Tlingit, Boas judged the Ts’msyen to be relatively recent arrivals on the coast. A number of Ts’msyen narratives support this conclusion.51 Boas (2002) noted that the Raven cycle, even in its northern area of origin, has evidently adopted foreign elements, including those originating from southern British Columbia. One of these is the “bungling host” episode, where Raven tries to provide hospitality to his guests using the means he has observed from other animals and fails in this imitation (as in the Saanich Salmonberry Bird story). This theme occurs as a separate legend type all over North America, from the Chinookan to the Mi’kmaq, including some Dene (Athabaskan) versions as well. On the central and northern coast, the personality traits of the Transformer and Trickster are blended, whereas for the Chinookan, they occur in distinct individuals. Boas (ibid., 640) suggested, therefore, that the “bungling host” theme was transmitted from the Chinookan to the Coast Salish “and thus gradually reached the Raven legend, into which it fitted quite well.” Boas (2002) identified a number of other stories that appear to have been transmitted from the Columbia River north into Salishan and Wakashan territories. One story in particular, recounted by Nehwitti storytellers of northern Vancouver Island (Kwakwaka’wakw), embodies a theme that is much more widespread elsewhere in North America, namely the idea of a time when there was only water on the earth and the Creator persuaded various animals to come down from the sky and dive down to bring up soil and plants or leaves in order to create earth as it is known today (ibid., 173). In the Nehwitti version, after many vain attempts, at Raven’s bidding, Duck at last succeeds in reaching the bottom of the water covering the earth and brings up a branch, from which Raven forms the mountains, earth, and trees. This episode must have diffused from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin – where it is prevalent and known to peoples as widely dispersed as the Anishinaabe, Sioux, and Cherokee – across the Rocky Mountains, to be woven into the Northwest Coast Raven cycle (Boas 2002). On the Pacific Coast, Boas identified this episode from only three other locations: a group of tribes of the San Joaquin Valley of southern California, the Molalla of the foothills of the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, and the Chinookans at the mouth of the Columbia River (ibid., 642–3).52

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The various relationships and affinities between groups reflected in oral histories are, as noted previously, significant to ethnobotanical knowledge because – along with similarities in the names of plants across languages and language families – they may show pathways by which botanical knowledge and technology were spread from group to group, just as narratives and themes in oral history have spread and then been incorporated and adapted into already existing oral traditions. The Role and Importance of Oral Traditions in Relationships with the Natural World The ancient and time-honoured stories also serve to connect people to their communities, their ancestors, and their environments, engendering respect, appreciation, and right ways of behaviour. Linda Smith (2008b, iii) explains the important role of stories in relation to the Tsìnlhqút’ín (Tsilhqot’in) narrative “The Bear Who Married a Woman”: [T]he story is full of the richness of ancient words, terms from the bear’s language, and vivid illustrations of ancient ways. This period, set out originally by mammals and fish to ensure that people continue to prosper and maintain respect for all life forms, is preserved in the term súwhtŝ’éghèdúdính. This documentation sets out to partially shed light on the Tsìnlhqút’ín concept of an energy called nímính which manifests within individuals at the onset of a life transition (namely at birth, puberty, and death) lingering for varying durations from one week to an entire lifetime, and influencing subsistence items, places, and vegetation. Maintaining balance amidst a web of other lifeforms is an ancient lifeway which now seems a complex undertaking. Kennedy and Bouchard (1994, 28), discussing the Transformer’s travels in Ditidaht, explain, Ditidaht myths reveal the models of behaviour that the Ditidaht people regard as good. Implicit in these stories are all their essential beliefs and values. The animal-people’s adventures demonstrated the benefits to be derived from being hospitable, unselfish, modest, hard-working, and respectful of one’s elders and Chiefs. From earliest childhood on, Ditidaht kids learned that this was how a proper person should behave. In a culture that maintains order through community approval and disapproval, mythology shows people how to live in accordance with the rules. At the same time, it provides a socially acceptable way to find humour in unacceptable behaviour, such as Raven’s greed for food. The

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telling of these stories, then, both instructs and amuses. And it also unites the Ditidaht people with another time, a time when a dangerous world was being set in order for their coming. Cove and MacDonald (1987, ix–xii), discussing the Ts’msyen narratives, note that these are “a collection of vivid oral histories depicting the rich culture of the west-coast Indians. Much of what is contained in the narratives reflects the relationship these people had with their environment: from their understanding of the spiritual universe to their interpretation of the physical world, the stories help chronicle and trace the unique spirit of these people.” Dr E. Richard Atleo (2011, 139) summarizes the relevance of narratives in his Nuu-chah-nulth culture simply by quoting his grandmother’s words: “Our stories are true.” Many story themes embody lessons of what can happen if people show disrespect to the environment and the resources on which they rely. In the Nass Valley lava flowing from a volcano filled the valley floor some 300 years ago, wiping out an entire village. Nisga’a storytellers still recount how that deadly eruption was triggered by the cruel antics of boys in the village who captured salmon as they came up the creek to spawn, cut their backs and filled the wound with pitch, and then ignited the pitch and laughed to see the burning salmon swimming away up the river (Chester Morris, pers. comm., 1993). The origin story of the Cumshewa Eagle clan of Haida Gwaii, and of other peoples as well, tells of a mythical woman, variously known as Creek Woman or Volcano Woman – Jilaa Kuns in Haida – who inflicted her volcanic wrath on villagers after boys had caught and burned her children, the frogs, in a fire (see Turner 2004a, 2005). Such immense and traumatic events have turned into the source of lessons and teachings for people, especially about respecting other life. According to Mary Beck (1989, 43–4) the figure of Volcano Woman (Creek Woman or Frog Woman, also associated with Fog Woman) is probably the oldest and most revered of the northern coast’s mythological figures: “She is believed to have reached Alaska from Asia, with late migrants who came by sea. Her counterparts figure in some Asian mythology, as well as Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Phoenician, Roman and Norse. She is the Earth Mother, and as Volcano Woman she is historian, collective memory of tribal tradition. She destroys an entire village for the failure of its people to observe the proper rituals and show respect for living creatures and cherished objects.” The Jilaa Kuns story is echoed by a number of others, including the Ts’msyen story “The Headdress of the Mountain Goat,” in which people who were abusing, maiming, and killing mountain goats for fun were punished with death, except for one young man who was respectful to the goats.53 Another Ts’msyen story embedding deep messages is that of the “perpetual winter.” There are many versions recorded (as cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987), and people today still tell this story (Tina Robinson, pers. comm., 2004).

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One example, told by Heber Clifton to William Beynon in the late 1940s, relates to the Ts’msyen migration down the Skeena River: There was a thriving village called Temlaxam on the upper Skeena River, where many people lived in the olden days. It was “a great place,” rich in foods of all sorts. But then, people became reckless. They disregarded the elders and lost respect for themselves. Thoughtless young people killed food animals for no need, just for the sport of killing. One time, in early spring when people were preparing their fish traps and roasting a few fish over the fire, it began to snow, which was unusual, since “The spring salmon was always a sign of the beginning of fine weather …” A thoughtless young man, Zamxlao, stood up with some roasted spring salmon in his hand and rebuked the skies, saying: “What is the matter, Chief-of-the-Skies? Do you not see this salmon that I am eating? Are you trying to make another winter, now that the spring salmon is here?” This disrespect brought disaster, with heavy snowfall, as high as the rooftops, leaving people on the verge of famine. “Day after day, the people were held in their houses and the food was about all gone, and wood was hard to get owing to the deep snow.” Then one morning a Steller’s Jay appeared and sat on the smokehole of the house of one of the chiefs, Tsibasa, holding a bunch of elderberries [Sambucus racemosa] in its beak.54 Then Tsibasa realized that it was summer nearby, while the village was still in the throes of winter. He said, “… Let us leave this place and go elsewhere, before we all perish.” Tsibasa and his brothers all left and travelled down the Skeena River until they reached Gitseguekla [? Kitsumkalum]. “Here they found that everything was as in summer.” Some of the people stayed here, and others spread throughout the Tsimshian [Ts’msyen] territory, down to the mouth of the Skeena, and north along the coast. (Cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 257–8) This story teaches at once the codes of behaviour by which people should live and explains the origins of the Ts’msyen from the upper Skeena. Plants also mediate transitions from one world to another in narratives. For example, for the Haida, a two-headed bull kelp leads to the top of the house post of a supernatural chief of the ocean world (Swanton 1905, 52, 245). The sky country has been reached by magically growing trees, as in the story of Coyote’s son (see Maud 1978a), with similar episodes occurring in stories from the Pacific Coast to the Ponca and Dene (Athabaskan) territories (Boas 2002). In a Gitxsan narrative, a magical fireweed, giłast (k’ilhaast, “single fireweed”), was planted in front of a house and grew overnight until by the next day it had pierced the sky. This was the beginning of a new clan, the Gisgahaast (Gisq’haast), or People of the Fireweed, one of the four clans of the Gitxsan.55 In the Mink stories, where

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Mink goes to visit his father, the Sun, Mink shoots arrows one after another until they form a chain, which he then ascends. This theme of ascending to the sky world on a chain of arrows is exclusive to northwestern North America, according to Boas (2002), and occurs in stories from the Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Kwakwaka’wkw, and Nahwitti. Simply thinking and dreaming is another means of travelling to the sky country, sometimes unintentionally, as in the “Star Husband” tales, but then the return to earth is by means of woven ropes, which are sometimes made of plant fibres and are often associated with Spider people (Boas 2002). Mouse Woman, a supernatural guide to those who travel from the Haida mythical world to the land of the living people (Archambault 2006), is often identified with a clump of sword fern (Polystichum munitum), which marks the entrance to her home. The stories are replete with lessons for life – about food, cultural and moral values, the importance of sweat bathing and purification rituals for hunters, proper treatment of hunted and killed animals, and general respect for the environment, including plants and vegetation. For example, Haida and Ts’msyen stories recount how devil’s-club should be used for purification by hunters and others needing supernatural strength and power.56 Many stories also reflect times of environmental and cultural change, with accounts of great floods (see Ludwin, Dennis, et al. 2005; and Ludwin, Thrush, et al. 2005), devastating volcanic eruptions, landslides, endless winters, and massive glaciers, as well as times of war, famine, and separation and intermixing of peoples, with accounts of learning new technologies and lessons and encountering new species (Boas 2002; Kennedy and Bouchard 1994; Teit 1912, 210). They embed peoples’ complex knowledge of geography and ecology within their own history and their own resource use and are generally indicative of long-term residency within, and familiarity with, a given location. Stories also warn people against breaking cultural taboos or about other dangers, such as harmful plants. For example, a number of Central Coast Salish stories (Straits Salish, Nanaimo, and Comox) caution against eating bracken fern “roots” either in the summer or if one is in training because it will cause a person to become “snaked,” a fearsome condition where snakes enter one’s body, which can be remedied only through extraordinary measures such as supernatural help (see Boas 2002, 145–6). The stories also recount how knowledge is exchanged and diffused, both at a personal and individual level and between groups and across boundaries. For example, a Nlaka’pamux story, “The Old Woman and the Boy,” recounts the teaching process between a boy and his grandmother. When he caught and killed a deer, the old woman showed him how the people used to skin the deer, and how they cut it up. She also told him what uses the different parts of the deer were put to …

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The old woman showed him how to skin and cut up the bear, and told him what the people used to do with the skin, bones, flesh, and fat … Thus he caught and killed goats and all the other animals and birds; and the old woman told him their names, and what they were formerly used for by the people. [Then they went in search of people.] “… So he put his grandmother in a hollow log and dragged her behind him. She knew the way; and as they went along she told him the names of all the plants and trees, and what uses the people made of them. (Teit 1912, 264, emphasis added) Another example is the story of the origin of the Gitxon Eagle (Laxsgiik) family of the Ts’msyen, which reflects connections throughout the Northwest Coast region between the Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, Haida, and Haisla. Like the previous story, it also features a hollow log. This account goes back to a great flood, after which the young Eagle chief Gitxon and his band members – the ancestors of this family – drifted around and eventually found refuge with the Killer Whales (Gisbutwada) of Kitsumkalum. They lived there peaceably for some time, sharing the fish trap sites of their Killer Whale relatives. However, Gitxon’s traps were more successful and caught huge quantities of salmon, which made the Killer Whale hosts resentful. Eventually, they attacked Gitxon and his band, killing Gitxon and all of his group, except for a young chief and Gitxon’s niece, both of whom fled to the Nass River. They were welcomed here and fished for oulachens with their Nisga’a relatives on the Lower Nass. The young woman, Gitxon’s niece, looked after a number of the children while the fishing was going on, playing with them in a giant hollow log. One day, as they slept in the log, a very high tide floated them away, and they drifted for many days and eventually landed on a long sandy beach. They found themselves in Haida territory on Prince of Wales Island. Gitxon’s niece married the young chief she met there, and she and the children settled in. She had a daughter and four sons with the Haida chief, but as they grew, her children were teased by the Haida children of the village. Eventually, she decided to send her children, now young adults, back to the Nass River village, after she had given them Ts’msyen names, including the name of Gitxon to the eldest brother. The young people travelled for a long time and came first to Dundas Island and then to the mouth of the Nass, where they were received with great joy by their relatives. They were assisted in taking revenge on the Killer Whales of the Skeena area, with the eldest brother, Gitxon, becoming re-established among the Kitsumkalum. The story goes on: The daughter of the family married a Kitselas chief but was captured by the Kitamaat during a berry-picking trip and was married to a Raven chief of the Haisla. She already had several daughters with the Kitselas chief and had more children at Kitamaat, thus establishing the Gitxon house among the Haisla.57

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Children are taught important lessons through stories – for example, to stay close to home and not stray into the forest by themselves because of a fierce Cannibal Woman who will glue their eyes shut with pitch, put them into a large basket, and carry them off to her den. This theme is common and widespread, from the Chinookan, Heiltsuk, and Nuxalk along the Northwest Coast to the Ponca, Mi’kmaq, and other peoples from far to the east (Boas 2002). Other stories incorporate actual instructions, almost like recounting a recipe. An example is the mainland Halkomelem narrative “Origin of the Siyak, or Salmon Weir,” recorded by ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout (in Maud 1978a, 56). The Chilliwack people, who are renowned for their use of salmon weirs, tell the story of how Tamia (Wren) first taught them how to construct one: He bade the limbs of the young cedars twist themselves into withes, and short branches to sharpen one of their ends to a point and place themselves firmly in the bed of the stream in the form of a tripod, fastened at the top by the withes, two feet being down stream and one up. He then called upon other boughs to wattle themselves in the lower legs of these tripods, till the weir or dam thus formed spanned the whole stream, at the foot of which the salmon soon congregated in great numbers. He bade the people make their salmon-weirs thereafter in like manner. Similarly, the instructions for making and keeping fire are conveyed in the Nlaka’pamux story of how Beaver taught the people to make fire, also recorded by Hill-Tout (in Maud 1978c, 101–2): As they returned down the river, Beaver threw fire on all the trees they passed, but mostly on the cottonwood trees, and thus it was that the wood from these trees was the best for making fire with from that time onward. He continued to do this till he had reached the coast again and all his fire was gone. After this he assumed a human form and taught the Indians how to make fire by means of the drill worked between the hands. He also taught them how to preserve the fire when once secured in the following manner. He procured a quantity of the inner bark of the cedar tree and made it into a long rope. This he then covered with the bark of some other trees which burnt less readily. When one end of this rope was lighted it would continue to smolder for several days, according to the length of the rope. When the Indians were traveling and likely to be away from camp several days they always carried one of these fire-ropes, called … patlakan, coiled around their shoulders. After this great gift to them the Indians thought very highly of Beaver, and he was usually called by them “our head brother” because of his wisdom and goodness.

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Dr Ron Ignace (M.B. Ignace, Turner, and Ignace forthcoming) provides an elegant explanation of the complex and comprehensive role of narratives in relation to Secwepemc environmental knowledge, but he does so in terms that are relevant to the stories of all peoples: It is important to realize that stspetekwll [stspetekwł, “traditional stories”] which explicitly or implicitly contain messages about the environment and species in it derive from a time when Secwepemc men, women and children spent the vast part of their annual seasonal round traveling, camping, hunting, plant-gathering and fishing in all parts of the plateaus of the Interior, migrating between highland areas and valley bottoms. In the context of this way of life, the knowledge of the behaviour of species, whether they were directly harvested or were ecological indicators of other species’ life cycle events, was crucial to survival and success in pursuing and managing resources. It was also critically important for younger people to become trained in recognizing species in the landscape and understanding the ecological interconnections between species. In Secwepemc society, as in other indigenous societies – but each with its own culture-specific and linguistic ways – the explicit or encoded messages about environment contained in stories represent a way of disseminating and transmitting ecological knowledge needed for the successful harvesting of species, and for survival within the environment. Implicit messages about the connection between ecological indicator species and food sources not yet known to younger people, or individuals who have no extensive knowledge of fauna, flora and landscape, further invite the audience to re-examine the living landscape after hearing the story in the new light of what they have learned. Conclusions The themes and stories cited and recounted here reflect the complexity of history and environment, mediated by cultural ties and adapted to specific groups and localities. They show, for example, that people living in particular territories today have, in some cases, storied accounts of arrival from other places and, in others, experiences of permanent occupation, “since the beginning of time,” as expressed by Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) (pers. comm., 2001). Some of the episodes are very ancient, connecting peoples from distant places, such as the Chinookan at the mouth of the Columbia River, with the Nahwitti (Kwakwaka’wakw) of the central coast of British Columbia or the Straits Salish of Vancouver Island with the Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes and even the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia. Along with story themes, it seems reasonable to believe that other

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types of knowledge, including ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge, followed similar pathways. The ancient stories, like the names of plants, have unfortunately been lost to many of the present generations of Indigenous peoples; the very lands and waters in which they take place have in many cases been damaged by industrial encroachment and urbanization and thus alienated from their original inhabitants (see L.R. Smith 2008b). As the fundamental underpinning of peoples’ lifeways within the landscapes of their ancestors, these narratives are profoundly connected not only to the places themselves but also to the species and resources of those places and to the activities of food production, technology and use of materials, healing, ceremony, celebration, and social interplay and interconnection with other peoples and other species that comprise the totality of life’s meanings. In the following chapter, these various aspects of peoples’ relationships with their lands and other life forms are discussed in more detail.

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13 Worldview and Belief Systems in Ethnobotanical Knowledge Systems

When we have to honour all the spirits, we acknowledge the spirits of water, all the elements, the fire, light, the earth, plants, animals. We all believe that they all have spirits, the same spirit that we have, all humans. Spirits are no different. (Gilbert Solomon, Tsilhqot’in, cited in Supreme Court of British Columbia 2007, 132)

Introduction “The same spirit that we have.” Gilbert Solomon of the Tsilhqot’in Nation, recounting his teachings from his mother, Mabel Solomon, and other elders, expressed as part of his court testimony a concept and a perspective that was held by any number of women and men of his mother’s generation of the mid-1900s from Indigenous communities right across North America and beyond. Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) recalled observing her own grandmother, from an even earlier generation: My grandmother, I watched her when we were little. If she went to gather medicine or some kind of edible that was to be preserved so they could survive, she didn’t just go tramping in the woods and “chop, chop” or “dig, dig” … She’d make us walk behind her, and … she would be chanting a tune as we’re going along … And when my grandmother went up to a tree or a shrub, or whatever she was going to gather, she acknowledged that particular tree … like it was a human being. She’d put her little hands on the tree or the brush … and she’d acknowledge it. And as a child we were made to respect our grandmother; we’d be quiet in the back … That’s part of our spirituality.

Many Indigenous people still hold this perspective – that plants and animals are respected persons, like humans. This idea has evidently been a part of Indigenous peoples’ understandings for hundreds, probably thousands, of years: “since the beginning of time.” Another reflection of this respectful approach to resource species is in the series of “words of praise”1 recorded by Franz Boas from Kwakwaka’wakw harvesters, addressed to the beings (plants, fish, and animals) that provided people with the food, materials, and medicines they needed for survival. An example is in the words a medicine gatherer addressed to a salmonberry bush (q’émdzuxwm’es) before taking some of its bark: “Don’t be startled, Supernatural One, by my coming and sitting down to make a request of you, Supernatural One … This is the reason why I come to you … to pray you, please, to [let me] take some of your blanket, Sore-Healer, that it may heal the burn of my child, that, please, may heal up his burn, Supernatural One” (Boas 1930, 218). Similarly, from the Interior Plateau, John Ross (2011, 352) notes that the Spokan practised a strict ritual of praying before gathering any plant foods: “a woman prayed as she moved from one berry bush to another. Praying was done by the person always facing east.” Such perspectives represent part of a people’s overarching worldview, “a distinctive vision of reality,” which is shaped by experiences and events in the collective lives of a people, rooted in ancestral teachings and guided by commonly held values and perspectives. It transcends the lifespan of individuals and provides continuity, identity, and a sense of belonging to a particular cultural group (Ortiz 1973, 91). Examples of a worldview that embraces other species with humans in a collective relationship with all of creation can be identified from virtually every Indigenous group across North America and beyond.2 The immense congruity of perspectives of peoples who have lived close to their lands and waters for generations, and the integration of values with their practical knowledge and technologies, has been noted by many scholars.3 According to Nuu-chah-nulth scholar and hereditary chief Dr E. Richard Atleo (Umeek) (2004), of Ahousaht, the eternal and unbreakable interconnections among humans, plants, animals, and the other entities of the environment are drawn directly from their common creation. As Umeek explains from a Nuu-chahnulth perspective (cited in Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995, 15): “The Creator made all things one. All things are related and interconnected. All things are sacred. All things are therefore to be respected.” Every entity that was a part of the Creator’s overall conception is, therefore, inextricably tied to humans. From the southwestern United States, Tewa (Tesuque Pueblo) elder Vickie Downey of New Mexico echoes this same philosophy: “You give thanks before you even receive your gifts from the Creator. When you ask, you give thanks. Your prayers are thanksgivings for everything – the sun, the moon, the snow, the water, the fire, the rocks. You see them

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as being alive, having a life of their own. A tree has its own life” (cited in Wall 1993, 6). For First Peoples in northwestern North America, the Creator, or “Great Spirit” (J.E. Brown 1953), is named and characterized in different ways in the narratives and stories of the ancient myth-times, when the distinctions between humans, animals, plants, and other parts of the environment blurred and when gifted and powerful individuals often transformed themselves and others between these states of being (see chapter 12). For some Interior Plateau peoples, the Creator was referred to as Old-One or Old-Man, and the narratives of how Old-One created the sun, the stars, and the earth were recorded by Teit (1912, 1917) and others in various versions. An Okanagan account, for example, was explicit about the origin of plants: An Old-One or chief [whose name also means “sweat lodge”] made the earth out of a woman, and said she would be the mother of all the people. Thus the earth was once a human being and she is alive yet; but she has been transformed and we cannot see her in the same way we can see a person. Nevertheless, she has legs, arms, head, heart, flesh, bones and blood. The soil is her flesh; the trees and vegetation are her hair; the rocks her bones and the wind is her breath. (Teit 1917, 80) A parallel story was told by one of the Kwakwaka’wakw tribes (Nawhitti), in which the “Oldest One on Earth” was himself transformed into a big stone. In this story, “His hair was transformed into grass and earth” (Boas 2002, 421). This idea of plants as the “hair,” or covering, of the earth is reflected in the words for vegetation: in Nlaka’pamux and other Interior Salish languages, grass and low-growing plants are known collectively as “ground-growth” or “groundhair” (Turner and Brown 2004). Another description of plants, uncovered from James Teit’s (1896–1918) field notes on the Nlaka’pamux, dating to around 1900, refers to plants as the “the covering or blanket of the earth.”4 Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) told another story from her childhood, also featuring grass as the hair of the “Mother Earth.” On one occasion, all of Mary’s women relatives were sitting around on the ground, working on the sp’ets’i (Indian-hemp), extracting the fibres to be spun into twine for making fishing nets and twining mats. The women were all talking among themselves, with the children sitting around and listening. Then at one point the conversation turned to certain sad events and people who had passed away. Before long, the women were all moaning and crying, even wailing loudly, and pulling at the grass at their feet. The children succumbed to the general mood and started to weep themselves. Afterward, Mary asked, “Auntie, why was everyone crying?” Her aunt explained to her that sometimes it really helped people feel better if they cried. She said they had no “doctors” (psychiatrists) around to help, so

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crying was one way that people healed themselves of emotional distress and tension. Mary’s aunt compared this healing process to that of a child who was tired and upset, who would snuggle into its mother’s lap, pull at her hair and cry, even for no apparent reason or particular cause. The women, her aunt said, were doing the same thing: sitting on the lap of their “Mother Earth” (using the Secwepemc term), pulling at her hair – the grasses – and crying until they felt better. Thus, from far back, almost a century or so, the elders regarded the grass and other plants in this special way, as the hair of the living earth. In the Nlaka’pamux “Old-One” narratives, Old-One also instructed the people he had made about how they should live and how to hunt and fish, make baskets, dig roots, and so forth (chapters 5, 6, 7, and 12). He also taught them the proper protocols for harvesting: how to harvest plants like saskatoon berry to make a fish spear or yew wood to make a bow. Before taking anything from a plant, he taught them, one should “pray or talk nicely to it.” In other words, right at the inception of humanity, as people perceived this time, they learned that they must treat plants and other living beings with deep respect and relate to them as they would to other human beings. In this chapter, I discuss the implications of Indigenous peoples’ worldviews and visions of reality for the ways that they relate to and use plants. I first consider the perception of plants as close relatives of humans – powerful, but usually generous, beings who can influence humans in different ways, positively or negatively, according to how they are treated. The entire collective system of Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Indigenous peoples across the continent is firmly grounded in the belief that there is a fundamental relationship and interconnectedness between humans, plants, animals, fish, and birds, as well as mountains, water, the moon, and stars. This perspective of plants and animals as our relatives has been termed “kincentricity,” or “kincentric ecology,” as mentioned in chapter 12. The power of plants as spiritual entities is described in the next section, particularly how certain species – especially prickly plants and aromatic plants – provide special protection against many types of harmful influences. Following this is a discussion of the role of plants in peoples’ rituals and ceremonies, and then the reciprocal relationships, taboos, and protocols around the use of plants are described. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the human creative role in transforming plants from one state to another. Table 13-1 provides examples of plant species featured in various ways in belief systems of Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America. Plants as Generous Relatives: Kincentric Ecology A kincentric belief system, in which all life forms and other environmental entities are seen to be relatives of humans and of each other, is widespread in Indigenous peoples’ cosmologies (Martinez 2008; Salmón 2000; Senos et al.

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Table 13-1  |  Examples of plants related to traditional beliefs of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America Species

Notes (reference)

Algae, lichen, fungi, and ferns

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana)

Two-headed kelp believed to mark entrance to the supernatural world under the ocean (Haida) (Swanton 1905; Turner 2004a)

Tree fungi (Fomitopsis pinicola, Ganoderma applanatum, and other spp.)

Tree Fungus was a person in a Haida narrative (see table 12-2); spiritual protection for a household or individuals against evil thoughts (Saanich and other Coast Salish peoples, Ditidaht and others); symbolic crest (Nuxalk and others); shamanic grave markers (Tlingit) (Blanchette et al. 1992)

Black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii)

Puffballs (Lycoperdon spp., Bovista spp., Calvatia spp.) Mushrooms (Tricholoma populinum and other spp.)

Created by Coyote from his hair braid (Okanagan, Secwepemc) (Bouchard and Kennedy 1979; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Said to be associated with stars, thunder, and weather events (Sechelt, Kwakwaka’wakw, and others); associated with corpses and ghosts (widespread) (Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972; Turner and Bell 1973)

Washing in mushroom juice thought to make babies strong and independent when they grew up (Nlaka’pamux); some people had strong taboos against eating mushrooms (A. Jones 1983; Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger 1985)

Running clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum)

Considered to be a “bad luck” plant; if handled, will cause one to become confused and lost (Ditidaht, Nlaka’pamux) (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983, 1990)

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum)

Associated with snakes; many taboos about digging the rhizomes (Nuxalk, Saanich, Halkomelem, Klallam, and others) (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1989; McIlwraith 1948; Turner 1973; Turner and Bell 1971)

Sword fern (Polystichum munitum)

Conifers

Amabilis fir (Abies amabilis) and Grand fir (A. grandis)

Subalpine fir, or “balsam fir” (Abies lasiocarpa)

Fern Woman was a supernatural being (Haida); Sword Fern was a supernatural person who controlled the weather and had a hairy face, earrings of dentalia, and cheeks smeared with red ochre; used in weather rituals (Kwakwaka’wakw) (Boas 1966; Swanton 1905; Turner 2004a; Turner and Bell 1973)

Needles for hair perfume (Nuxalk, Hesquiaht); boughs for purification (Kwakwaka’wakw); branches burned as incense, air freshener, protection against illness (Ditidaht); boughs rubbed on skin of girls for protection against predators, used as a protective wash (Nlaka’pamux) (Boas 1921, 1966; H.I. Smith 1928; Turner 1973; Turner and Bell 1973; Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983, 1990) Boughs rubbed on skin of girls for protection against predators; babies washed in bough solution for strength (Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan); powdered bark rubbed on skin as cleansing and for

/continued

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Table 13-1 | continued Species

Yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis)

Common juniper (Juniperus communis)

Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) and Pacific coastal juniper (J. maritima)

Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) and White spruce (P. glauca)

Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis)

Notes (reference)

scent, boughs as bedding, in sweathouse (Okanagan); boughs in sweathouse for purification (Sahaptin); protective smudge from boughs (Ktunaxa, Secwepemc, Okanagan, and others) (Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; G. Palmer 1975b; Teit 1906b; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Boughs used in sweat bath, as scrubbers, for rheumatism, arthritis, and protection (Kwakwaka’wakw) (Boas 1930; Turner and Bell 1973)

Used as medicine; all had to be drunk, or it would not work (Haida); decoction drunk in sweathouse and used as purifying wash for hunters and others (with Artemisia and Shepherdia canadensis) (Nlaka’pamux); decoction used as fumigant against death and illness (Okanagan); wash for babies against witchcraft or fever (Sahaptin) (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner 2004a; Turner and Thompson 2006; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Branches hung in house or burned on stove as incense to keep away germs during epidemics (Saanich, western Washington); decoction as fumigant, incense, and air freshener during sickness, death (Nlaka’pamux); steam inhaled to prevent illness (Secwepemc); wash for hunting gear (Okanagan); boughs burned on stove or in fire as protective incense (Okanagan, Nlaka’pamux, Stl’atl’imx, and others); solution of berries and/or boughs, bark (also J. occidentalis) as room disinfectant (Sahaptin) (Gunther 1973; Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Turner and Bell 1971; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Wash of branches for purification by hunters and others (Nlaka’pamux); baby wash made from boughs to give strength (Nlaka’pamux); pitch connected to death and bereavement (general, Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan, Interior Plateau); chewing gum from twin-topped spruce tree will cause a woman to have twins (Tsilhqot’in) (Linda Smith, pers. comm., 1987; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Said to bring supernatural protection (Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Klallam, Ditidaht); bark mixture in sweat bath, decoction drunk for tuberculosis (Nuxalk); branches placed around sick people’s houses with the idea that the sharp spruce needles would keep anything unclean from entering the house; spruce tips rubbed on canoes, digging sticks, and implements to purify them and used to cleanse a person contaminated (sic) with menstrual blood (Kwakwaka’wakw); beating with branches said to drive away the sickness and ghosts of the dead (Klallam); said to bring vivid dreams and good luck if you sleep under spruce (Nlaka’pamux) (Boas 1930, 1966; Turner 2004a; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983)

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Table 13-1 | continued Species

Notes (reference)

Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa)

Deodorant, used in sweat bathing (Secwepemc); needles spread on sweathouse floor to help ward off witchcraft, salve to make babies sleep well (Okanagan) (G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) Western redcedar (Thuja plicata)

Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)

Mixture with other plants for hair wash and skin wash during sweat bathing, needles as hair tonic (Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan); boughs used on floors, in sweathouse, for bereaved persons, used as tea during sweat bathing, cleansing agent (Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan, other groups); boughs used in ritual washing of twins, to construct puberty houses for girls, and in other ceremonial roles (Secwepemc, Okanagan, other Interior Plateau peoples) (Turner Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Tree “talked to” before a piece was cut for bows or other tools (Kwakwaka’wakw); branches used for ritual scrubbing and purification (Ditidaht, Nlaka’pamux, and others) (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983, 1990)

Strong taboo against harvesting cedar bark when seaweed is being picked (Ts’msyen); bark used in sacred cedar-bark ceremony of the winter dances and for ceremonial cleansing (Kwakwaka’wakw); tree “talked to” before planks or bark removed, or tree cut for canoe, etc. (Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, Nuu-chah-nulth, and others); mixture with other plants for hair wash and skin wash during sweat bathing, for scrubbing (Kwakwaka’wakw, Okanagan); boughs as ceremonial scrubbers (Saanich); boughs used to sweep house after death and smudge from boughs to scare ghosts (western Washington, Saanich); inner bark used as headband for girl at puberty (Secwepemc) (Sewid-Smith and Dick 1998; Turner 1998, 2003b, 2004a; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner and Clifton 2006)

Boughs used as ritual scrubbers to protect girls at puberty, hunters (Kwakwaka’wakw, Hesquiaht/Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, Makah, Nlaka’pamux); decoction of branches drunk for ritual purification and used as disinfecting fumigant for houses (Nlaka’pamux) (Boas 1930; Gill 1983; Turner and Bell 1973; Turner and Efrat 1982; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Flowering plants

Red alder (Alnus rubra)

Formerly a woman; you should hug an alder tree before you cut it down (Haida) (Turner 2004a)

Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)

Ripening of berries celebrated with First Fruits ceremony (northern Interior Salish, Nez Perce, Sahaptin); Old-One created fish spear from branch (Nlaka’pamux) (Hunn, Selam, and family /continued

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Table 13-1 | continued Species

Red columbine (Aquilegia formosa)

Notes (reference)

1990; A.G. Marshall 1977; Teit 1912; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Believed to cause rain if picked (Haida); a good luck plant, for love, wealth, etc. (Saanich, Kwakwaka’wakw) (Turner 2004a; Turner and Bell 1971, 1973)

Northern wormwood (Artemisia frigida)

Leaves used for incense as disinfectant, smudge (Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc, Okanagan) (G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata)

Leaves, branches as protective smudge, incense, and house fumigant against illness, death; decoction of branches used to revive unconscious people (Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc, Okanagan, Sahaptin) (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Western mugwort (Artemisia ludoviciana)

Wild ginger (Asarum caudatum)

Balsamroot, or spring sunflower (Balsamorhiza sagittata)

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera)

Poque (Boschniakia hookeri) Calypso, or false ladyslipper (Calypso bulbosa) Edible camas (Camassia quamash)

Blue harebell (Campanula rotundifolia)

Leaves used for incense as disinfectant, smudge (Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

A good luck plant, for love, wealth, etc. (Saanich); leaves used as protective wash against illness or evil thoughts (Sechelt); powdered leaves used in baby’s cradle (Quileute, Nlaka’pamux); used as love charm and charm to keep families together (Secwepemc) (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001; Gunther 1973; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990; Turner, Timmers, and Bouchard 1972)

Many taboos and observances relate to pit-cooking these roots (Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc, Okanagan) (Teit 1909; Peacock 1998) Tree ceremonially thanked before bark gathered; special basket used by girl at puberty (Secwepemc); tree said to have been created by Old-One (the first tree), and a basket from a roll of birch bark (Nlaka’pamux) (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994; Teit 1909; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Said to be a good luck charm (northern Wakashan) (Compton 1993b)

Flowers used as a good luck charm (Nlaka’pamux) (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) First Roots ceremony celebrated for these roots in some places (Okanagan, Sahaptin) (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980) Believed to cause rain if picked (Haida) (Turner 2004a)

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Table 13-1 | continued Species

Notes (reference)

Paintbrush (Castilleja miniata and other spp.)

Flowers are considered to be sacred; if picked, would cause thunder (Dakelh, Tsilhqot’in) (Kay 1993)

Bull thistle (Cirsium brevistylum) and other thistles, including introduced spp. (Cirsium spp.)

Root of thistle considered to bring good luck and protection (Saanich) (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1991)

Creeping snowberry (Chiogenes hispidula)

Plants used as protective and therapeutic wash for pregnant women (Secwepemc) (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994)

Spring beauty, or “mountain potato” (Claytonia lanceolata)

Mature stems (gone to seed) pulled up by bereaved women and thrown onto places where it wasn’t growing to help spread the plant (Tsilhqot’in); included in First Roots ceremonies of some Interior Plateau peoples (Mabel Solomon and Gilbert Solomon, pers. comm., 2003; Mellott 2010; L.R. Smith 2008b)

Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea)

Bush “talked to” before bark, branches removed for medicine (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001)

Black hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii)

Charcoal used as face paint in winter dances (Halkomelem) (Abel Joe, pers. comm., 1974)

Sundew (Drosera rotundifolia)

Said to be a good luck charm, especially for fishing gear (Haida) (Turner 2004a)

Shooting star (Dodecatheon jeffreyi)

Believed to cause rain if picked (Haida) (Turner 2004a)

Pink fawn lily (Erythronium revolutum)

Called “sad flowers” and said to cause fog if picked (Ditidaht) (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983)

Cascara (Frangula purshiana)

Tree “talked to” and asked permission before bark harvested (many other trees and shrubs were approached similarly) (widespread, coast and interior peoples) (Turner and Hebda 1990)

Northern riceroot (Fritillaria camschatcensis)

Featured in a special ceremonial Flower dance, with other flowers (Hanaksiala) (Compton 1993b)

Sweet-scented bedstraw (Galium triflorum)

Plant used for love charm (Ahousaht Nuu-chah-nulth, western Washington) (Densmore 1939; Gunther 1973; Turner and Efrat 1982)

Junegrass (Koeleria macrantha)

Waving this grass is said to cause rain (Dakelh) (Poser 2008a)

Sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata, H. hirta)

Used as protective smudge, body wash, and incense (Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc, Okanagan, Ktunaxa, Nuxalk) (Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner 1973; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

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Table 13-1 | continued Species

Notes (reference)

Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva)

Said to have been human beings; many beliefs around picking them; First Roots ceremony held for them (Okanagan, Nlaka’pamux, Sahaptin, Nez Perce, and others) (Bandringa 1999; Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; A.G. Marshall 1977; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Canby’s lovage (Ligusticum canbyi)

Tiger lily (Lilium columbianum)

Stoneseed (Litho­ spermum ruderale) Geyer’s biscuitroot (Lomatium geyeri) Desert parsley (Lomatium macrocarpum)

“Wild celery,” or barestem lomatium (Lomatium nudicaule) Skunk-cabbage (Lysichiton americanus)

Root used as scent, for smoking and smudging, as good luck charm; used to prevent babies from catching cold and to revive unconscious people or people who have gone into a trance (Spokan, Okanagan, Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux, Ktunaxa) (Hart, Turner, and Morgan 1981; G. Palmer 1975b; J.A. Ross 2011; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Flowers used as charm for love and wealth (Nlaka’pamux) (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Used as charm to call the rain (Stl’atl’imx, Okanagan) (Sam Mitchell, pers. comm., 1974; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

First Roots ceremony celebrated for these roots in some places (Okanagan, Sahaptin) (A.G. Marshall 1977; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Associated with Transformer; this root, qw’əqw’íle, was said to have fathered a son, who grew up to be one of the Transformers (Nlaka’pamux, Stl’atl’imx, other Interior Salish) (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Seeds burned as a smudge in First Salmon ceremony, to “drive away ghosts,” to protect against illness and death (Saanich); used widely for spiritual protection (Klallam, Saanich, Ditidaht, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nlaka’pamux, Stl’atl’imx) (Boas 1921; Turner and Bell 1971, 1973; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983, 1990)

Smoke from burning roots inhaled for bad dreams, flu, rheumatism, used in sweat bath (Nuxalk); leaves placed under pillow, or head washed with solution, for “power dreams” (Nlaka’pamux) (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Tall Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium)

Used with wild rose to give protection in illness and death (Okanagan) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Pineappleweed (Matricaria matricarioides)

Used as love charm (Okanagan) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca)

False azalea (Menziesia ferruginea)

Ceremonial use for women at puberty and in mourning (Haida) (Turner 2004a)

Placed in coffins and used around illness and death (Haida); said to steal berries if used to cover them in a basket (Ditidaht) (Turner 2004a; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983)

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Table 13-1 | continued Species

Notes (reference)

Monardella (Monardella odoratissima)

Infusion of stems, leaves used in a wash to purify weapons (Okanagan) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Indian-pipe (Monotropa uniflora)

Said to grow where the wolf urinates; called “wolf ’s urine” (Saanich, Nlaka’pamux) (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1998; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Single delight (Moneses uniflora)

Yellow pond-lily (Nuphar lutea ssp. polysepala)

Plant eaten for “luck” and power; used, along with devil’s-club, as good luck charm and for supernatural help (Haida) (Swanton 1905, 1908; Turner 2004a)

Used as charm for calling the west wind (Hesquiaht, Nuu-chahnulth); associated with dreams; can heal a person who is having dreams of deceased relatives (Nuxalk) (Turner 1973; Turner and Efrat 1982)

Water-parsley A charm in a narrative on stealing daylight (Ditidaht) (Turner, (Oenanthe sarmentosa) Thomas, et al. 1983) Devil’s-club (Oplopanax horridus)

Western sweetcicely (Osmorhiza occidentalis)

Wild poppy (identity not positive) (Papaver alaskanum, P. alboresum, P. nudicaule)

Supernatural being in many traditions and narratives for sweat bathing and ceremonial washing; bark eaten to bring supernatural protection and luck in gambling, hunting, etc. (Haida); widely used for purification and for washing hunting and fishing gear, as recounted in many narratives (Ts’msyen, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuxalk; western Washington); charcoal as ceremonial and protective face paint (Saanich, Ditidaht); taboo against shadow of a person touching devil’s-club medicine (Okanagan) (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1994; Boas 1916, 1921; Gunther 1973; Lantz, Swerhun, and Turner 2004; Turner 1973, 2004a; Turner and Bell 1973; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983) Root carried by hunters to mask human scent (Okanagan) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

A “good luck” plant that grows in the mountains and opens and closes with the sun is known in the inland area; people with power can talk to it and cause the weather to change (apparently it is poppy) (Dena’ina/Tanaina) (Russell Kari 1987)

White bog orchid (Platanthera dilatata)

Widely used in Interior Salish as good luck charm, love charm (Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc, Okanagan); purifying sweat bath; used to wash guns and as a body wash for hunters (Nlaka’pamux) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Black cottonwood (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa)

Burning the bark causes a strong wind (Squamish) (Bouchard and Turner 1976)

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Table 13-1 | continued Species

Notes (reference)

Smooth sumac (Rhus glabra)

Not used to cover berries in baskets, or it will steal some of the berries (Stl’atl’imx) (Sam Mitchell, pers. comm., 1974)

Wild black currant (Ribes hudsonianum)

Berries said to turn into trout if they drop into the water (Nlaka’pamux) (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Gray currant (Ribes bracteosum) and trailing currant (R. laxiflorum)

Swamp gooseberry (Ribes lacustre)

Red-flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum)

Prickly wild rose (Rosa acicularis) and Wood’s rose (Rosa woodsii)

Dwarf wild rose, or baldhip rose (Rosa gymnocarpa) Nootka rose (Rosa nutkana)

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus) Salmonberries (Rubus spectabilis)

Trailing wild blackberry (Rubus ursinus)

Rubbed on fishing gear to mask human scent (Haida) (Turner 2004a)

Branches burned as protection against snakes and other harmful spirits (Nuxalk, Haida, and others); used as charm to make rain (Secwepemc); rubbed on fishing gear to mask human scent (Okanagan) (McIlwraith 1948; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner 2004a; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980) Said to cause rain if flowers are picked (Halkomelem) (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1989; Turner and Hebda 2012)

Solution of branches used by hunters as body wash to remove human scent and used as protection (Okanagan); used to “sweep out” graves before burials (Okanagan); branches used to ward off ghosts and used in bereavement ceremonies (Sahaptin, Secwepemc, Okanagan, Spokan); protective face cream for infants, and baby wash, to give strength (Nlaka’pamux) (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; G. Palmer 1975b; J.A. Ross 2011; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Leafy twigs used to make a protective wash and smudge (Saanich, Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc) (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1994; Turner and Bell 1971; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Featured in a special ceremonial Flower dance, with other flowers (Hanaksiala); mixture of leafy twigs with other plants for hair wash and skin wash during sweat bathing (Okanagan, Secwepemc) (Compton 1993b; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980) First Shoots and First Fruits ceremonies held for this species (Chehalis, Halkomelem) (Hill-Tout, in Maud 1978a, 1978c)

Singing of Swainson’s thrush makes the salmonberries ripen (belief widespread along Northwest Coast); dark coloured salmonberries ripen at night, light coloured ones in daytime (Ts’msyen) (Turner and Thompson 2006); featured in a special ceremonial Flower dance, with other flowers (Hanaksiala) (Compton 1993b) Used as medicine for its protective properties (Saanich, Halkomelem) (Turner and Bell 1971)

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Table 13-1 | continued Species

Notes (reference)

Willows (Salix spp.)

Inner bark used as headband for girl at puberty (Secwepemc) (Teit 1909)

Gray ball sage (Salvia dorrii)

Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa) Tule (Schoenoplectus acutus)

Used in baby’s cradleboard (apparently for protection) (Okanagan) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Commonly associated with death (Haida, Ts’msyen, and others) (Boas 1902; Cove and MacDonald 1987; Turner 2004a) Special ceremony observed by Spokan before harvesting the stems (J.A. Ross 2011)

Snowberry, or waxberry (Symphoricarpos albus)

Berries associated with snakes and with corpses and ghosts (widespread); said to be the saskatoon berries of the people in the land of the dead (Stl’atl’imx) (Teit 1906a)

Western trillium (Trillium ovatum)

Called “sad flowers” and said to cause fog if picked (Ditidaht) (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983)

Common tansy (Tanacetum vulgare, introduced sp.)

A charm for obtaining luck and wealth in gambling (Straits Salish) (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1994)

Cattail (Typha latifolia)

Special ceremony observed by Spokan before harvesting the leaves (J.A. Ross 2011)

Blueberries (Vaccinium alaskaense, V. ovalifolium)

Featured in a special ceremonial Flower dance, with other flowers (Hanaksiala) (Compton 1993b)

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica)

Black huckleberry (Vaccinium membranceum)

Mountain valerian (Valeriana sitchensis) Indian hellebore (Veratrum viride)

Wild violets (Viola spp.)

Mixture with other plants for hair wash and skin wash during sweat bathing; used to combat witchcraft (Okanagan) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980)

Ripening of berries celebrated with First Fruits ceremony (Okanagan, Spokan, Sahaptin, Nez Perce, and others) (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990; A.G. Marshall 1977; J.A. Ross 2011; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980) Whole plant as protective wash for hunters to mask human smell, also a hunting charm (Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc) (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990)

Used by shamans for protection against evil and to gain supernatural help (Haida, Ts’msyen); widely used as smudge or wash for spiritual protection and to vanquish monsters like sisiutł (double-headed sea serpent) (Kwakwaka’wakw, Okanagan, and many others) (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001; Boas 1921, 1930; G. Palmer 1975b; Turner 2004a; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner and Thompson 2006; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) Believed to cause rain if picked (Haida) (Turner 2004a)

Note: See also tables 12-1, 12-2, and 12-3. Worldview and Belief Systems  |  309

2006; Turner 2005).5 The same obligations that almost all humans feel toward their own family members are, in the case of the kincentric view of Indigenous peoples, extended to all life. It is the duty and responsibility of humans to acknowledge, and to look after, all of their relatives and to consider the well-being of these relatives as inextricably bound to the health and well-being of humans. It is seen as a sacred trust to care for the earth and all of its inhabitants, as they all care for us. The Mohawk pronouncement of the Haudenosaunee thanksgiving address at the beginning of every major gathering expresses similar relationships and responsibilities to and from all of the entities of the Haudenosaunee world (Turner 2005). Biologists and geneticists studying our nucleic acids will tell us that it is largely true, at least for living things, that we are all descended from the same common ancestral forms and that much of our genetic makeup is, indeed, virtually identical to that of plants. However, most people in western urbanized, industrialized society consider humans to be apart from, and above, other life forms, even those like chimpanzees and other primates who are genetically closest to us. In this predominant perspective, even where humans may feel some connections to other mammals such as dogs, cats, horses, or dolphins, plants are conceptually far distant. For the most part, they are seen as “objects,” strictly resources, that are available for our use and capacity to gain wealth, not as sentient beings with a sensory capacity equivalent or even superior to that of humans. Even rocks, mountains, rivers, and lakes are recognized at some level in the kincentric worldview as powerful and sentient beings. Some of the mountains of Tsilhqot’in and Ulkatcho country, for example, were said to have been human beings at an earlier time; two individuals near Chilco Lake, Ts’ilʔos and ʔEniyud, were a chief and his wife, who didn’t get along and ended up separating. The couple had six children; two of them are behind Ts’ilʔos and one is on his lap. The three other children are right beside ʔEniyud. In a land claims court testimony in Victoria in 2003, Xeni Gwet’in chief Roger William (2003) recounted the story, explaining the present locations of the mountains: ?Eniyud was heading towards … Tatlayoko. She planted them wild potatoes [spring beauty, Claytonia lanceolata, at Potato Mountain] on her way over. And Ts’ilʔos just stayed there [figure 13-1]. Some of the stories I hear was that the beartooth, ʔesghunsh [yellow glacier lily, Erythronium grandiflorum], that he planted those around there. And in our stories in our history, when … you’re married, they’re not supposed to separate, and what happened there, there was a separation. So when they turned to stone, they – you know, they’re going to look after us, the Xeni Gwet’in Tsilhqot’in people, all the time.

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13-1 | Ts’ilʔos (Mount Tatlow), in Xeni Gwet’in Tsilhqot’in territory, who used to be a bad-tempered man according to Tsilhqot’in traditions. It is considered disrespectful to point at this or other mountains.

The stars themselves are included in this immense family of creation. For example, the stars of the Pleiades constellation were said by the Secwepemc formerly to have been a group of women roasting roots in an earth oven who were transformed into these stars (Dawson 1892, 39). The well-known “Star Husband” narrative (see chapter 12) recounts how two sisters married Stars, identified in one version (R. Brown 1873) as Aldebaran and Sirius and in another (Boas 2002) as the planets Mars and Jupiter. Interestingly, the Navajo name for “star,” sósi, means “my ancient ancestor” (Larry Emerson, pers. comm., 2009). The sun, too, is seen as a powerful person who was once a great chief. Of course, animals, birds, and fish of all kinds are all major players in this familial relationship, as reflected in their portrayal in narratives, dances, songs, and ceremonies. For example, the Saanich ceremonial names for the different kinds of salmon, used during the First Salmon ceremony, are a reflection of their perceived kinship: Sockeye is addressed as “Honoured One”; Coho as “Parent of your daughter-inlaw or son-in-law”; Humpback, or Pink Salmon, as “Adopted niece or nephew”; and Spring, or Chinook, as “Sister-in-law or Brother-in-law” (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994). Kincentricity for plants, too, is reflected in the diverse stories, many recounted in chapter 12, in which plants – in the ancient times before the transformation –

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were originally people, or in other cases, they were transformed from their previous botanical form into humans. Other plants were created by transformations of certain objects or substances, or they were converted magically into other entities. In other words, the lines that divide people, animals, trees, ferns, flowers, rocks, mountains, rivers, and stars into different and distinct categories were not fixed in myth-times as they are mostly today. Plants in those ancient days were actually very similar to people, living in communities with their own social organization as humans still have. For example, in the Saanich narrative of the Tree people, all of the trees were formerly human-like and were transformed into their present form by Qäls (Xe’ls), the Creator. Douglasfir (ch’sey’) was said to be the “boss” of the Trees (Jenness n.d., 63). In one Okanagan cosmology, all of the different creatures, plants, and rocks were described as having their own societies, each with its own chief, overseen by Old-One. Three Yellow-Cedar sisters of the Hesquiaht, who were scared away from the food they were preparing by Raven, voluntarily placed themselves into the service of humans. Others were compelled into their new roles as being useful to humans. Such is the case with Cow-parsnip in a Tlingit story; she was a woman who offended Raven by speaking angrily and was therefore transformed by Raven into a food for people. Similarly, Western Larch, or Tamarack, and Tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) were said to have been people-eating monsters, transformed by Coyote to be of service to humans. Other plants were created by individuals from parts of themselves: black tree lichen by Coyote from his own hair braid, bunchberries and trailing blackberries by a dying woman from her own blood, and Indian-hemp plants by Coyote’s son from his own hairs for the elderly Spider couple of the sky country. Others, like the old blind woman who was transformed into an edible wood fern and the young girl caught in a landslide whose head became a wood fern root and body a marmot, were simply apparent victims of transformations (see chapter 12, table 12-2). Plant actors in the ancient stories, although not as common as animal actors, can be identified here and there. The Kwakwakw’akw and Central Coast Salish stories about Mink are a case in point. In different episodes of these stories, Mink tries to marry Horsetail, Resinous Bark, and Bull Kelp (Boas 2002, 130, 131, 190). Another is the role of qw’əqw’íle (desert parsley, or hog-fennel, Lomatium macrocarpum), a root that was said to be the father of one of the Salishan Transformers, Child-of-HogFennel (see Teit 1912, 224, 351) (figure 13-2). To this day, the qw’əqw’íle root is associated with fertility and fathering children (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 155). Viewing plants as sentient, and even spiritual, beings – sharing the same ancestors as humans and with lives as worthy as human lives – requires a different, more respectful way of approaching, recognizing, and especially harvesting and utilizing them. Their role as resources must be reconciled with their role as persona. They must be addressed (as Mary’s grandmother did) with appreciation,

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13-2 | Qw’ǝqw’íle (desert parsley, or hog-fennel, Lomatium macrocarpum), an edible root that was said to be the father of one of the Salishan Transformers, Child-of-Hog-Fennel.

as generous relatives. Their relationship must be acknowledged and their help requested with supplication and humility, not just assumed. The Kwakwaka’wakw refer to a standing cedar tree from which a board has been cut as “begged from” and treat it as a sentient being (see chapter 6). For the Nuu-chah-nulth, a similar approach is made to trees – for example, when sought for making a canoe or for some other purpose. “Talk to it like a person. Explain to the tree the purpose, why you want to use it – for the people at home and so on. It may seem like you’re praying to the tree, but you’re praying to the Creator” (Roy Haiyupis, pers. comm., 1995; Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995). Dr E. Richard Atleo (pers. comm. and lecture at University of Victoria, 28 September 2006) added that a canoe builder would come to visit a potential canoe cedar, and the plants living around it, four different times before even touching it. He said, “So much respect is given to

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all the plants around the tree, even the little plants, before focusing on the tree itself. It is recognized that the tree will participate in the dynamic nature of life; in reciprocity, giving, taking and transformation.” Another example reflecting kincentricity is from Klallam (Clallam), a Central Coast Salish group. In addressing the berries they like to pick, people name them with the first person singular possessive prefix (nə-, “my”), a term of affection and thankfulness used when addressing a younger person: nət’éy’əqw (“my strawberry”), nəts’qw’úʔmə (“my raspberry”), nəyíʔxəm (“my blue huckleberry”), nəpíxw (“my red huckleberry”), and so on (L.C. Thompson and Thompson [1975– 80]). Mary Thomas (2001), on many occasions, emphasized the respect people gave to the plants they wished to use – for example, to the birch tree: “You never just went up and cut off the bark. You always talked to the tree, asked its permission to use its bark, and gave an offering of tobacco or similar material as a token of acknowledgement.” Once, when she harvested some tseqwtseqwélqw (red-osier dogwood, Cornus sericea) bark to demonstrate how it is prepared as a medicinal poultice for sores, she asked us to wait, and then she approached and talked to the bush and offered it some tobacco, just as her grandmother had taught her to do (pers. obs., 1995).6 Yet another testimony to the close affection people had for their plants is in the Sm’algyax (Ts’msyen) name for black mountain huckleberry, maay, which means simultaneously “berry” and “great grandmother” (J.A. Dunn 1978). Other specific ceremonies that involve plants and relate to their spirituality are described in later sections. Perhaps the most important aspect of kincentricity is that it fosters an ethic of stewardship between humans and their environment where humans are responsible for protecting the land and resources that sustain them, as they would their own kin. Humans and nature are part of an extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins (Martinez 2008; Salmón 2000; Teit 1909; Turner 2005). Plants as Spiritual Entities Not only are plants seen in many Indigenous worldviews as kindred to humans, with common ancestries and origins, but they are also seen has having a spiritual or metaphysical dimension, as do all their other relations, human and otherwise. There is no separation of the spiritual dimension from the physical in the worldviews of some (E.R. Atleo 2004, 2011). Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief Dr E. Richard Atleo (Umeek) (pers. comm., 2008) explained: “The coincidence of these two dimensions is so complete that everything, including all matter, is alive. There is an absence of inert matter. What is also apparent is that the spiritual dimension is considered the source of the physical dimension. That is why deliberate interaction with the spiritual realm is thought necessary to ensure

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the maintenance and continuation of necessary provisions. This is the reason ‘You give thanks.’” As entities of the spirit world, plants have innate powers to influence human destiny and fortune. This influence can be negative or positive, depending upon the actions and attitudes of the people who encounter them. Thus plants can bring good fortune and success in hunting, fishing, root digging, berry picking, basketry, or canoe making. Plants can also protect people against evil forces, illness, or even death. On the other hand, if people neglect to show appropriate respect and appreciation in their actions, and if they disregard certain taboos or constraints, plants can cause serious harm to them. The same is true of animals, rivers, and mountains.7 Taboos Related to Weather and Plants Disrespect toward plants, too, can result in bad weather or misfortune, as explained in the quotation cited above from James Teit’s (1896–1918) field notes on the Nlaka’pamux about flowers, grass, and other plants being the blanket of the earth, which could cause “rain, fog or bad weather.” There are many other beliefs related to plant use that pertain to the weather. For example, the Gitga’at (Ts’msyen) maintain that peeling cedar bark will cause rain, and therefore, people should never undertake this activity until the seaweed harvest has been completed and the seaweed has been dried in the sun and stored away.8 Picking seaweed in the rain is itself a taboo and would cause continued rain. Helen Clifton (pers. comm., 2001; see also Turner and Clifton 2009) explained further: A lot of people like to eat those giant mussels. For some reason Nature always works together with all other forms of life, and so, with the mussels … you’re not supposed to [collect them] until after your seaweed is finished, after your halibut is dried. Because it’s going to rain. Same way, you will feel, this is the time of year when the older women go to get their cedar bark, and prepare it for their winter weaving. And, so, they’re not allowed to do that until all the food that requires the sun and needs drying is done. Especially the halibut and the seaweed. Because, Nature works with the trees and as soon as you take that bark off … all the rain will come, a mist will come … because the tree has a burn on it. So, to heal the tree, to keep the tree alive, a mist will come and the rain will come to soothe the burns on the tree. In other traditions, certain flowers were known as “rain flowers,” and people would not pick them because doing so would cause bad weather. For example, the Massett Haida names for red columbine and blue harebell are dall(-xil)-sgid

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13-3 | Trillium (Trillium ovatum), called “sad flowers” (chaachaawaʕs, “sad ones on the ground”) in Ditidaht. Picking these flowers is said to cause fog and bad weather.

(“red rain-flowers”) and dall(-xíl)-gułał (“blue rain-flowers”) respectively; Haida children were warned that picking these flowers would bring rain and make it impossible for people to dry their seaweed (Turner 2004a). For the Ditidaht on the west coast of Vancouver Island, two kinds of flowers, pink fawn lily (Erythronium revolutum) and trillium (Trillium ovatum) (figure 13-3), are called “sad flowers” (chaachaawaʕs, “sad ones on the ground”); picking them was said to result in fog and bad weather (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Interestingly, Nlaka’pamux elder Annie York said that trillium, which was a medicinal plant used for eye troubles, should never be picked, except by a serious healer who truly needed it as a medicine; otherwise, bad luck would befall the one who picked it (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990).

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A Hul’qumi’num version of “rain flowers” is red-flowering currant. Violet Williams and her sister Mary Thomas (not the Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas) (pers. comm., 1991), who grew up around Westholme on Vancouver Island, were warned by their parents that picking these flowers would cause rain. For the Ulkatcho and other Dakelh (Carrier) people, paintbrush (Castilleja miniata and other spp.) was known as “thunder flower.” One elder explained, “Long ago, when we were children, our parents forbade us to pick Indian paintbrush [called beuk’enułtsih or ditnikwun, also ‘lightning, electricity’] because it was considered to be sacred” (cited in Poser 2008a, 98). One Ulkatcho woman (pers. comm., 1992) recounted that people had once picked a bouquet of paintbrushes for a funeral, and a big storm ensued. Some Dakelh people just considered these flowers to cause bad luck if picked, without specifying bad weather particularly. Interestingly, paintbrush (Castilleja spp.) is also called “thunder flower” in Selish (Flathead), Interior Salish, and Sahaptin.9 In the Interior Plateau, people used other plants to “call” or invoke rain at times of drought. During long bouts of hot, dry weather, Okanagan people invoked rain by beating on a wooden log or, for even more effect, a wooden cross in a cemetery with the flowering stalks of stoneseed (Lithospermum ruderale), called kłts’áleqwtn (“instrument for beating on wood”) (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980, 91) (figure 13-4). Ray (1932, 214) stated that the leaves of this plant could cause rain by being mashed and immersed in a basketful of water and that the flowers of the same plant would bring wind if they were pounded between rocks, dampened, and spread out. Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1998) recalled her own mother breaking off the prickly branches of swamp gooseberry (Ribes lacustre) during a summer drought and then dipping these in the water of a mountain creek and calling on the rain to come. Russell Kari (1987, 157) describes a “good luck” plant that grows in the interior mountains of Dena’ina (Tanaina) territory and opens and closes with the sun, suggested to be a poppy (Papaver sp.). It was said that people with power could talk to this flower and cause the weather to change. On the Northwest Coast, usually it is wind – or lack of it – rather than drought, that causes problems. The Kwakwaka’wakw had a ritual using sword fern to call the northwest wind, needed for canoe travel from Fort Rupert to Alert Bay,10 and some Nuu-chah-nulth people used yellow pond-lily leaves – called hachłsmapt (“west wind plant”) in Hesquiaht – to summon the west wind.11 Not only mistreatment of plants but also any disrespectful acts – overhunting, unwarranted harm of animals, killing a fish with a stone, playing with one’s food or with parts of a dead animal – are seen as likely to cause bad weather events and bad luck in general. For the Tlingit, “Any abuse of a living being, especially needless killing or harming a helpless creature, or insulting an animal or bird, was likely to bring bad luck” (Emmons 1991, 103; see also Emmons 1991, 427–8; and Turner, Ignace, and Ignace 2000). The relationship between lack of respect

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13-4 | Stoneseed (Lithospermum ruderale), used by Okanagan and others to invoke rain during droughts.

and bad luck for the perpetrators is reflected over and over again in narratives like the “perpetual winter” story of the Gitga’at and other Ts’msyen peoples and the Ts’msyen story “The Origin of the Name of Chief Mountain” (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 340; see also chapter 12). The Jilaa Kuns (Creek Woman or Fog Woman) story of the Haida, Tlingit, and Ts’msyen and the Nisga’a story of the Nass Valley volcano are other examples (Chester Morris, pers. comm., 1993; see also chapter 12).12 Today, some people see climate change itself as an outcome of disrespectful practices or breaking of taboos: “It’s hard to say [what is the cause of differences in vegetation from the past] because the weather has changed so much, it’s hard to say what’s happening to the natural growth … The old people knew about the weather. I just wonder if they were alive what they’d say about this weather that

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we’re having now … They would say somebody did something. Somebody did something, why the weather is the way it is” (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2001; see also Turner and Clifton 2006). Plants That May Be Harmful

Many other taboos are, or were, observed that relate to the proper, respectful use of plants and other resources and ways of behaviour toward the environment. Another plant that is at times seen as potentially harmful is bracken fern. Although its black, branching rhizomes were a well-known food, especially for Northwest Coast peoples (Norton 1979b; Turner 1995), there are some negative elements associated with their use. If the rhizomes are dug at the wrong time of year (i.e., summer) or by those who are ritually vulnerable (e.g., men who are in seclusion for training), there is a danger – seen among Halkomelem, Straits, Clallam, and other peoples – of being “snaked,” or having one’s body contaminated with snakes, a condition that can be ameliorated only through extraordinary measures. If you eat too much bracken root, you might be “snaked” (Jenness n.d., 142), or you will become too heavy. In a Klallam story, one girl who ate nothing but bracken fern gave birth to little snakes and was put onto an island (Laurence C. Thompson, pers. comm., 1975). Snake Island near Nanaimo is said to have been named because of the snakes that were stranded there when a man infested with snakes because of digging bracken roots at the wrong time of year was desnaked by his friends (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1994).13 The Stl’atl’imx believed that eating the central fibres of bracken rhizomes would cause paralysis. The Kwakwaka’wakw believed that only old women should dig these rhizomes; if young women dug them, they would become sick. Bracken rhizomes are generally roasted or pit-cooked, but they contain a number of harmful compounds (Turner and von Aderkas 2009), and the various taboos associated with their use may relate, at least indirectly, to their potential toxicity. Bracken fern fronds and a number of other plants, including false azalea (Menziesia ferruginea) on the coast and smooth sumac (Rhus glabra) in the Interior Plateau, are known as materials one should not use to cover berries in a basket because they will “steal the berries,” or “cheat you,” and you will end up with fewer berries if you cover them with these particular plants (Laurence C. Thompson, pers. comm., 1975; Turner 2004a; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Another plant that is seen as potentially harmful is running clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum) (figure 13-5). Ditidaht children were warned not to pick or handle this plant, which is called haayaapadatssiʔ – literally “something (medicine) that gets you confused in the woods” – and is said to bring bad luck (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983, 60–1, 104). The Nlaka’pamux also considered this plant a “bad luck” plant (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). For others, it apparently featured in stories that related its use by Deer and other animals as a belt (see chapter 3).

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13-5  |  Running clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum), said by some to bring bad luck or confusion if handled.

In the Interior Plateau, one species that was considered particularly sensitive to inappropriate preparation techniques, and therefore subject to a number of different rituals and taboos, is arrow-leaved balsamroot, or spring sunflower. This plant was highly esteemed, as indicated by a “prayer” addressed to “the Sunflower-Root” by young people partaking in their first plant foods of the season: “I inform thee that I intend to eat thee. May thou always help me to ascend, so that I may always be able to reach the tops of mountains, and may I never be clumsy! I ask this from thee, Sunflower-Root. Thou art the greatest of all in mystery.” Omission of this prayer was said to “make the person partaking of the food lazy” (Teit 1900, 349; see also Peacock 1998). While cooking and digging balsamroots, women were to abstain from sexual intercourse. When going out to dig the roots, the women often painted their whole faces red or black or painted a large black or red spot on each cheek. When the roots were being pit-cooked, no men were allowed to come near the cooking pit. Sometimes the women cooking the roots spread out the small ends of four

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long, thin fir branches in different directions near the bottom of the oven where the roots were and then tied the thick ends together and raised them above the centre of the oven so that they protruded a little from the filled-in oven. When the cooking was finished, these branches were pulled out; according to their colour, the women could determine whether the roots had been successfully cooked. If the fir boughs were black or dark-coloured, the roots would be well cooked, but if the boughs were spotted or light-coloured, the cooking would not be successful. It was sometimes said, when sunflower roots had been cooked successfully, that Coyote had caused success by urinating on them (Steedman 1930; Teit 1900). There were various other rules or taboos against certain behaviours related to pit-cooking, seaweed harvesting, and berry picking. For example, young Nlaka’pamux people, as a rule, did not eat berries until more than half of the crop was ripe (Teit 1900, 349; see also Steedman 1930, 509). Good Luck Plants

Many plants were also regarded – by virtue of their spiritual powers – as having highly positive qualities and powers to assist people. For example, some were used as special charms to ensure long life, obtain friendship, or bring high status, love, wealth, or success in hunting, gambling, and other endeavours. Brightly coloured flowers such as red columbine, tiger lily, and calypso orchid were widely valued as charms, as were scented plants like wild ginger and white bog orchid, which is said to release special vapours in wet montane meadows (Hunn, Turner, and French 1998; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990; see also table 13-1). Even bracken fern, identified above for the taboos and potential harm related to its use, brought good fortune in at least one instance. There is a Nuxalk narrative about a woman who dug up a particularly large bracken fern rhizome, which, when it was in her basket, transformed into a writhing snake. This turned out to be the “Mother” of the Bracken Fern, and it gave her extraordinary powers (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 92). Other plants and parts of plants served as guardian spirits for young people at puberty and for others who undertook spirit quests, although animals were more usually identified as guardian spirits. Young women in particular, especially at puberty, often sought the spiritual help and guidance of particular plants. “Sharp Plants”

One class of plants that has been attributed particularly potent powers for protection and assistance are those with spines, thorns, or sharp parts. Of these, devil’s-club (figure 13-6) was, and still is, probably the best known and most widely used plant for spiritual protection, for luck in gambling, fishing, and so forth, and for its overarching health-giving properties (see chapter 7). Devil’s-club was a well-known persona in the narratives of Ts’msyen and other

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13-6 | Devils’-club (Oplopanax horridus), highly respected and widely used in healing and for spiritual protection.

northern coast peoples. In “The Origin of the Wolf House of Hawaao,”14 Devil’sclub appears as a beautiful young woman to a young man named Gwaxskkik, who had lost all of his possessions in gambling. After he had purified himself through fasting and bathing and eating devil’s-club stalks for many years, the young woman appeared. He took her for his wife, and she showed him how to use devil’s-club to make gambling sticks and rubbed her hands over his eyes, enabling him to become a great gambler. Eventually, he gambled with the man who had vanquished him before, and he regained all of his property.15 The Haida name for devil’s-club is evidently derived from the name for gambling sticks or vice versa.16 Sometimes, for luck and to obtain supernatural powers, Haida shamans ate devil’s-club inner bark together with the bitter-tasting leaves of another plant, single delight (Swanton 1905, 1908). Bathing in a solution of devil’s-club is said to make one strong, and those wishing to succeed in contests of strength or hunting might cleanse themselves by bathing, fasting, and eating devil’s-club roots or inner bark (Cove and MacDonald 1987; Johnson 1997; Turner 2004a). Many precise rituals were developed for the proper use of devil’s-club, both in general training and especially for

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hunters. In fact, in Ts’msyen and other traditions, it is Devil’s-club as a supernatural being who instructs humans about how to make snares and traps, as well as how to purify themselves before hunting using devil’s-club (Cove and MacDonald 1987, 80). Even today, people of the central and northern coast use devil’s-club to wash their hunting and fishing gear, as well as for ritual bathing and for a range of different medicinal purposes (see chapter 7). Although it may not be mentioned explicitly, it seems that the thorny nature of devil’s-club is one of the features – along with its potent scent and medicinal qualities – that makes it so desirable as a spiritual protector. Devil’s-club charcoal, for example, is used to make face paint, worn by dancers and others at winter dance ceremonials and said to protect one from any bad influences or evil thoughts directed toward them by anyone present. Ditidaht elder John Thomas explained that a person wearing devil’s-club face paint is so powerful that one cannot look them in the eyes (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Many people still place devil’s-club stalks in the corners of rooms of their house, over the doorway, or under their mattress to protect the household from any kind of negative influence. Powerful animals such as bears are commonly associated with devil’s-club and other spiny plants. For example, the black bear is said to use devil’s-club as bedding for protection in the night (Boas 1898, 111).17 Swamp gooseberry (Ribes lacustre), another very prickly shrub, is attributed protective powers similar to those of devil’s-club. Its prickly stems can be used in the same way – placed over a doorway or under a person’s pillow to give protection against evil thoughts or “witchcraft” being directed toward members of a household. As noted earlier, smoke from burning swamp gooseberry branches is said to deter and protect one against snakes. One Nuxalk man who was infested with snakes was fumigated with smoke of burning devil’s-club and gooseberry together and was cleansed of this affliction (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 75). Other prickly species that are used variously for their spiritual protective qualities, whether in winter dances or in times of illness or death, include thistles (Cirsium spp.) (Straits Salish), trailing blackberry (Straits Salish, Hul’qumi’num), black hawthorn (Hul’qumi’num), wild rose (Rosa spp.) (Straits Salish, Interior Plateau), Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium) (Okanagan), Sitka spruce (Central Coast Salish, Ditidaht, Kwakwaka’wakw, and others), and Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) (Interior Plateau and others) (see table 13-1). Scented Plants and Other Protective Species

Another class of plants that have particularly strong spiritual properties, and that were therefore widely used for protection and for bringing luck and good fortune, are the scented, or aromatic, plants. These include a number of coniferous trees, like western redcedar, subalpine fir, and Douglas-fir, as well as junipers (Juniperus spp.), all of which are also recognized for their aromatic qualities. In all, thirty-five or more different species have been identified as being used

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in some way in ceremonial protection or for bringing success or good luck in hunting or other pursuits (see table 13-1). Tree fungi – especially artist’s fungus (Ganoderma applanatum) and pine conk (Fomitopsis pinicola) – were, and are, known along the coast as powerful spiritual entities. They are called “echo-maker” in some languages because of their reflective powers.18 Not only could they reflect sound, such as echoing someone yelling, but they were also said to reflect any evil thoughts that were directed toward someone back to the originator. People who had tree fungus as their spirit protector could thus use it to maintain their personal safely (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). The spiritual and protective qualities of tree fungi may be why the Tlingit used them to carve grave effigies (Blanchette et al. 1992). Smoke from burning tobacco and some other plants, especially aromatic ones, is also considered sacred because it has the capacity to mediate between the earth and the spirit world (Dr Ron Ignace, pers. comm., 2008). For example, the smoke from burning the seeds of q’əxmín (“wild celery,” Lomatium nudicaule) was said to be the food of the Salmon people and was therefore burned ceremonially when the Salmon were first escorted to the Saanich homelands, as described in the “Origin of Salmon” narrative in chapter 12 (Jenness n.d.; Turner and Hebda 2012). For some coastal and interior Salishan peoples, the downy seed fluff of cattails is also considered sacred and was used in burials (Ostapkowicz et al. 2002). It may be that, like smoke and eagle down, cattail down is considered to be a linking agent between the earth and the spirit world. Ceremonial Recognition of Plants For traditionally trained Indigenous people, there is no real separation of the secular and the spiritual. Plants, animals, people, natural objects, and supernatural entities are not distinct but are all linked to each other and to their surroundings through cultural traditions and interactive, reciprocal relationships (E.R. Atleo 2004, 2011). Every secular pursuit, whether it is hunting, making a basket, or picking berries, has a spiritual side to it. Any given activity thus involves not only practical preparation – assembling hunting gear, harvesting and processing basket materials, preparing berry baskets, and making berry-drying racks – but also spiritual preparation, such as training, ritual purification, sweat bathing, or cleansing. Any harvesting of a plant or animal also requires proper and respectful behaviour. For example, women should not eat berries while they are picking, as was revealed in the Nuxalk story “The Woman Who Befriended a Wolf ” (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 691; see also chapter 12). Klallam children were taught, “When you’re picking blackberries, don’t eat the berries or you’ll turn into a bear” (L.C. Thompson and Thompson [1975–80]). Sometimes, too, relationships between people and the other entities of their environment must be mediated through ritual or ceremonial means to restore

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and maintain the balance and harmony of people’s lives (E.R. Atleo 2004). There were many different ritual practices and ceremonies that related to peoples’ relationships with plants. Some – such as formally or informally addressing a plant from which medicine was sought or from which bark, wood, or some other material was to be harvested – have already been mentioned (see Boas 1930). These small-scale and private rites, recognizing the spirit of the plant and the Creator, still take place on an ongoing basis. The ceremonial complex that came to be called the “potlatch” is one widely known traditional cultural institution in northwestern North America that reflects the general recognition of the sacredness of environmental entities and their ties to human health and well-being.19 The term is derived from the Nuu-chah-nulth verb pachitłe (“to give”) (Turner and Atleo 1998). The potlatch not only embraces social, economic, and political aspects of people’s lives but also reflects the kincentric worldview and other spiritual aspects of life. From an economic perspective, the potlatch and associated feasts incorporate investment systems, as well as helping to redistribute food resources and other wealth. They function to promote the well-being of the community without doing damage to the environment, without violating the principles of balanced stewardship over the land, and in such a way as to render respect and honour to chiefs, nobility, people, plants, animals, spirit powers, and through all of these, the Creator (E.R. Atleo 2011). Ancient stories, teachings, laws, songs, dances, names, and lineages are emphasized during the potlatch to validate sovereignty over territories, as well as highlighting leaders’ and communities’ accountability to lands, habitats, and other species. Potlatches have been occasions for the joyful sharing of resources and the renewing of friendships and goodwill, all in the attitude of respect and honour. Also reflected in the potlatch is the institution called hahuułi in Nuuchah-nulth, with comparable terms in other languages, pertaining to hereditary leaders’ rights and stewardship over their territories and resources, as well as the responsibilities they incur for the environment, for the resources, and for the people of their communities to sustain all of them wisely and fairly (E.R. Atleo 2011). Ownership and proprietorship of lands and resources often have a strong spiritual basis (Turner, Smith, and Jones 2005). In his address to the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 1987, for example, Gitxsan hereditary chief Delgamuuxw began by outlining the ayaawx (ancient oral histories): “For us, the ownership of territory is a marriage of the Chief and the land. Each Chief has an ancestor who encountered and acknowledged the life of the land. From such encounters come power. The land, the plants, the animals and the people all have spirit – they all must be shown respect. That is the basis of our law” (Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw 1989, 7). Although each group has its own particular approaches and traditions, the process of acknowledging and thanking the Creator and the plants and animals

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that provide for people is very widespread. Linda Smith (2008b, 89) explains, from a Tsilhqot’in perspective, There is no Tsìnlhqút’ín [Tsilhqot’in] term for “sacred” or “spiritual” likely because everything is considered to be sacred. The natural environment stimulates an energy of gratitude, and for people who have lived for centuries in one area, nature provides close connections to one’s ancestors. Stones, creatures, and vegetation are sacred, and water from the river and mountains are ancient ancestors. The yearly journey of salmon, our relationship with everything, and all our activities on the land are spiritual. Tsìnlhqút’ín life is full of rituals and ceremonies. A hunter begins the day with a purification ceremony, and makes a request for a successful hunt, and calls upon the ancestors. A successful hunt ends with a thanksgiving ceremony where food is shared with the ancestors. Ceremonial recognition can be as straightforward as simple words of thanks. Mary Thomas’s (pers. comm., 2001) mother, Christine Allen, whenever she was given wild strawberries or other kinds of berries, never neglected to hold them up in her hands and say, “Kwukstsámxw, Kwukstámxw, Kwukstsámxw!” (Thank you, thank you, thank you!). She did this over her entire life, even when she was in her late nineties. Leaving a small gift of appreciation was likewise a very common practice. If people took hazelnuts, whitebark pine seeds, spring beauty corms, or mountain potatoes, or masru (“Indian potato,” Hedysarum alpinum) from the cache of a mouse, squirrel, or vole, they would also leave a gift, usually of grain or some other edible material, and most said that you should never “clean out” an animal cache but only partially empty it so as not to seriously deprive the animal of its food (see A. Jones 1983). In recent years, a small amount of tobacco from a cigarette is offered as a gift of respect to a birch tree for providing its bark or to a medicine plant for giving up its roots, leaves, or bark for medicine (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1995). People will also leave coins or other items of value in the hole where a medicine root is removed or at the base of a tree.20 Collecting and administering medicinal plants was, and is, widely considered a sacred act, and usually a very private one, with the ceremonial or ritual aspects shared only with close relatives or apprentices. Usually medicine harvesters went to a distant location, away from human habitats, to collect medicine, even if the same kind of plant was growing closer at hand. The harvesters would often go early in the morning, before having eaten, taking great care to cleanse themselves and remaining focused on their mission to gather medicine and on the patient who would use it. Not being “greedy” in harvesting medicine was also important. It is still a common practice, especially on the Northwest Coast, to harvest only four pieces

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of a medicine: four devil’s-club stalks, four strips of bark from four individual trees, four roots of medicinal plants, and so forth (Turner and Hebda 1990; Turner and Thompson 2006).21 When the medicine is prepared, again, special words of thanks are addressed to the spirit of the medicine itself, requesting its help to heal the patient. It is considered bad luck to waste medicine; all of what is prepared should be used, even if it is over a period of days (see chapter 7). Knowledge of specific medicinal preparations, even involving very widely used plants, may be restricted to a single community, or even to a single family. Many people recall their elders or relatives being very careful not to reveal the ingredients of a recipe, although they were always willing to provide it for anyone who needed it. It is often said that the medicine will lose its power if too many people know about it. Since around the 1960s, however, many plant specialists, like Ida Jones (cited in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983) and Annie York (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990), have been concerned that their traditional remedies will be lost and have asked to have the details of their preparation and use recorded. Others continue to practise and pass on these medicines in traditional ways (Sewid-Smith and Dick 1998; Turner 2004a; Turner and Hebda 1990; Turner and Thompson 2006). Always, those collecting and administering medicine stress the strongly spiritual nature of medicinal plants and how important it is to approach them with respect and to ask their permission before harvesting them (Boas 1930; Mary Thomas 2001). Those harvesting basket materials, berries, or roots undertake similar, usually private, rituals to recognize these resources. Ceremonies Involving Cedar

Western redcedar is a tree that has had particularly strong spiritual associations. For the Kwakwaka’wakw, before cutting cedar wood or gathering cedar bark, the traditional harvester would purify himself by washing and would say a “prayer” to the spirit of the tree. One such ritual was undertaken by a man when he wished to have the tree he was cutting down fall in the right direction. He would take four chips of wood, throw them behind the base of the tree, and then say to the tree, “O supernatural one! Now follow your supernatural power” (Boas 1930). Another example is the well-known Kwakwaka’wakw “words of praise,”22 spoken to a young cedar tree by a woman who wished to take some of its bark for a basket: Look at me, friend! I come to ask for your dress, for you have come to take pity on us; for there is nothing for which you can not be used, because it is your way that there is nothing for which we can not use you, for you are really willing to give us your dress. I come to beg you for this, long-life

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maker, for I am going to make a basket for lily roots out of you. I pray, friend, not to feel angry with me on account of what I am going to do to you; and I beg you, friend, to tell our friends about what I ask of you. Take care, friend! Keep sickness away from me, so that I may not be killed by sickness or in war, O friend! (Cited in Boas 1921, 619; see also Stewart 1984; and Turner 1998) Harvesters of cedar bark or of cedar-wood planks were similarly respectful in approaching the trees they wished to use (Turner 1998, 2004a). The sacred Cedar Bark ceremony, enacted during the Kwakwaka’wakw winter dances, was explained in Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith’s narrative about ts’eqamey (see chapter 12). At the time of the Great Flood, ts’eqamey was told by the Creator to hollow out and enter a giant cedar tree, where he and his family survived, and from which various Kwakwaka’wakw lineages descended (Sewid-Smith and Dick 1998). It was while he was inside the cedar tree that he was instructed about the Cedar Bark ceremony: While [ts’eqamey] was inside the cedar tree, he was told to weave the first cedar headdress, the first cedar neck ring, wrist rings, and ankle rings. And he was told to put the faces of men all around his cedar head ring and his cedar neck ring, and this was to signify two things, and that was that he was saved, from out of all his tribe, and also that from that day on, he was to honour and respect the cedar that saved his life, and that he was going to be the first one to, ever to perform what we now call the Cedar Bark ceremony. And he was told how it was going to be performed … And so, when he came out, this is what happened, that through him, the Cedar Bark ceremony spread among all the Kwakwaka’wakw people. (Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 1994) The Cedar Bark ceremony takes place at the beginning of the Kwakwaka’wakw winter dance season each year. A broad ring of specially harvested inner cedar bark, often dyed with red alder bark, is carried into the big house in a solemn procession, encircling a ritually trained woman of high standing who has entitlement to this role, who walks in with it. Everyone in the big house is expected to maintain complete and respectful silence as the cedar bark is taken four times around the fire. It is then ceremonially cut into narrow strips, which are distributed as headbands to each person attending, as a symbolic recognition of this sacred material and the tree from which it came. This cedar bark is so sacred that a mere touch of it has the power to “tame” and purify a hamatsa (“wild man”) who has been possessed by the man-eating spirit Baxwbaxwalanuksiwe (Cannibal Who Lives at the North End of the World). The Hamatsa dance, which can be performed only by initiates of the Hamatsa Society, is a re-enactment of

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a young man’s possession by this spirit, in which he is eventually humanized by being repeatedly approached and then touched with the sacred cedar bark.23 Cedar had many other ritual associations and applications (Boas 2002). It was often connected with salmon, and in fact several narratives describe how salmon were actually created from cedar bark (see chapter 12). In the First Salmon ceremony of the Kwakwaka’wakw and others, the first salmon to be caught was laid upon a piece of western redcedar bark during the welcoming ritual (Boas 1935). The Straits Salish laid their first salmon on cedar boughs, as well as sword fern fronds, which are also considered to be a sacred plant for the Saanich (Turner and Hebda 2012). Spiritual Aspects of Food Harvesting and Food Preparation

Food sharing and giving recognition to the plants and animals that provided food were generally practised within communities and extended families as a matter of course.24 For some peoples, sharing food and paying tribute to the spirits of the different food species was formalized in annual ceremonies known collectively as the First Foods ceremonies. Most commonly and widely practised was the First Salmon ceremony, mentioned previously in connection with cedar and sword fern, which was held at the time of the first sockeye or spring salmon runs (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994; de Laguna 1972, 105; Maud 1978c). However, there were – and are – also a number of ceremonies that recognize key plant foods. Most Interior Plateau peoples celebrated First Fruits and First Roots ceremonies, along with their First Salmon and First Game ceremonies, to acknowledge and thank the spirits of important fruits like saskatoon berry and black huckleberry and of important roots like bitterroot, spring beauty, biscuitroot (Lomatium spp.), and camas at the beginning of their harvest season (see table 13-1).25 Roy Carlson (1976, 27) suggests that the First Salmon ceremony is “a widespread and very old practice related to first fruit ceremonies all over the world.” If he is right, it is likely that the First Fruits and First Roots ceremonies are also very old and reflect attributions of spirits to plants and animals that extend far back into the depths of time. Alan Marshall (1977, 138) notes that the Nez Perce held a First Fruits ceremony, qéʔuyit, for “canyon serviceberries” (a variety of saskatoon berry), which was presided over by a respected old man, who gave thanks for life and food, and in which four highly respected elder ladies directed young women in food gathering, preparation, and serving. Young men supplied the deer and other animal foods for the feast. Marshall (ibid.) describes the social importance for the Nez Perce of these gatherings to celebrate special foods and other resources, noting that they tended to mark the change-over from the resource-poor early spring period to the time of year when there was a profusion of resources. These favoured foods were gathered and enjoyed in plenty, before the work of gathering

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and storing large quantities of food for winter began. The First Fruits ceremony for the Nez Perce also marked a change in area of resource utilization from lowlands and canyons to upland areas (ibid.). A Nlaka’pamux First Foods ceremony was described by ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout: As far as I could learn, the hunting, fishing and berry grounds of the Thompson were common property. But no one under penalty of a severe punishment could take a fish, pick a berry, or dig a root until after the Feasts of First Fruits had been held … Messengers are then sent to the neighbouring villages, calling a meeting of the people on a certain day, at which all must attend at the appointed place. When the day has arrived … the head chief, attended by the other lesser ones and the elders, opens the ceremony at daybreak by a long prayer. (In Maud 1978a, 46) Hill-Tout also described a rather unusual First Shoots ceremony as observed by the Chehalis (Chilliwack), a Stó:lō group of the Fraser Valley (Harrison River) region: Another of these ceremonies [aside from the First (sockeye) Salmon ceremony] was kept in connection with the satske [stheʔthqəy], or young succulent suckers of the … [thimbleberry]26 which the Indians of this region eat in large quantities, both cooked and raw. When cooked, I am told they eat like asparagus. The time for gathering these was left to the judgment and determination of the chief. When ready to gather, he would direct his wife or daughter to pick a bunch and bring them to him; and then, the people all being assembled, a ceremony similar to that connected with the salmon ceremony would take place. After the ceremony anyone might pick as much as he liked. A similar ceremony took place later in the summer, when the berries of this plant were ripe. (In Maud 1978c, 116) Charles Hill-Tout obviously thought carefully about the meaning of the ceremonies he observed, recognizing the importance of the spiritual aspects of the food species, as well as tying the ceremonies to the origin stories for these foods: Concerning the meaning and object of these ceremonies I have been led to the opinion by my studies of the Salish and other tribes that they were always propitiatory in intent. They were intended to placate the spirits of the fish, or the plant, or the fruit, as the case may be, in order that a plentiful supply of the same might be vouchsafed to them … if these ceremonies were not properly and reverently carried out there was danger of giving offense to the spirits of the objects and being deprived of them. The

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myths which speak of the first coming of the salmon … make this quite clear. In the compact made by Qäls [Xéls, the Creator] on behalf of the Indians and the salmon chief, the Indians are pledged to treat the salmon according to the instructions of this chief … For it must be remembered that, in the mind of the [Indigenous person], the salmon, or the deer, or the berry, or the root, was not merely a fish or an animal or a fruit, in our sense of these things, but something more. (In Maud 1978c, 116, emphasis added) The Yakima people, who were said to use eighteen different kinds of berries, of which huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum, V. deliciosum) were the most important, celebrated a Yakima girl’s first basket of berries, along with a counterpart ceremony for a boy’s first salmon or deer (Curtis 1911, cited in Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 69). The Secwepemc and others also celebrated the first fruits with a special dance, in which women carrying baskets and branches of saskatoon berry imitated the gathering of berries. The Dakelh (Carrier) and Tsilhqot’in also held a Saskatoon Berry dance, as well as a Salmon dance (Solomon 2006, 20; Teit 1909, 578). In 1847 artist Paul Kane described a special dance performed by the Songhees Coast Salish of Victoria that included ceremonial recognition of camas gathering, an activity he portrayed in one of his paintings, “The Canoes Returning from Gathering Camas to the Esquimalt”: “These Indians have a great dance, which is called ‘The Medicine Mask Dance’; this is performed both before and after any important action of the tribe, such as fishing, gathering camas, or going on a war party, either for the purpose of gaining the goodwill of the Great Spirit in their undertaking, or else in honour of him for the success which has attended them” (cited in Harper 1971, 101–2). On the central and northern coast, harvesting and food use were also ritually enacted, and the availability of particular foods was recognized and celebrated in feasts.27 The Hanaksiala of the Kitlope Valley celebrated the New Year (h’isdlàm hs h’snx) around the end of March when the northern riceroot flowered. They performed a ceremonial Flower dance in which “costumes were covered with flowers of the Nootka rose, salmonberry [figure 13-7], blueberries, riceroot, and any other plants that were blooming then” (Compton 1993b, 197). This time of year was known as qw’àxilaqus (“growing month”) and zàxwilaqus (“oulachen month”) and was associated both with the Flower dance and with the time of the oulachen harvest (Lantz and Turner 2003). As well as the First Foods ceremonies, there were various rituals and observances that related specifically to food harvesting and preparation. For example, it was customary for Nuu-chah-nulth root diggers to paint their faces with specific designs before harvesting particular kinds of roots, such as springbank clover, Pacific silverweed, and camas bulbs, as well as before whaling, seal hunting, and medicinal plant gathering, as a part of their spiritual and physical

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13-7 | Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) flower, one of the blossoms featured in the Hanaksiala Flower dance (Compton 1993b).

preparation, called oosumich (E.R. Atleo 2004, 2011; Pukonen 2008; D. Thomas 2000). Without this careful preparation, a woman might encounter only small and poor-tasting roots. Even everyday experiences with food often took on ceremonial aspects. Chief Earl Maquinna George (2003) recalled from his childhood at Ahousaht how, when a couple of women went out to harvest thimbleberry shoots, as they approached the village, they called out, and all of the women in the village would come down and join in a “feast” of these fresh springtime foods.28 The same type of spontaneous feast occurred for the Kwakwaka’wakw when people brought a canoe-load of fresh eelgrass back to a camp or village (Clan Chief Adam Dick and Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 2009). Soapberries were also celebrated with feasts and special songs that recognized this valued and important food.

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Some of the ceremonies surrounding food harvesting and use go back to ancient times, with underlying narratives, as noted by Charles Hill-Tout (see Maud 1978c), describing how the foods were first provided or given as gifts. For example, a Sinixt (Lakes Okanagan) story describes how the Mountain Goat brothers first gave the Eagles a gift of black huckleberries, which have been a treasured food ever since (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980, 103). Rituals for food harvesting and use also sometimes represented engrained systems of resource management (see chapter 11).29 For example, some First Fruits ceremonies, such as the First Huckleberry ceremony of the Klamath, included tossing berries to the ground as a ceremonial way of “giving back” to Mother Earth, which probably helped to perpetuate the berry populations (Douglas Deur, pers. comm., 2008). Not only foods but also important material plants were celebrated and recognized ceremonially. For example, John Ross (2011, 248) describes a special ceremony preceding the actual cutting and gathering of cattail and tule by Spokan women: “This ritual was led by an elderly woman who was recognized as being the most knowledgeable of such harvesting, and, prior to cutting and gathering, she would give an oration of gratitude for the resources as well as recognize the presence of all the women in attendance … votive offerings were once given for each person’s harvest, but prayers varied with each individual.” Ross also notes that while gathering tules the women often sang songs, directed by this recognized elderly woman, who also instructed young girls and helped them with their first harvesting efforts. These songs were about the enjoyment the cattail and tule mats would bring to others. The older women who helped to direct the ceremonies and songs were recognized later with gifts of finished mats (ibid.). Protocols and Ceremonies for Ritual Protection

A number of rituals relate to protection of individuals against illness, death, and other negative influences, using in particular the groups of spiritually powerful plants mentioned previously: the “sharp plants” and the strongly aromatic plants. For example, Central Coast Salish and Wakashan peoples have commonly used Sitka spruce branches to protect against illness. Following a death, the Klallam ritually “beat” the bed and walls and the arms of surviving relatives with sqolp (spruce branches) to drive away any residual illness (Laurence C. Thompson, pers. comm., 1975). In the Interior Plateau, Okanagan “Indian doctors” used branches of wild rose and tall Oregon-grape during funerals to “sweep out” the grave before the coffin was lowered in and to prevent others from being drawn into the underworld with the one being buried (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980, 131, 87). The Okanagan have also used these plants and stinging nettle to combat witchcraft (ibid., 142). Juniper boughs were, and still are, widely used for protection, both by the Coast Salish (using the maritime species, Juniperus maritima) and in the Interior

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Plateau (using Rocky Mountain juniper, J. scopulorum). Farther south, the Sahaptin, Great Basin, Southwestern, and Californian peoples used western juniper (J. occidentalis) and other species in similar ways. In Alaska and elsewhere, common juniper (J. communis) was used: “Some people toast the leaves on the back of the stove in a room where there is a sick person so the rest of the family won’t get sick” (A. Jones 1983, 110). Solutions of juniper were used to wash the clothing, bedding, walls, floors, and possessions of a recently deceased person in order to protect bereaved friends and relatives from their spirit. People placed juniper boughs in the fire or on a hot stove as a household fumigant for the same purpose, and juniper solution was poured across doorways and pathways to the house and outbuildings, and along window openings, to prevent the spirit of the deceased from re-entering the house (Hunn, Turner, and French 1998; Tur­ ner and Bell 1971; Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Mountain valerian is another strongly scented plant used ceremonially. For example, a Nlaka’pamux hunter might prepare a decoction from the whole plant of mountain valerian to wash his gun and other hunting equipment. He would also drink the solution as a tea and wash his skin with it, often accompanying bathing or sweat bathing. Through this practice, the hunters believed that the deer would become “tame” and easier to approach (Steedman 1930). Another example of the ceremonial importance of aromatic plants was the widespread use of Douglas-fir boughs in puberty rites, hunting rituals, and other ceremonies (Teit 1900, 1906a, 1909; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 109–10). Smudging and Decontamination

Smudging, mentioned above in connection with devil’s-club and juniper, is evidently a practice of some antiquity both on the coast and in the interior. Although it may be better known in association with the plains and eastern First Nations’ pipe ceremonies, and their burning of sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata) braids and sage (Artemisia tridentata, A. ludoviciana) bundles, northwestern North American peoples also ceremonially burned different plant materials and used them as an incense for spiritual protection. The Selish (Flathead), Ktunaxa, Sahaptin, and some other Interior Plateau peoples sometimes used sweetgrass, and even the Nuxalk on the Pacific Coast used sweetgrass (H. hirta) ceremonially, going back at least to the 1800s, if not earlier (Dave Moody, pers. comm., 1972; Sam Moody, pers. comm., 2005). Kwakwaka’wakw hunters routinely smudged any new implements with the smoke of burning spruce boughs to cleanse them (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2009). The seeds of “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule) are mentioned in a Klahoose narrative as being burned as a disinfectant (Boas 2002, 223) and are still well known for this use among the Central Coast Salish.30 False hellebore

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root was, and still is, used to smudge and fumigate a house in order to ward off suspected evil influences, as well as for ceremonial cleansing of implements such as fishing gear. This root was also used as a “charm” – a piece of root kept in a small pouch hung around the neck or placed in the gear box of sea hunters and fishers – to protect a child or a hunter from illness, accident, or any kind of negativity (see Turner and Bell 1973). As well as being used in smoking rituals, tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) smoke – and smoke from burning other powerful and fragrant plants like yarrow – was, and is, used for ritual smudging and protection against illness, for purification, and for bringing good luck and fortune. Smudges of yarrow, sagebrush (Artemisia spp.), and other plants are also used for repelling mosquitoes and other biting insects (see chapters 6 and 7). Canby’s lovage root was smoked ceremonially, at least by the Secwepemc and Spokan (Aimee August, pers. comm., 1992; Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 1998; J.A. Ross 2011; Turner 2009), and the toasted leaves of kinnikinnick were widely smoked, both recreationally and ceremonially (although apparently people on the Northwest Coast did not start smoking them until after Europeans arrived; see chapter 4). Sumac (Rhus glabra) leaves were smoked with kinnikinnick and native tobacco in some Secwepemc ceremonies (Lilly Harry, pers. comm., 1990). Within the historic period, commercial tobacco gradually supplanted the ceremonial role of native tobacco and kinnikinnick (Hunn, Turner, and French 1998). Ritual Scrubbing, Sweat Bathing, and Cleansing

Use of tree boughs and other plant materials to scrub the skin during ritual bathing was very common. For example, western hemlock is called “scrubber plant” in the Nlaka’pamux language (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990) since its boughs were commonly used for this purpose. Young men at puberty generally went through a period of “training” that involved seclusion, fasting, and bathing. Sometimes the scrubbers they used were graduated, ranging from very soft willow roots for young boys, for example, to western hemlock or Douglas-fir boughs and finally to western redcedar or yew boughs, which are very tough and could be used only on skin that was well conditioned (Boas 2002, 239; Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Hunters and fishers also bathed and scrubbed themselves with these and other plant materials for strength and purification and to bring them success in their endeavours. Use of plants and fungi in their supernatural or spiritual roles is generally considered very private knowledge and is not widely shared. In fact, as with some medicinal remedies, many people believe that if others know about such protective rituals, they will lose their effectiveness. Each individual and each family has had its own particular practices involving plants and other charms that they might use for gaining luck and protection, and these go together with

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their own rituals, songs, and ways of invoking spiritual protection. This privacy itself is very widespread and represents a general consensus across many different languages and cultures. Many plants (some of which could be considered toxic if taken in excess) were drunk in the form of infusions or decoctions for their emetic and/or laxative qualities (see chapter 7) to purify and cleanse the body internally. This was often undertaken in conjunction with spiritual training and external cleansing through bathing and scrubbing. Those seeking special protection or strong powers for hunting, fishing, plant gathering, or healing would often undertake such treatment. For example, an infusion of tobacco was drunk as an emetic after the death of a close relative (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990, 230). These rituals involving bathing, internal cleansing, or smudging and washing implements with aromatic plants or their solutions to bring luck and protection may well be related at some level to the capacity for masking the human scent on hunting and fishing gear or on the skin of hunters and fishers handling the gear. In this case, the role of aromatic plants in increasing the success of hunting and fishing would be profound in terms of survival. The spiritual protection provided by aromatic plants such as juniper and wild rose was – and is – no less important for peoples’ well-being and overall health than other, more physical protection. Ritual and ceremonial practices often embrace ancient knowledge metaphorically and in ways that are deeply meaningful within a culture, leading to overall respect and conservation of critically important species and habitats (Turner and Berkes 2006). Guardian Spirit Power

The concept of individuals seeking a special guardian spirit to assist them in all of their endeavours is part of an overall belief system, especially expressed in Salishan cultures but also recognized more widely in various practices. In these traditions, the guardian spirit is said to be responsible for all of one’s achievements and successes in extraordinary ventures or in everyday subsistence activities, whether gambling, hunting, root digging, or basketry. Any individual – especially young men and women at puberty but also anyone else who aspires to excellence in a particular feat or vocation, such as being a powerful shaman, a successful hunter, or a skilled basket weaver, root digger, or berry picker, as well as anyone who simply aspires to gain luck and good fortune – can undergo purification and associated training and seclusion. This generally involves ritual bathing, scrubbing with tree boughs or other plants, fasting, prayer, rigorous exercise, and sometimes consuming medicines such as devil’s-club bark or other plants. If all goes well, individuals will have a vision of their guardian spirit, which they will hold and carry with them, usually for their entire lives (H. Robinson and Wickwire 1994; J.A. Ross 2011).

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Charles Hill-Tout (in Maud 1978c, 49) described how a Halkomelem shaman would seek his sulia (“guardian spirit powers”) through training: “To acquire these [shaman’s] powers, he usually underwent a long and secluded training in some lonely spot in the forest or on the margin of some lake. This training consisted in prolonged fasts, trances, body washings and exercises, accompanied by invocations of the mysteries. This medicine, or power, it is believed, was bestowed upon him by his guiding spirit, or spirits.” The guardian spirit may have been a particular plant or botanical object, such as a type of flower or root, an animal, or some other feature, and could be represented with a spirit drawing, with a special symbol or design on the face, on one’s digging stick or drinking tube, or on wood or rock, or with a song, a dance, a crest, or a totem pole figure. Hill-Tout (ibid.) emphasized that any animal or object could become one’s guardian spirit, noting: “This is a fact of special significance, clearly showing that every object in Nature, animate or inanimate, possessed for them active and sentient powers and qualities.” For the Haida, a similar situation was noted by Swanton (1905, 29): “Besides bird and beast powers the existence of supernatural beings in the trees … was recognized … It would appear that not only animals and trees, but bushes, sticks and stones, were alive with spirits; for when one of the great heroes is about to break a taboo or commit some similar error ‘everything in the forest cries out to stop him.’” As explained by Vickers (2008, 67) for the Nisga’a and other Northwest Coast peoples, All – humans, plants, the land, supernatural beings, are alive and intimately related to each other – impacting each other. The continued use of carved and painted crest designs in Northwest coast art in the form of totem poles, chief screens, ceremonial pieces such as masks and button robes that give account of supernatural encounters or an individual’s origins, practical implements such as soapberry spoons, ladles, feast bowls, vests, capes, jackets and shawls remind us of the continued connection between humans, the land and the supernatural world. Some keep the identity of their guardian spirit secret, whereas others might reveal it publicly on a ceremonial occasion. In any case, guardian spirit power becomes part of one’s social standing and status and is often linked to special skills and success in particular tasks. Puberty and Other Ritual States and Plant Use

At certain times of one’s life, or in certain conditions, a person may be ritually more powerful or more vulnerable, and at these times, special precautions must be taken. Puberty, especially for girls, is one of these times. A young woman

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at puberty or during her menstrual period was considered highly potent and capable of damaging hunting, fishing, or harvesting gear or causing misfortune for others. Therefore, she was usually kept in seclusion and observed a range of taboos and protocols, avoiding particular foods (Laforet, Turner, and York 1993; L.R. Smith 2008b; Teit 1909; Mary Thomas 2001) and practising skills she might use in her adult life. Interior Plateau women were usually housed in lodges of Douglas-fir boughs, constructed at some distance from other habitations, for a major period of time during their puberty, as well as for a few days each month during menstruation. The only people they encountered during this time were older women relatives, who would visit and instruct them on what they needed to know in order to participate fully in the community as food harvesters and processors, as weavers of mats and baskets, and eventually as mothers. Teit (1909, 587) described the puberty rituals for a young Secwepemc woman: When a girl had her first menses, she was considered a “mystery,” and had to live in a small lodge apart from the people. The lodge was conical in shape, and made of fir-branches placed very thickly together, or of mats … She wandered abroad at dusk, and spent every night in the mountains roaming about exercising herself and praying. About daybreak she bathed in running water, washing herself with fir-branches, and praying to the Day Dawn. She had to be back in her lodge before it was properly daylight. If she had wandered far and daylight overtook her, so that she might possibly meet people on her way home, she made a veil of fir-branches to hide herself; for no one, excepting her instructor or nearest relatives, was supposed to see her face during her training … While out at night, girls practised running, climbing, carrying burdens, digging trenches, the last so that in after years they might be expert at root-digging. Each morning they brought home a small load of fresh fir-brush or fire-wood to their lodge. The girl also carried a small birch-bark basket, decorated with dentalium shells. “Inside her lodge she suspended grass, bark, rushes, and other materials that she had gathered for the making of miniatures; strings for threading seeds on, that she might become an adept at stringing roots; fir-branches, from which she plucked the needles in her spare time, that she might learn to move her fingers nimbly; and pieces of skin, on which she practised tanning and dressing” (ibid., 588). In general, girls of the Interior Plateau during their puberty seclusion kept themselves busy weaving baskets or digging trenches as preparation for serious root digging, and the parallel lines found on many digging stick handles may signify these trenches (M.B. Ignace, Ignace, and Nord 2009). Connected to a girl’s puberty rituals were associated rites of passage such as weaving her first basket or completing her first harvest of roots. Strong (1959,

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180) reports that “a digging stick handle was made for a young girl [of the Columbia Plateau] when she was first able to help with the food gathering.” John Ross (2011, 333) reports for the Spokan, “a rite of passage was always recognized when an older girl received her first digging stick. After digging her first root, usually balsamroot, it was presented to an elderly person, who offered a prayer for her continued success.” For the Sahaptin, Hunn, Selam, and family (1990, 209; see also D.E. Walker 1998, 273) noted that a young woman presented with a digging stick and with bags and baskets when she started harvesting was expected to give these objects away to the elder who helped her during her puberty rites but that they would soon be replaced by return gifts from the elder. Nlaka’pamux elder Mabel Joe (pers. comm., 1985) remembered making her first basket as a girl and being told by her mother to fill it with black huckleberries when they went berry picking near Coldwater and then to give the berry-filled basket away as a gift to her uncle. She remembered feeling proud to present this gift and was well praised for her generosity. Root digging and berry picking also signified important rites of passage for Nez Perce girls, and a girl’s first basket of roots or fruit included a large tribal celebration and feast recognizing her transition into womanhood. Root harvester Gwendolyn Carter recalled that a girl gave her first-dug camas bulbs away to someone important in her life, such as a grandmother, aunt, or tribal elder (cited in Gilman and Ronda 2003; see also Driscoll 2003). On such an occasion, at the end of her puberty training, a young woman might have her face painted or have tattoos placed on her arms and wrists, signifying her new status as a harvester (Teit 1930, 404; see also Maud 1978c, 55). Pictograph images might be painted on boulders and cliffs to mark the occasion as well, some of which represented fir branches and related objects (Teit 1930, 404–5). Some of the images found on digging stick handles are the same as those found in rock paintings and in basketry, and it is said that young women were given their digging sticks after puberty (M.B. Ignace, Ignace, and Nord 2009; D.E. Walker 1998, 273).31 Boys at puberty – when their voices changed or “when they commenced to dream of women, arrows, and canoes” – also underwent training and instruction but as warriors, hunters, and runners (Teit 1909, 589). From two to three days to many weeks at a time, they moved away from the community to seek a guardian spirit or other supernatural power and trained for their chosen profession. These periods of training could occur over eight or ten years. They fasted and undertook a regime of purification and sweat bathing. They wore special clothing and spent long hours running, jumping, climbing up mountains, shooting arrows, and other physical training, along with ritual bathing, internal cleansing (using emetics and laxatives such as decoctions of soapberry or Oregon-grape twigs), cutting their bodies to help them withstand pain, and praying. They also undertook contests, like walking in shoes made of balsamroot leaves, to test their ability to tread softly and carefully. Or “They tied long

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fir-branches to their feet, or made rough snowshoes of fir-branches and ran in shallow water with them on, praying to the Day Dawn that in after years their limbs might be strong and tireless when they walked on snowshoes, and that their shoes might not sink deep into the snow” (ibid.). Both boys and girls of the Interior Plateau at puberty often wore bark headbands of willow (Salix exigua or other spp.), silverberry, or western redcedar. For Interior Plateau peoples, including Secwepemc and Tsilhqot’in, twins are ritually powerful, and both twins and the parents of twins, at least in the past, underwent a number of ceremonial observances, some related to plant use, to protect them and to protect others from their powers. Twins were not allowed to be around other people, except their parents, for a period of four years after their birth. The entire family lived in a conical lodge of Douglas-fir boughs, and their father or mother washed the babies daily with fir boughs (Teit 1909, 586–7). Twins also were said to have particular powers over the weather. For example, it was thought that if a twin bathed in a lake or stream, this would cause rain; thus twins were washed by dipping fir branches in a basketful of water and rubbing these on the skin or by using a dipper to pour water over themselves.32 For the Tsilhqot’in, it was believed that twins should never harvest anything in the normal course of events because they could ruin a harvesting site, like a good berry patch, due to their supernatural energy. However, because of their powers, twins could also lend themselves to certain ceremonies. Their hair could be used ritually to enhance the growth of berries and increase the harvest of an area. To increase the growth of spring beauty corms, or mountain potatoes, people would have twins plant one of the corms, or they would take the hair from a twin and tie it around the stem of the plant. The powers attributed to twins also extended to their parents and families; everyone had to be careful around twins (Mabel Solomon and Gilbert Solomon, pers. comm., 2003; L.R. Smith 2008b). For the Spokan and others, a “two-spirited” person (a male with female qualities) was also considered to have special powers and might become a shaman and perform important rituals around plant harvesting. For example, a twospirited shaman who held bear power would have special knowledge of locating and harvesting black huckleberries, and one with weasel power would be asked to help women to collect tules and cattail leaves. In the case of tule harvesting, a two-spirited person with water power might direct a ceremony following the tule harvest, in which unharvested tules were burned over to ensure an abundant supply the following season. He would first sing his power song, joined by all of the women attending, and then loudly recite a prayer of thanksgiving (J.A. Ross 2011, 249).33 Certain other circumstances, such as encounters with animals like bears or wolves, can make one more vulnerable or subject to harm. An example is

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from the Okanagan narrative “The Bear Woman” (Teit 1912, 90–1), in which a woman was kidnapped by a bear while she was out digging roots. Her husband came to rescue her from the cave where she was living with the bear. “Her face was painted and she carried her root digger.” Her husband killed the bear and restored her, but she would have died if he had not “rubbed her with firtops and veratrum [false hellebore, Veratrum viride].” Even after this treatment, she needed to be isolated from the other people of her community, and she instructed her husband to build “a lodge of fir brush for me some distance away from the people.” Resource use taboos, such as the avoidance of certain foods at certain times of the year or under certain conditions, occur widely across the cultures of northwestern North America but seldom pertain to the use of plant foods, except perhaps when fresh berries are avoided by girls at puberty in some circumstances (Laforet, Turner, and York 1993) or when certain foods are harvested by widows or others during a period of bereavement. Colding and Folke (2001, 584) note that informal institutions such as social taboos (e.g., food taboos pertaining to menstruation and puberty) are seen in many traditional societies throughout the world and frequently guide human conduct toward the natural environment. Other taboos, such as those noted previously surrounding the use of bracken fern or the avoidance of eating berries while picking, may be imposed because of seasonal inedibility or potential harm, in the case of bracken rhizomes, or for increased harvesting efficiency, in the case of berry picking. Still others – like never picking seaweed in the rain or when it is under the water at mid or high tide – may relate both to the taste of the seaweed and to concerns about the safety of the pickers (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2003). Bereavement

The loss of a child or spouse placed one in a ritually vulnerable state and generally required special purification rituals to be undertaken. Depending on the area, these might involve bathing and cleansing with aromatic plants such as juniper (Juniperus scopulorum), Douglas-fir boughs, or sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) or with prickly plants such as wild rose or spruce boughs, as described previously, to protect one from being haunted by the ghost of the departed one. A bereaved parent or spouse might also be banned from eating certain foods and might take only “medicine” made from herbs (Maud 1978c, 54). Linda Smith (2008b, 142) describes the Tsìnlhqút’ín (Tsilhqot’in) concept of nímính, which includes at least ten ritually powerful and vulnerable categories, including birth, puberty, motherhood, widowhood, and death. During any of the nímính states, one was considered “different” and might be set apart or emotionally, if not physically, isolated, as though having entered a different world.

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These states and the different routine they invoke also allow people to contemplate and renew and reorient themselves. “From this perspective,” Smith surmises, “abiding by these ancient laws is a privilege.” Individuals carrying the energy of nímính must take care of themselves, and protect others, in particular ways, such as respectful observances in relation to game animals and fish, including the gear used to obtain these resources. Animals and fish were always treated with particular respect, but handling fresh meat and fish was believed to be actually “dangerous” if done by one who was nímính (ibid., 70–1). The energy of nímính also affects wild plants, berries, and even garden vegetables, and any negative impacts must be ritually ameliorated. For example, nímính can cause saskatoon berry and soapberry bushes to wither and the berries to fall off of the bushes. Wild roots, corms, and garden vegetables do not grow well under the influence of nímính. During their menstruation, for example, some women will wear gloves when they pick berries so as not to harm those who will eat the berries. As a protective measure, they will also tie pinegrass around four branches of any berry bushes from which they are gathering, saying “become plentiful” to the bushes in the Tsilhqot’in language: “Lhàn tsínsh nághùndláx” (ibid., 133). A grieving widow (in the state of nímính) was instructed to go to Potato Mountain or other places, pull out the stems of spring beauty, or mountain potato, after they had finished flowering, and throw them around in places where they were not growing. This was said to keep these plants plentiful (Mabel Solomon and Gilbert Solomon, pers. comm., 2003). There have been occasions when women did not heed the taboos and failed to follow the required rituals, with resulting long-term damage to the berry bushes (L.R. Smith 2008b). Other plants, including common juniper and false hellebore, can also be used to ritually treat berry bushes, fishing gear, and people who have been negatively affected by the nímính energy (L.R. Smith 2008b, 135).34 Transformation: Plants as Gifts and Symbols of Spiritual Life The spiritual nature of plants – and their interconnectedness with humans and other animals, as well as with rocks, water, and objects that are, in a Western worldview, thought of as inanimate – meant that they could readily transform into other states and other dimensions. The Nuu-chah-nulth phrase hishukish tsawaak (“everything is one”) effectively encompasses the concept of the interrelatedness of all things (E.R. Atleo 2004, 2011; Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995). The profound implications of this concept are reflected in the notion of kincentricity and in the innumerable transformations and conversions that are recounted and reinacted in the narratives and ceremonies, as described in this chapter and in chapter 12. In fact, the

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entire concept of grass and flowers being the “earth’s blanket” is a transformative one. Not only are plants seen as related to humans, but – at least in the past – they could also undergo transformation from a plant state into a human state or from a human state into the physical form of a tree or other plant. The dramatic dance performances of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other Northwest Coast peoples, such as the Hamatsa dance and the Atlágimma (Spirits of the Forest) dance, with their masks, rattles, and spiritual regalia, represent and reinact transformations and interconnections between species and ecosystems through the medium of the sacred (Dubin 1999). Plants and animals can be either direct players in such transformations or intermediaries that assist in the processes. Narratives of Transformation

The stories and beliefs around the association between the song and actions of Swainson’s Thrush and the ripening of salmonberries and other berries, as described in chapter 12 (see Boas 2002, 117, 177), are one example of the transformational attributes of plants, animals, and people. The case of Swainson’s Thrush involved a temporal transformation as well, with Thrush being able to expedite the ripening of salmonberries and highbush cranberries, even in the middle of winter. Other examples from stories are the origin of salmon from cedar bark through the actions of individuals like Beaver and Woodpecker (e.g., Boas 2002, 129), trees turning themselves into humans, humans being transformed into trees, herring originating from yellow-cedar bark or redcedar boughs (Teit 1912, 223, 285; Boas 2002, 147, 310), Pitch impregnating women (Boas 2002, 227, 287), Raven transforming himself into a hemlock needle (Boas 2002; Turner 2004a), Raven converting the pod of giant vetch or beach pea into a canoe (Turner 2004a), and Coyote transforming the stalks of giant wildrye grass into dentalium for a necklace (Teit 1912, 307). There are instances, too, of important plants being spread or introduced by spiritual beings, such as in the Nuxalk story of soapberry whip, scattered by Raven, transforming into soapberry bushes (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 88) and the Ktunaxa story of Rocky Mountain juniper growing everywhere from pieces of “bow wood” being scattered around (Boas 1918, 109). The gift of her own blood, transformed into edible berries (bunchberry or blackberry), by the woman stranded up a western redcedar tree by her jealous husband in “The Revenge of the Brothers” narrative is another example, as is the transformation of an old woman into a wood fern (Dryopteris expansa) plant, to be used as food for people (Boas 2002). The gift of abundant root vegetables in Botanie Valley in Nlaka’pamux territory, as described in a narrative recorded by Teit (1930, 477), is another case in point: “Their abundance [edible roots] is accounted for by the

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Thompson River tribes as due to a powerful woman who lived at Lytton. She was taken away by a great chief, some say the sun. She wanted to leave provisions for her people so she dropped edible roots at Botanie [Valley] saying that, ‘roots will grow in abundance in this place and all my children shall repair here to dig them.’” The well-known and ancient theme of culture heroes throwing various objects behind them while fleeing from a monster, and these objects turning into barriers to thwart the pursuer, provides another example of transformations: a magic comb growing magically into a crabapple thicket and a small cedar stick transforming into a giant log (Boas 1921, 2002). Another theme involving transformation is in the Haida story where a single highbush cranberry expands by magic into an entire meal for a supernatural hero (Swanton 1905), and yet another, in a Nlaka’pamux tradition, is when black currants (Ribes hudsonianum) dropping into the water become trout (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Perhaps the ultimate in transformations is the desert parsley (Lomatium macrocarpum) root’s fathering of a boy, named qw’əqw’íle after his father, who eventually became one of the Transformers in Interior Salish traditions, travelling around the country with other supernatural beings and changing many different objects, plants, and animals into their present form (Teit 1912; see also chapter 12). The ability of plants to grow magically in other worlds – like the camas, spring beauty, western redcedar, and Indian-hemp in the sky country of the “Star Husband” tales and related themes and like various species in the underworld – is worthy of note. Plants were involved in transformations in these places as well. For example, in some traditions, as noted in chapter 12, waxberries are seen as the saskatoon berries of the spirit people in the land of the dead (Kennedy and Bouchard 2010), and in other narratives, the eyes of dead people are crabapples. Perhaps even more compelling, however, is the mediating role that many plants take in linking between worlds. Some of the heroes of ancient stories travelled to the undersea world by following the stalk of a two-headed bull kelp (Turner 2004a). Heroes like Mink travelled to the sky country by climbing up a chain of wooden arrows shot into the sky. Roots like camas bulbs, pulled up by those in the sky country, revealed the earth country below through the openings they left. And being lowered – with or without a basket – from the sky country back to the earth on a fibrous rope of cedar bark, nettle fibre, or Indian-hemp is a common means of re-entry (see chapter 12 for specific examples). In a Tlingit version of the story about the boy who ascended to the sky on a ladder of arrows, “The Boy Who Shot the Star,” the amazing transformational qualities of berry bushes are featured: [The boy who shot arrows and ascended to the sky] took various kinds of bushes and stuck them into the knot of hair he wore on his head. He

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climbed up his ladder all day and camped at nightfall upon it … When he awoke early on the second morning his head felt very heavy. Then he seized the salmon berry bush that was in his hair, pulled it out, and found it was loaded with berries. After he had eaten the berries off, he stuck the branch back into his hair very much strengthened. About noon of the same day he again felt very hungry, and again his head was heavy, so he pulled out a bush from the other side of his head and it was loaded with blue huckleberries [blueberries, Vaccinium alaskaense or V. ovalifolium]. It was already summer there in the sky. That was why he was getting berries. When he resumed his journey next morning his head did not feel heavy until noon. At that time he pulled out the bush at the back of his head and found it loaded with red huckleberries. (Swanton 1909, 210; see also Thornton 1999) In all of these instances, plants serve as mediators across spiritual barriers or boundaries. As noted previously, smoke from burning tobacco, “wild celery” seed, false hellebore, or other types of incense and cattail seed fluff can also assist in communications with the spirit world or sometimes help to ward away negative or evil spirits from a house or a vulnerable individual, which is why they are considered to be sacred. From Living Plant to Art for Living

One of the most compelling types of transformations, also involving careful training and assistance from the spiritual realm, is the conversion by skilled artisans of raw plant materials like cedar bark, spruce roots, and cedar wood into baskets, canoes, and other objects, at once beautiful and utilitarian. In a predominant worldview from the Northwest Coast and Interior Plateau, baskets, canoes, digging sticks, and hunting gear were regarded as having their own personalities, their own consciousness, their own spirits, and their own ability to bring “luck.” Like the plants from which they were derived, they were said to have powers and capabilities to influence human affairs. People could talk to them and ask for their help, as they would from a relative. Canoes, paddles, and baskets were often given names. They were seen to have a life of their own, and their first use was celebrated ceremonially. Saanich elder Dave Elliott (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994) described how a paddle was treated at the end of the harvesting season: “When November comes around, people would put away their paddles. They would ceremonially hold their paddle up in the air and speak to it: ‘We’ll travel again together.’” Having respect for and recognizing the agency of these items are part of the predominant worldview of relationships and interconnections. Similarly, as noted by John Ross (2011, 250, 333), “Even when working with

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other women, a [Spokan] woman might talk to the plant (ch’iʔtm’ilłt) as she made a tule or cattail mat,” and “years ago it was not unusual to see a solitary elderly woman quietly speaking to her digging stick as she worked.” The decorative motifs that adorn implements, boxes, baskets, houses, digging sticks, spindle whorls, rock paintings, and many other objects and settings also serve as symbolic representations of the dynamic nature of environments and the spiritual interchanges across species and planes of existence. The designs have definite symbolism, often linking the users of decorated objects with their intended endeavours – such as the previously noted parallel lines on some digging stick handles that evidently represented trenches a girl at puberty would dig during her training and presumably connected her spiritually with her task and her vocation (M.B. Ignace, Ignace, and Nord 2009; MacDonald 1976). Not only food but also the vessels that contain it have long been considered sacred. The Tlingit story of the origin of spruce-root baskets from a woman who was married to the Sun up in the sky country is a testimony to the spiritual nature of baskets for these people (Paul 1991). Baskets also have an important place in the First Fruits and First Roots ceremonies of the Interior Plateau peoples (Schlick 1994; Teit 1909).35 Conclusions The concepts of spirituality, kincentricity, and interconnectedness of all things must have ancient origins, extending back in some form to the “beginning of time” since they are firmly embedded in many origin stories of families and clans and in peoples’ ceremonies and other traditions. The manifestations of spiritual power, in the form of symbolic designs and representations of birds, animals, humans, or supernatural figures on tools and rock faces, extend back at least to the Mid Holocene. As noted in chapter 2, ornamental objects and designs proliferated on the Northwest Coast starting about 3,500 years ago and are especially evident in many sites from about 2,000 years ago to the present. Ritual power and strong connections with supernatural entities in the form of guardian spirits and totems were also linked – through artistic representations and good success in hunting, fishing, and other endeavours – with increasing social complexity, growth of wealth and status, and expansion of hereditary prerogatives, as well as with increasing occupational specialization and possibly an amplification in shamanism, spirit quests, and ceremonial enactments of groups and individuals. It stands to reason that an individual who could gain strength and success from spiritual sources through advanced training, and thereby provide more food for his or her community, was more likely to be given high status and to be looked upon as a role model and leader. A person who could claim close relationships with particular important plants or animals would likewise

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be accorded high esteem and probably be recognized as a gifted person and leader. The three-way spiritual connection seen to exist among humans, plants, and animals is also quite common and widespread. Bears in particular are strongly associated with plants, both practically and spiritually, as seen in the narrative theme of “The Woman Who Married a Bear.” The parallels in bear and human foods – especially berries and roots – is remarkable, and it is not surprising, therefore, that human women who, in narratives, are taken as wives by Grizzlies or Black Bears spend their time picking berries and digging roots for their husbands (L.R. Smith 2008b; Teit 1912). Geese and ducks (who relish springbank clover, Pacific silverweed, and eelgrass roots), swans (who eat camas bulbs), and muskrats (who eat wapato tubers) may well be the original spiritual and practical mediators between these roots and their human consumers. Similarly, beavers and woodpeckers may have been the original inspirations behind the sophisticated woodworking technologies that developed in the area, and both are associated in narratives with the creation of dugout canoes and other carpentry. Beaver is also associated with causing floods and, conversely, with providing fire to humans (see chapter 12). The attribution of sacred or spiritual qualities to trees (like western redcedar) and other plants, as well as to special places, is not confined to northwestern North America. All over the world, people have identified sacred trees, sacred forests, sacred mountains, and sacred waterways (Chandran and Gadgil 1993; W. Davis and Henley 1990; Mauzé 1998; Pandey 1998; Turner, Ari, et al. 2009). All around the circumpolar region, for example, trees are accorded special status.36 This reverent attitude people have toward trees and, by extension, forests has significant implications for biodiversity conservation. In many parts of the world, the only places where certain rare and threatened trees and other species can be found are in sacred groves and temple forests where cutting is prohibited.37 Some of these ideas, including a kincentric approach to ecology, have made their way into more recent Western thought as well, such as in Leopold’s (1990) notion of a “land ethic.” Places where spiritual work and special events have taken place are also an important part of overall management and conservation. The valley where Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith’s ancestor ts’eqamey was said to have resided within the giant cedar tree during the Great Flood and the pools in the Nuu-chah-nulth territory where whale hunters and others training to accomplish great tasks undertake their spiritual training (oosumich) are elements of ecological and historical intersection with human thought and spirituality that are fully integrated into community and culture and into the maintenance of environments (E.R. Atleo 2011; Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995, 25). In short, these are places from which human participants enact

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their responsibilities to others, human and otherwise, and to past, present, and future generations. The various taboos against picking certain flowers, and against any disrespectful treatment of fish, animals, and trees, also have implications for conserving these species and may in fact serve as deeply rooted prescriptions for sustainability, so profoundly embedded in cultures that people may not even have been aware of the broader effects of their prohibitions. The prohibitions against wasting any food or medicine – supporting the tenets of taking only what one needs and no more and of sharing any excess with others rather than “hoarding” – are part of the overall suite of practices and cultural mores that underlie resource use and promote conserving practices (Turner and Berkes 2006; Turner, Ignace, and Ignace 2000). Together, beliefs and associated codes of conduct guide the practices for sustaining and enhancing resources and habitats that might be embraced under the title of “management.” However, such practices are mostly much less prescriptive than conventional resource management and much more based on broad-scale complex customary approaches. Beliefs and worldviews tend to motivate a general sense of responsibility toward resources, which seamlessly merges with the inherited roles of chiefs and designates in overseeing, caretaking, decision making, and intergenerational accountability that go with leadership and associated social organization (see chapter 9). These beliefs and cultural norms that relate to proper use of and care for the environment and to appropriate social behaviour are routinely self-enforced, with monitoring of compliance occurring across generations and within and among family and clan members. They are embedded in strong social and religious teachings that are enacted and re-enacted many times over an individual’s lifetime, being reinforced through stories, ceremonies, and songs, as well as by example (M.R. Atleo 2009). Sanctions against violations of taboos might also be determined and meted out by chiefs and leaders, with serious offences being punishable by exclusion from the community, abandonment, or even death for violators in cases such as polluting a salmon river.38 A good example of the link between beliefs and sustainability is with the harvesting of cedar bark. Weavers all up and down the coast are taught that one should remove only a portion of the bark from a cedar tree: only one or two “straps,” or around one-third of the circumference of a young cedar tree. This convention was drawn from the knowledge that the tree would die if the bark was peeled off all around the tree: “Even when the young cedar-tree is quite smooth, they do not take all of the cedar-bark, for the people of the olden times said that if they should peel off all the cedar-bark … the young cedar would die, and then another cedar-tree near by would curse the bark-peeler so that he would also die. Therefore, the bark-peelers never take all of the bark off a young tree” (Boas 1921, 616–17; see also ibid., 619; and Schlick 1994).

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Another manifestation of the intersection of beliefs, rituals, and management is with the previously mentioned Tsilhqot’in tradition of instructing a woman who had recently lost her husband, and who was having a difficult time adjusting to his death, to ascend Potato Mountain, pull out the mature stems of spring beauty, or mountain potato, and strew them around in places where they did not grow, a practice that at once helped the woman in her grief and effectively extended the range of this important edible root, increasing its overall productivity. As explained by Mabel Solomon and Gilbert Solomon (pers. comm., 2003), “The woman [widow] had a special energy. That’s why she was asked to work to make more sunt’iny (mountain potato) grow; the other women would keep asking her, ‘Have you gone up yet? Have you gone up yet?’” Examination of these mature stems, which are quite succulent, revealed that they ripened within a short time and produced quantities of viable seed that would soon have exploded from their capsules, germinated, and started to grow in bare patches in the high country. Thus spiritual renewal in this case goes hand in hand with ecological renewal. The Xeni Gwet’in and other Tsilhqot’in maintain that it was their own practices, such as this tradition, that created the dense and productive mountain potato meadows within their territories at places like Chunoz Ch’ed (Potato Mountain) (Mabel Solomon and Eileen William, pers. comm., 2003). The Tsilhqot’in philosophy is summarized in the idea that “If you take care of and respect the land you live on, the land will take care of you” (Glavin and People of the Nemiah Valley 1992, 150). The statement of Nuuchah-nulth elder Roy Haiyupis that “Respect is the very core of our traditions, culture and existence” (cited in Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995, 6–7) reflects the understanding and expression of the reciprocity that exists broadly, still today, in many Indigenous people’s relationships to their environment and the resources that they depend on, such as plants for food and shelter. This type of “coming to understanding” and the many similar lessons instilled by elders and leaders about developing relationships of respect and reciprocity over the generations may have originated from some long-ago catastrophic depletion of an essential resource resulting from an individual’s or community’s overexploitation or improper behaviour (Turner and Berkes 2006). Ancient stories and ceremonies as conservation tools may well be rejected out of hand by ecologists and land managers since they do not fit the model for direct interventions implied by some definitions of the term “conservation.” Yet they may be far more effective in communicating complex concepts and key principles, in promoting effective learning and understanding, and in motivating people to participate in implementing more sustainable strategies for long-term resource use than approaches based on scientific knowledge alone. Collectively, they gently instil and effectively reinforce the codes of

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proper behaviour, consideration, and restraint required to live well in a kincentric world. Plants are important elements of an overall belief system, and their spiritual dimension is reflected in virtually every aspect of Indigenous cultures, from the “words of praise” spoken to the plants and other resource species before people harvest them to narratives, songs, and ceremonies that show appreciation for them. Ultimately, the careful and respectful approach to plants and other living beings, in a “sentient ecology” perspective, guides and directs people’s behaviour toward them and the care that they receive when they are harvested and used. They truly are “re-sources” in this context, to be used and renewed over and over again, through time and generations.

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14 Ancient Pathways and New Pathways for Retaining and Renewing Botanical and Environmental Knowledge Systems for the Future Well, I heard a lot of my Elders … talk about the spirituality of the environment. And they would say that we as human beings are not superior to Mother Nature’s creation. We are only a strand in it. And what we do to the environment, we do to ourselves. (Mary Thomas 2001, 48)

Introduction In a single sentence Mary Thomas, Secwepemc elder and cultural specialist, portrayed the essence of an Indigenous perspective that is widespread within the cultural groups of the study area: We humans are only strands in the immense fabric of the universe. This is a critically important idea – one that has been evidently little recognized in our predominantly urbanized, industrialized, and increasingly globalized societies. Most of us seem to behave as though we humans are all that counts – as though the environment no longer matters. We are increasingly appropriating more and more of the earth’s production. Yet it is at our own peril that we ignore our fundamental connections to the environment and to all of the other species of the planet. No one understands this better than the Indigenous peoples of long-resident communities around the world who have always relied upon their close and direct ties to their territories and local ecosystems for their very survival. In many cases, they see the consequences of their own harvesting and resource use practices directly. Generation after generation – in some cases, for thousands of years – Indigenous peoples, dwelling in their own home localities, have developed, learned, and adapted the knowledge, skills, and values that have enabled them to subsist as active players in their own habitats, not just taking what they can through

random opportunism but also finding ways and developing technologies and belief systems that have allowed a mutual dependency to grow between themselves and the habitats and species that surround them – and with which they have surrounded themselves.1 Of course, a key aspect of this interdependency is peoples’ relationships with the plant world. This book has examined these relationships for Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America, as reflected in their history, their botanical vocabulary, their adaptations to the immense changes of the period since European contact, their uses of plants for food, materials, and medicines, their spatial, temporal, and social relationships, their interactions with one another as mediated by their available resources, their systems for sustaining and enhancing the plant species and habitats on which they have depended, their oral histories involving plants and botanical knowledge, and their belief systems as they relate to their various associations with plants and environments. As outlined in each chapter, all of these relationships have been dynamic – ever changing and adjusting to fluctuating and sometimes unpredictable conditions. They are also diverse, with each aspect linked to the other but no two situations exactly the same. Nevertheless, patterns exist and can give important signals about the historical development of human-environment relations and, in particular, about effective interactions that can sustain human societies and environments together over long periods of time. An overarching problem to be addressed, based on findings in this and other studies that link biological and cultural studies, is: Why are both cultural diversity and biodiversity failing? This is a daunting question because it is so complex, but I believe that the answer is to be found in examining the inextricable linkages, such as those examined here, that underpin human cultural systems and ecological systems. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have been major participants in the evolutionary dynamics of species and ecosystems throughout the world. In northwestern North America, people have been living within particular regions and relying almost completely on local resources over centuries and millennia. Yet local and Indigenous peoples, who are closely tied to their home places through generations of interaction with their environments, are often excluded from mainstream society’s decision making and policy formulation, including efforts to conserve biodiversity, even though the methods used by many resource managers – narrowly based on scientific principles of conservation biology – are all too often ineffective.2 Furthermore, efforts to maintain the integrity of Indigenous cultures through conventional education and revival of language instruction have also often been unsuccessful, at least in part because they fail to take into account those same inherent linkages between humans and their environments (Battiste and Henderson 2000; Cajete 1994; Kawagley 1995, 2003; J.C. Thompson 2004). Finding and identifying the multiple ways that people and their habitats are united –

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through their languages, belief systems, foods, technologies, practices, and relationships with other species or ecosystems – and then directing our attention to these specific intersections will be, I believe, the most effective means of ensuring and renewing both ecological and cultural integrity. In this chapter, I examine insights and processes identified in the earlier chapters – the legacy of knowledge, practices, and beliefs that relate to the peopleplant and human-environment interactions of Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America – to help identify effective ways of reconnecting the human strand with the rest of “Mother Nature’s creation” (in Mary Thomas’s words),3 in which we are embedded and on which we are completely reliant, whether we realize it or not. Chapter 4 in particular shows the effects of sudden, relentless, and externally imposed changes on Indigenous peoples’ abilities to retain and maintain these relationships with their home places. The effects of eroding connections, of displacement, and of loss of control over their lives and territories have resulted in increased vulnerability and reduced resilience both for the people and for native species and habitats. Can peoples’ capacity for resilience and adaptation be strengthened in this dramatically changing world, based on past wisdom and on a sense of place and identity, as expressed in many of these chapters (e.g., chapters 12 and 13)? To answer this question, I build on themes and lessons exemplified in the previous parts of the book. I first reintroduce and summarize some of the key elements related to patterns of people-plant relationships from the various facets of peoples’ history and knowledge systems. This section is followed by a discussion of the diverse ways that knowledge and skills are learned and transmitted. The next section identifies a series of ideas and strategies, drawn from the teachings and examples described in the book, that could contribute to our collective efforts to maintain and renew biocultural diversity; a brief concluding section completes this analysis. Finally, I reflect on the changing perspectives on ethnobotany and ethnoecology that have developed over the course of recent decades as an expanded appreciation has been formed for the complexity, role, and importance of plants and their ecosystems for the First Peoples of this vast and beautiful part of North America. Patterns in Ethnobotany and Ethnoecology in Northwestern North America Historical Relationships

Peoples’ deep connections with plants in the study area extend back to the first entry of humans into the New World, some 14,000 years ago, and even before. Those small groups of hunters, fishers, and plant gatherers making their way

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across Beringia or around the coast along the “kelp highway” would already have had strong and deep associations with a wide range of plants: berries, roots, greens, and the inner bark of trees as food; grasses, sedges, cattails, willows, and other woody materials for fuel, construction materials, matting, and basketry; stinging nettle and willow for cordage; and likely sagebrush, marine algae, and numerous other plants as medicines. Although plants are sparse, to say the least, from the earliest archaeological records, inferences about the use and cultural importance of plants can be made from their identification in palaeoecological contexts, their occurrence in later archaeological situations, and their widespread salience among contemporary Indigenous peoples, including those of northeastern Asia, indicating a probable long time frame for ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge. The difficulty of plant preservation in many archaeological contexts has meant that they have often been overlooked by archaeologists in considerations of early peoples’ lifeways. Yet, based on findings by Croes (2012; Croes et al. 2008) from relatively recent wet sites, like Ozette and Hoko River on the Olympic Peninsula and Sauvie Island on the Columbia River (sites where plant remains were well preserved), plants and plant materials constitute as much as 90 to 95 per cent of the total inventory of species and materials used by people at Northwest Coast sites. This situation is probably not limited to recent centuries; more likely, plants have always played a dominant role in peoples’ lives. Other findings from archaeology and ethnographic research in the study region also refute any assumption of minor roles played by plants in Indigenous lifeways (see chapters 2, 5, and 6 in particular). One inference that can be made is the consistency of the types of species used over the millennia of human occupation of the study region. Over 14,000 years ago, the people of the Monte Verde site in Chile, who had evidently travelled down the Pacific Coast from northern North America, were using digging sticks and other wooden tools, making twine, living in wooden houses, eating fruits and seaweeds, and using a range of medicinal plants (Dillehay et al. 2008). On Haida Gwaii wooden stakes, wedges, twine, and implement hafts have been found dating back 10,000 years or more. In fact, Ames and Maschner (1999) suggest that virtually all of peoples’ resources from 10,000 years ago were also resources of 200 years ago. The beginnings of plant-based technologies, too – nets, wedges for splitting wood, spear throwers, barbed points for fishing and hunting, and even basic watercraft – were also likely underway in the earliest of times, as were basic food storage processes of smoking, wind and sun drying, and food caching. People probably learned some of their early knowledge by observing animals. In any case, the basic resources and techniques have remained. What has changed over that time is the increased specialization and sophistication of exploitation, manipulation, and preparation of the resources. Rather than discovering entirely new resources, people refined and built upon the original suite of species and developed novel and improved methods and processes

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of harvesting and preparation. Some resources were intensified through application of more refined harvesting, production, and/or processing and storage methods; yet peoples of the area have always maintained a wide diversity of food and material supplies to allow alternatives if and when needed. Similarly, tools – including those made of wood and other plant materials, as well as implements for harvesting plant resources – started out in the Pleistocene and Early to Mid Holocene as relatively basic and general-purpose. In composition, they were made from whatever was readily available. Over the millennia and especially in the Late Holocene, they became more sophisticated, precise, and focused in their use. As the particular properties of different kinds of woods and fibres came to be appreciated through discovery, experimentation, and sharing of knowledge, the materials used became increasingly specialized according to the required properties of the specific tools. Even different parts of a single species of tree had specific applications: knot wood for fishhooks, compression wood for tool handles, roots for fibrous stitching and binding materials, sapwood for splints, and saplings for poles and long implement handles. Some plants have a particularly long and consistent history of high cultural salience, judging from their widespread occurrence in palaeoecological sites, as well as other evidence from their names, stories, and more recent and extensive use. Some of these species are known from the glacial refugia along the coast or possibly existed in nunataks (unglaciated peaks) in the mountains, and they were evidently present in the region even in the Late Pleistocene.4 Others may have first been encountered south of the ice sheet along the ice-free coastlines or interiors of Oregon and California. Another insight from the archaeological records is that even long ago, people were highly mobile, and individuals and communities were interconnected on a range of scales. Well-developed trade networks going back nearly 10,000 years are indicated, for example, by the presence of obsidian at On Your Knees Cave, Alaska, likely from Mount Edziza around 200 kilometres away.5 Farther south, affiliations between the early Interior Plateau peoples and those of the Great Basin to the south and east are suggested by the presence of Great Basin–style twined sagebrush-bark sandals of a unique weave in caves in south-central Oregon, most notably Fort Rock Cave, dating from over 10,000 years ago to just over 9,000 years ago (Connolly and Barker 2004). These connections are particularly significant because they reflect peoples’ abilities to learn from each other – to share not only materials but also innovations in technology, as well as ideas, stories, and beliefs that have, together, resulted in some of the patterns of similarity and congruence reflected in the ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge systems of today. Other evidence of people converging and exchanging goods and knowledge exists in the prime fishing locales of the Columbia and Fraser Rivers, for example. The Dalles was such a place of ancient gathering and exchange, dating back at least 9,000 years. Camas meadows on the Columbia

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Plateau similarly became sites for gathering, first apparently in the Willamette Valley and vicinity and a little later, just under 7,000 years ago, in the Calispell Valley; the technologies for pit-cooking camas and other foods, possibly originating farther south, evidently developed further and spread out from such sites. Many other innovations – new styles of dwellings, improved methods for canoe construction, new basketry materials, and different weaving techniques – would have been learned and adopted at such places. The palaeoecological and archaeological records tell us, too, that plants and other resources were hardly ever constant; their ranges were continually shifting with environmental change over decades, centuries, and millennia: sea level rises, floods, volcanic activity, climatic warming or cooling, and accompanying changes in the extent of wetlands or the frequency of fires. People had to respond to the changes in their environments and in available resources, learning to rely on new species or on new ways of harvesting and preparing old species. This required observing, testing, and learning new skills. The integration of different materials from different sources and locales is another major aspect of ethnobotanical patterns reflected in the archaeological record. Fishing and marine-based resource exploitation is a good example, linking plants with animal resource procurement. The fish and sea mammals could not be taken without implements and gear, mainly originating from plants and mostly from terrestrial environments; the much-celebrated salmon and other food from the ocean and rivers must be considered in the context of wooden fishing weirs, wooden spear shafts, and plant fibre netting and twining. As well, animal resources required various plant materials to enable their transport, preparation, cooking, and storage: knives, spreaders, wooden racks, baskets, fuel for cooking and smoking, and so forth. The components of peoples’ food systems – including both the foods and the materials and knowledge required to obtain and process them – cannot be separated, and plants have been integral to these systems from the earliest times in northwestern North America.6 Since people’s arrival in the study area, human populations and settlements have more or less continually expanded, especially starting in the Mid Holocene, between about 7,000 and 3,500 years ago, with increasing diversification in languages, in cultural traits, and – of relevance here – in plant resources. People were settling down more into larger, more integrated communities, but they continued – and perhaps even expanded, with increasing mobility – their seasonal rounds for food harvesting. By the Late Holocene, there is no question that peoples were not only more successful in providing themselves with the food resources they needed – whether wapato or salmon, camas or halibut – but were also becoming stronger social entities, with greater occupational specialization, more interchange, and larger extended family dwellings and permanent villages. Pithouses may have been the most ancient form of permanent shelter,

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but their construction became increasingly sophisticated in the Late Holocene, culminating in the Plateau Pithouse Tradition beginning at least 3,500 years ago, possibly as early as 5,000 years ago, with large pithouse villages being established along the major rivers of the Interior Plateau in the latter part of the Late Holocene. On the Northwest Coast, the iconic western redcedar plank and post big houses came into their own around this same time period, as the large, monumental cedars became more common. Another lesson of history is that, despite their adaptability and ingenuity in times of immense environmental change, people seemed to thrive more in the times when climatic conditions – and sea levels – were generally more stable. Within the past 3,000 to 2,000 years in particular, the coastline in the region has been fairly consistent, and this has allowed the rich coastal ecosystems – clam beds, estuarine tidal marshes, and rocky shorelines – to develop without excessive shifts in tidelines. These conditions, in turn, may have enabled people to access their fish, shellfish, estuarine root gardens, and other coastal resources more predictably. Extensive, metres-thick shell midden deposits all along the Northwest Coast at this time are a testament to the abundance of intertidal resources and the intensity of their use.7 With the increased populations and larger settlements allowed by the relatively steady resource base, more complex social organization and occupational specialization ensued, as reflected in the elaboration of art and ceremonial practices, for example. People were able to travel more, and this enhanced trading and exchange. Also in the Late Holocene, people evidently started to identify more with particular places, affiliating themselves more with home territories, and increasingly developing more predictable resource bases and following more predictable seasonal rounds, while still maintaining ties and trading relations with other groups. There was a relative prosperity, a cultural and linguistic blossoming, in the latter half of the Late Holocene, and one could argue that the relative stability of climate and sea levels was a major contributor to this situation. Significantly, too, the more stable coastline and climatic regimes of the past few thousand years also probably enabled people to develop methods of habitat enhancement and resource management (Caldwell et al. 2012; Deur 2000; Deur and Turner 2005; Recalma-Clutesi 2005).8 Expansion in knowledge and use of plant resources was a major element of the general elaboration of subsistence strategies characterizing the entire Late Holocene period, including harvesting and storage technologies, housing, social structures, art, ceremonial practices, and transportation and trade connections, right up to and including the time of European contact. To say that many people were flourishing in a rich and developing environment would not be an understatement – and the contributions of plants to this relative prosperity were numerous and diverse.

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Language and Vocabulary

The high significance of plants for the Indigenous peoples of the study region is reflected in their botanical vocabularies, particularly in the profusion of names applied to plants in the various languages. People give names to things they converse about – things that are important to them – including the most common and salient entities in their environments, of which plants are a prime example. Almost without exception, the species of plants that provide people with their food, fuel, materials, medicines, decorations, and so forth are named in any language, as are plants that are particularly notable by virtue of a characteristic shape, colour, texture, or importance to a particular animal. Names thus reflect a plant’s abundance, visibility, distinctiveness, seasonality, potential utility, and history of cultural association. Seldom do people give specific names to small, undistinguished species that are not used, even though some people, at least specialists, may recognize them at some level. The plant names of the Indigenous peoples of the study region, as described in chapter 3 (see appendix 2), show these general trends very well. The survey also reflects the dynamics of plant naming – how names develop and disseminate over time according to a group’s historical roots and relationships with other groups, as well as with the floristic history of the region. The body of plant names in any particular language represents a complex of words: original terms that were retained more or less unchanged with their primary referent species; terms that were expanded, modified, or adapted in meaning and reference from earlier forms; names that were borrowed from neighbouring or more distant languages (through trade, intermarriage, or other means); and names that were themselves products of shifting or expansion from some other term. The acquisition of new names, loss of old ones, and semantic changes of existing terms in a language reflect the function of the language itself: to allow communication about things that matter to people in a dynamic, constantly changing world. In orally transmitted languages, without written records, particular changes in names and other terms over time are not necessarily evident; they must be inferred from known patterns of sound shifts and other factors, such as the occurrence of a plant in a given area or trade patterns between groups. For clusters of related, cognate terms – terms developing from a common ancestral root word within a language family – linguists can sometimes track an existing term back to the original form in the language that must have been used by the ancestral peoples of the language groups, before the peoples and languages diverged: the proto-language (see Kari and Potter 2010a; Kuipers 2002). Knowing how long ago groups of people sharing a common ancestral language separated from each other – and therefore the approximate time when their languages started to develop as separate entities from the original language – can give some indication

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about the antiquity of the names and about the assumed continuity of cultural importance and uses of a particular plant in a given language. Some of the plant names used by Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America are judged to be extremely old, as reflected by the existence of proto-language forms and by the widespread dissemination of a term over many languages, both within and across language families. For example, names for soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis) show ancient origins, occurring both in Proto-Salish and early Dene (Athabaskan) languages in association with a term meaning “to foam” or “foaming,” and possibly extend back in some form to Early Holocene times (Turner and Burton 2010). If this is the case, it implies, too, that the popular use of soapberry for making a whipped confection may be similarly ancient. The assumption is that the broader the distribution of a term and the more widely it is shared, the more important is the plant resource named by the term. The situation can be extremely complex, however, since the original meanings and referents of a name can shift and expand.9 Other plant names are assumed to be very old because they no longer reflect any particular meaning; their original meaning has been obscured over time, such that the words are no longer analyzable, except perhaps by deep and careful linguistic analysis. This is often the case with plants that are highly salient and culturally important; their names might include a suffix pertaining to “plant,” but the root of the word has no other meaning than as a plant name. However, another reason why a name may not have any identifiable underlying meaning is that it has been borrowed from some other language. A significant number of plant names, for example, were apparently borrowed from Proto-Salish into early Wakashan languages. All nineteen of the Wakashan terms identified as originating from Salish are culturally important, and thirteen of them (including highbush cranberry and soapberry) apply to food plants. The borrowing of terms can usually be detected by surveying names in neighbouring languages, especially when the languages are in different language families, but (as with the Haida and Ts’msyen names for highbush cranberry discussed in chapter 3) the direction of borrowing may not be obvious, unless there are known proto-antecedents in one of the languages but not in the other. As pointed out by Leslie Main Johnson (1997), borrowing plant names and other terms bespeaks what must have been extended periods of intimate contact between groups of very different origins, especially in the more peaceful contacts of trade, intermarriage, and feasting exchanges. The plant names exemplified in appendix 2 (and in the database from which it is drawn) reveal just how much communication has occurred across geographic and linguistic boundaries (such as between Salish and Wakashan peoples) in the study area over many millennia. The “top 25” (most frequently named) plant species and groups of related taxa (see chapter 3, table 3-8) are all widespread across the

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language territories of the study region, and all have a high level of cultural importance as foods, materials, and/or medicines. All of these species also possess names that reflect a substantial degree of retention from proto-languages and that have common uses and cultural features that indicate considerable exchange between cultural groups. Notably, too, eighteen of the twenty-five are woody plants (trees or shrubs), reflecting both a high level of visibility and significant utility. Much of the linguistic diversification within the major language families evidently occurred around the beginning of the Late Holocene, when human settlements were expanding and when people were becoming increasingly mobile. This was evidently the time, for example, when the early Salishan peoples started leaving their original homeland in the lower Fraser Valley and moving eastward and southward into Interior Plateau regions and Puget Sound, as well as westward and northward to Vancouver Island, the Sunshine Coast, and beyond. The Salishan migrants may well have amalgamated with peoples already residing in some of these places and blended their vocabulary and cultural features with these peoples to some extent. This type of mixing and merging of distinct groups of people apparently occurred in many different parts of the study area, creating the remarkable convergences and distinctive characteristics in languages, vocabularies, and cultural practices existing today, or at least in recent times. Plant names, along with other vocabulary, reflect this dispersal and integration but with the added complication of uneven distributions of plants, and botanical referents sometimes changed as people encountered new and different species and left others behind. For example, camas (Camassia spp.),10 whose bulbs are a “root vegetable” and food staple of the First Peoples of the southern part of the study region, does not occur in the lower Fraser Valley or the northern part of the Interior Plateau at present and likely moved northward onto Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands from south of the Pleistocene ice sheet along the coast (Tomimatsu, Kephart, and Vellend 2009). Therefore, the original Proto-Salish term qwlawl, whose descendant terms apply to both camas and nodding onion (Allium cernuum) in different Salish languages today, likely referred first to nodding onion and then shifted to camas as Salishan peoples moved westward to Vancouver Island and vicinity, where camas would have been encountered (see discussion in the preface and chapter 3). Change with the Newcomers

When the Europeans arrived in the area with all of their new goods and technologies, numerous semantic expansions and shifts occurred, almost simultaneously, as people adopted many new species and tools and integrated them into their languages (see chapter 4). In some languages, for example, the original name for “arrow” was transferred to “bullet,” and in others the name for “firedrill” shifted to “match.” New types of fruits and vegetables were often 360 | part four – underlying philosophy

designated with the same names as their most similar indigenous counterparts: domesticated onions were called by the same name as wild nodding onions, domesticated rhubarb by the name used for western dock, and so on (see the example of the potato in appendix 3 and other examples of names for introduced species in the database from which the appendix is drawn). The entire system of knowledge, practice, and belief that was fundamental to Indigenous peoples’ lifeways was put to an extreme test with the opposing influences and practices of many of the European newcomers. At first, the goals and needs of the European explorers and traders fitted within the existing social, cultural, and economic norms of First Peoples, but soon the newcomers’ impacts, demands, and cash-based economy outstripped the capacities of the Indigenous occupants to maintain many aspects of their traditional lifeways. The cumulative consequences of disease epidemics, multitudes of new goods and introduced species, newcomers’ appetite for lands and resources, landscape transformations, and the imposition of new languages and religions, a wage economy, and labour practices – enacted through a compulsory and often cruel and coercive education system – were profound.11 Knowledge and practices around plants and environments were suppressed along with other cultural knowledge as people struggled simply to survive in a drastically changing world. Fortunately, however, there were knowledgeable and determined individuals, families, and communities who were able to acquire and retain key elements of their cultural knowledge and languages, including botanical and environmental knowledge, over decades and generations despite the many changes and pressures surrounding them. These people, who were themselves taught about their ancestral wisdom and traditions by their elders, recognized the value of these teachings and understood the necessity of preserving and maintaining this knowledge for the benefit of future generations. Many of these individuals have been quoted and cited in this book, and countless others have contributed to the ethnographic and linguistic work referenced here. Their contributions, recognized or not, have been critical elements of peoples’ resilience and have allowed a general renewal and revitalization of ethnobotanical, ethnoecological, and other cultural knowledge and practice that is still ongoing (see Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012). Food

Although they sometimes go unrecognized, plants have played a long-standing and critically important role in the food systems of Indigenous peoples over all of northwestern North America: the Interior Plateau, the Northwest Coast, and even the northern, sub-boreal regions. Plant foods provided – and continue to provide – essential vitamins and minerals, as well as carbohydrates, some protein, and in the case of seeds and nuts, nutritious fats. Plant foods also provide dietary fibre, which is essential for proper digestion (Kuhnlein and Turner Ancient Pathways and New Pathways  |  361

1991). The diverse types of plant foods – berries, root vegetables, greens, tree cambium, and seaweed – were undoubtedly known to the earliest peoples entering the region, and it is likely that many of the actual species that were used in these early times have continued as food resources up to the present. Obviously, new foods were added to the original selection available – species that are restricted in their distribution to the New World and that people arriving in the area would have encountered either in ice-free refugia around the end of the Pleistocene and Early Holocene or in the unglaciated area south of the ice sheets. Camas, mentioned previously, also presents an intriguing example of how ancient people may have acquired access to new foods through innovative ways of processing. In recent times and for the past several millennia, Indigenous peoples of the southern Interior Plateau, across Washington to Montana, and on southeastern Vancouver Island (as well as in California, parts of the Great Basin, and Texas) have harvested and processed camas bulbs by cooking them for prolonged periods in underground pits, or earth ovens. As described in chapter 5, this special processing technique using heated rocks was required to break down the plant’s main storage carbohydrate, inulin – a complex sugar that is largely indigestible – into sweet-tasting and digestible fructose. As noted previously, camas itself appears to have largely migrated northward after the Pleistocene by natural means from south of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet.12 However, without the proper cooking to free up the fructose in the bulbs, camas bulbs would not have contributed substantially to peoples’ diets in terms of food energy. Pioneering research by Thoms (1989, 2008a, 2008b, 2009) provides clues to the origins of the earth oven technology that allowed camas – and some other inulin-containing root vegetables – to become a staple food throughout most of the Holocene. The earliest known earth ovens with rock-heating elements in North America are located along the ecotone between the southern Plains and southeast Woodlands, dating to around 9,500 to 8,000 years ago (Thoms 2008a). Earth ovens occur – with remains of camas bulbs – in the Willamette Valley region of Oregon from around 8,000 years ago and in the Calispell Valley of Washington from between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago. The revolutionary earth oven technology apparently spread rapidly from these early sites throughout the Interior Plateau and onto the entire Northwest Coast, where their use is well documented in relation to cooking camas as well as many other foods (see Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980; Turner and Kuhnlein 1983; and Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Not only did pit-cooking produce more palatable and digestible bulbs, but it also produced a sweet coating over the bulbs that helped to preserve them as edible products, when dehydrated, for exceptionally long periods of time – in some cases, for many years. Thoms (2008a, 2008b, 2009) suggests that earth ovens represent a relatively sudden dietary transition toward use of more carbohydrate-rich root vegetables during a time of relatively dry climate, when availability of game was decreasing

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and people had to learn to exploit alternative foods, resulting in a land use intensification that he terms the “carbohydrate revolution.” Pit-cooking also adapted readily to the large-scale processing of many other foods, including balsamroot, nodding onions, yellow glacier lily bulbs, black tree lichen, and even various types of berries, as well as clams, venison,13 and other animal foods, thus demonstrating how one technology can be modified for many purposes.14 There was a general trend of sophistication in methods of food harvesting and processing over the Holocene, culminating in the Late Holocene, with a substantial, increasing emphasis on food production and storage throughout the study region. High-quality basketry and, on the coast, bentwood cedar boxes brought new possibilities for cooking and storing food, as well as for trade – by allowing standardized quantities and containers for transport and consistency in exchange measures. Other innovations that related to food included improved digging stick design (in some cases, with elaborate handles), presumably enabling more efficient root harvesting, and the development of other specialized equipment and improved processes for dehydrating berries (such as the trenches of the Indian Heaven huckleberry sites near Mount Adams). Acorn-processing technologies, such as those at the Sunken Village site on Sauvie Island,15 are also part of the suite of innovations that swept the region in the Late Holocene, but in this case there are intriguing linkages both to the Great Basin and to the Jomon culture of ancient Japan (Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009a, 2009b). All of these improvements occurred, not coincidentally, in concert with growing populations. Also by the Late Holocene, peoples were developing ways of enhancing the growth and productivity of plant foods, using fire, selective harvesting, and probably other forms of management such as clearing and pruning berry bushes. Intensively used and managed estuarine root gardens, camas meadows, and subalpine root-harvesting and berry patches also would have become common during the Late Holocene. Ownership by chiefs and particular families of prime productive patches of plant foods within designated territories, especially along the Northwest Coast, probably also began at this time, with increasing populations and more permanent settlements. It is possible, too, that people were moving plants (e.g., stinging nettle, cattail, berry bushes, and young cedar trees) and plant propagules (e.g., hazelnuts, camas bulbs, wapato, and acorns) from place to place, as well as developing arrangements with neighbouring groups to harvest some resources in their territories. More detailed genetic research of plant populations might reveal the extent to which humans were involved in plant dispersal in the study region.16 Significantly, the majority of the plant food resources in the region were probably harvested and processed predominantly by women and children in the past, as has been the case in recent times. The times spent together in foodrelated activities would have provided significant opportunities for women to

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socialize, pass on information, recount stories, and teach the children, not only about the particular plants being harvested or worked on but also about important cultural practices, songs, games, and other traditions (Turner 2003b). Many of the elders of recent times throughout the study area reminisced about childhood times of picking berries or digging roots with parents and grandparents and recounted how they had learned the details of how to select prime bulbs, where to find the biggest berries, and how to care for and respect the plants and the places where they grew. Although most of the plant foods identified in this study were used by people throughout their range, wherever they were found, a few were used by only one group or in one restricted area. The reasons for this are not always clear but may be related to historical factors. Some might be regarded only as famine foods: skunk-cabbage rhizomes, for example, were eaten occasionally in early spring by the Chinookans and Lil’wat (Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc) of the Mount Currie area and by the Secwepemc but evidently not by others. These same peoples also ate cattail rhizomes, although throughout most of the study area, cattail was used only in technology – its leaves for making mats and bags and its fluffy fruiting heads for diapers, tinder, and ceremonial materials. Q’əxmín (“wild celery,” Lomatium nudicaule) seeds were used by Coast Salish and Kwakwaka’wakw as a flavouring and ceremonial incense, but the Lil’wat and Interior Plateau peoples also ate the young leaves, raw or cooked, as a springtime green, rich in vitamin C. The young vegetative leaf bases of arrow-grass (Triglochin maritima) were relished as greens by the Squamish, Comox, and Sechelt Coast Salish (who have recently called them “sea onions”) but apparently not by other coastal peoples, even though the plant is common all along the Northwest Coast. Indigenous peoples from Alaska to California gathered and ate, and still do, red laver seaweed (Pyropia abbottiae and related species), but evidently the Nuu-chah-nulth and Ditidaht on the west coast of Vancouver Island did not eat it.17 Grains and “seeds” in general were widely gathered, processed, and eaten by peoples of the Great Basin and California but much less so in the study area.18 Edible mushrooms present a particular puzzle. Over much of the study area, they were generally avoided as food, as in Siberia and across the Canadian north (Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Yamin-Pasternak 2011). Yet the Interior Plateau peoples ate, and still do, several different types of mushrooms, including pine mushroom (Tricholoma magnivelare) and cottonwood mushroom (T. populinum) (Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger 1985). California Indigenous peoples also gather and eat a number of different kinds of mushrooms (M.K. Anderson 2005). The use of mushrooms as food in the Interior Plateau region may therefore have spread – like pit-cooking and camas use – from peoples of the south. There are many commonalities and correspondences of food species across cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries, with phytogeographic patterns of plant distribution largely – but not entirely – determining which species are

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used. In all, the plant foods of peoples in the study area represent a complicated mix: some already known to people entering the area from northeastern Asia, some existing in situ since the late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, and others encountered and adopted later. Some of the food plants, such as hazelnut and springbank clover, were evidently moved to different locations or expanded in range by the people themselves. As well, various innovations associated with intensified food production have arisen and spread relatively quickly across wide areas, although there are still some notable regional differences.19 Materials and Technology

From their earliest arrival in the New World, people would have relied heavily on plant materials as sources of fuel, for weaving and matting, in construction, and for other technological purposes. The trees encountered by the new immigrants – either travelling overland across Beringia or moving along a cold and glacier-lined coastline (much lower than the present one) – were probably mostly stunted and few in number. People likely used whatever wood they could find – willow, aspen, birch, and possibly lodgepole pine, spruce, and hemlock, as well as driftwood – for fuel and construction, including frames for houses, racks for drying food, and even watercraft, spear shafts and atlatls (spear throwers), and other implements for hunting and fishing. Woodworking would thus have been a central occupation from the earliest times, and it continued to develop and flourish right up to the present, especially on the Northwest Coast, where opportunities for working with large cedars created the pinnacle of woodworking in the study area. As noted previously, the massive western redcedar trees that provided planking, beams, and posts for the large Northwest Coast dwellings of recent centuries (see Ames 1996, 2005) evidently did not appear widely on the coast until around 4,000 years ago. By 3,000 to 2,000 years ago, the Northwest Coast peoples had become masterful architects in cedar wood, constructing immense multifamily dwellings with removable planks that could be taken to provide shelter at summer resource-harvesting sites. These accomplished woodworkers and engineers – most of them men – also crafted dugout redcedar canoes of many sizes and styles that allowed greater possibilities for travel, just at a time when the coastline had stabilized, populations were growing, and marine resources were intensifying. The Haida and Heiltsuk became famous for their canoes, which they used to travel as far along the coast as California and which they traded to their respective neighbours. It was said to be only a three-day journey from Haida Gwaii to Victoria – a testament both to the fine quality of the craft and to the strength and prowess of the paddlers. In the interior and in the north, Dene (Athabaskan) peoples were famous for their wooden-framed birchbark canoes, similar to those made by the Cree and Anishenaabe to the

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east. Salish and Ktunaxa peoples on the Interior Plateau also made birchbark canoes, as well as vessels from other types of bark, such as white pine. Interior peoples also made dugouts canoes but usually from cottonwood since cedar was not always available.20 Woodworking skills expanded in the Late Holocene to the crafting of bentwood boxes on the Northwest Coast, as well as of fine and elaborate tools: canoe paddles, digging sticks, spindle whorls, bows and arrows, long-handled dip nets of Douglas-fir saplings, fish traps, and complex fishing spears.21 Carpentry and carving, seemingly a universal men’s craft and occupying a substantial proportion of time for most males, became more specialized by the Late Holocene, with certain individuals becoming renowned for their skills in canoe making, crafting bentwood boxes, constructing houses, fashioning various tools such as spears and wooden fishhooks, or carving the immense representational figures and totem poles so well known from the post-European contact era. Whereas men were, for the most part, the hewers and crafters of wood, women were the supreme weavers, producing diverse sizes and styles of basketry from numerous different fibrous materials, including grasses and sedges, roots and withes of spruce and western redcedar, inner bark of red and yellow cedars, Rocky Mountain maple, and willow, and bark of bitter cherry or pin cherry. They also cut sheets of birch bark, spruce bark, cottonwood bark, and some other tree barks, which they incised, folded, and stitched into buckets and other types of containers. They also used birch bark and coiled basketry techniques to make baby cradles.22 The women also sewed and twined mats – some of them enormous – of cattail leaves, tule stems, and inner bark of cedar. Cattail and tule mats, in particular, were used as coverings for summer lodges and even for large multifamily dwellings in the Interior Plateau, as well as for drying berries on and for sleeping mattresses, room dividers, and other purposes. Other fibrous materials used by Interior Plateau women in weaving and for cordage include Indian-hemp, inner bark of silverberry, bark of big sagebrush, and even black tree lichen.23 Baskets, in particular, often reflect not only regional differences in twining, decorative overlay, patterns, and materials used but also styles of individuals and female lineages, such that, in some cases, the baskets of an individual weaver and her descendants can be recognized from her own signature patterns and stitching.24 Basketry styles were remarkably constant, retaining regional fidelity in weaving and stitching types in some cases for thousands of years, while accommodating variation in detail (Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009a, 2009b). The ways that the materials for baskets and other weaving projects were harvested reflect a detailed knowledge of plant growth and propagation. From an early age, girls were taught to avoid overharvesting bark or roots from a particular tree, and they also learned that cattails, tules, and basket sedge (Carex obnupta), as well as stinging nettle and Indian-hemp, actually grow better when the patches are cleaned and maintained by regular harvesting. Keeping and 366 | part four – underlying philosophy

maintaining basketry and fibre plants were as important as maintaining the edible roots and berry bushes since food could not be transported or stored without these containers. Every stage of the basket-making process requires an intimate knowledge of the materials and of the plants and environments from which they are derived. For example, if western redcedar roots are harvested from a place that is too rocky, the roots will be too crooked to use. If the soil contains too much clay, the roots will not pull out easily. If the tree has too many branches, it is said that the roots themselves will be short and branching. The best sites for cedar roots are moist, sandy riversides, where the trees are tall, straight, well spaced, and not too bushy. Old logs on the ground also yield long, straight cedar roots growing through the rotten wood. If the roots are harvested at the wrong time of the year, the bark will not peel off well, and the roots will not split properly. Wooden splints for basketry must be cut from young sapwood; if it is too old, the wood will not be flexible enough to split or mould to the desired shape. Birch bark and cherry bark can be easily removed from the trees only within a short window of time. Furthermore, as described in chapter 6, the cut must be made carefully, and the bark taken off gently, so as not to damage the growing layer (cambium tissue) of the tree. The amount of time women devoted to harvesting and processing their materials and to weaving baskets, mats, blankets, clothing, and hats was substantial, especially if extensive travel to particular harvesting sites was required. Many of these items – such as the decorated coiled cedar-root baskets of the Nlaka’pamux and Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc and the wrapped twined trinket baskets of the Nuu-chah-nulth and Ditidaht – are constructed of two, three, or more different materials, each requiring its own harvesting expeditions and processing methods. Although sometimes baskets could be fashioned roughly and quickly as needed from folded sheets of cedar or other bark, most took many hours, or sometimes days or weeks, to complete.25 Not surprisingly, such objects were treasured and used with care over many years; some were repaired to make them last even longer. Depending on the region, women in a single extended household might possess as many as twenty or thirty medium- or large-sized baskets for transport, storage of roots and berries, cooking, and other purposes, as well as many woven mats and bags (Schlick 1994; Turner 1996; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990).26 Thus basket making, including gathering materials, processing, and weaving, may well have consumed from one-quarter to one-half of a woman’s working hours each year in some regions. Some women were specialists in basketry arts and may have spent even more of their time as weavers. Weaving can also be a very sociable activity, a time for teaching girls the required skills and for stories and conversation among friends and across generations. Some items might be made by both men and women working together. For snowshoes, men might harvest and shape the wood for the frames – of yew Ancient Pathways and New Pathways  |  367

sapling, birch, or maple – and women might prepare and lace the rawhide webbing. Similarly, both men and women might make fibre twine from nettle or Indian-hemp and work together to prepare fishnets. Both men’s and women’s technologies were as essential for people’s survival as the food they procured, providing together the prime means of transport, shelters of all kinds, implements for obtaining food, and vessels not only for carrying goods but also for cooking and storing food. Children assisted in all of the harvesting, processing, and manufacturing activities, the tendency being for boys to help their fathers, grandfathers, and uncles and for girls to help their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. Technological pursuits of all types became increasingly specialized over the millennia following the Pleistocene, with increasingly enhanced opportunities for trade and exchange of canoes, baskets, implements, and other items, as well as the techniques and designs used in their construction. Gathering the materials and constructing these various items were not simply practical activities; they also provided opportunities to learn about other species and reflected people’s spiritual connections with the plants and their environments. Harvesting, carving, and weaving all required deep understandings of the protocols that would minimize damage to the plant resources and pay appropriate tribute to individual plants, such as cedar trees and birch trees, for giving their lives or parts of themselves and for allowing themselves to be transformed into canoes, houses, or other items of beauty and utility. Consider, for example, the relationship between a woman and a birch tree from which a sheet of bark is removed. The point at which harvesters reached an understanding that they could remove the outer bark without killing the tree would have been pivotal, both in terms of developing practices that were sustainable and in terms of fostering an awareness of nonhumans as living entities. When, and how often, this realization was achieved is not known, but the concept of trees and plants as sentient living beings is undeniably universal within the study area, indicating an idea carried forward and disseminated from deep time, possibly right from the time of people’s entry into the region. Medicine and Healing

Treating diseases, ailments, and injuries and providing required assistance in childbirth or for the aged are necessary activities for any group of people. Although it is difficult to prove the antiquity of medicinal plant use (Leonti, Sticher, and Heinrich 2003), it is highly likely that the earliest peoples in northwestern North America were already using many different plants – as well as some animals – for various medicinal treatments. Use of medicines – in contrast with food or materials – is arguably more contained and exclusive within the knowledge and practice of individuals or families.27 Yet a host of different medicinal plants have widespread and similar usage across the cultural, linguistic, and 368 | part four – underlying philosophy

geographic boundaries of the study region, indicating considerable common knowledge and exchange of medicinal practice over millennia. Some medicinal species, like devil’s-club and false hellebore, are particularly distinctive and potentially drastic in their actions, and it is conceivable that their medicinal qualities may have been discovered and put to use independently by different groups. More likely, however, the knowledge of their potency would have been spread widely and rapidly with its initial discovery. Numerous aromatic plants (e.g., sagebrush and wormwood, Labrador tea, yarrow, spruce, and juniper) are widely used medicinally around the northern hemisphere. They may have been discovered and developed as medicines on many occasions in different places, but, alternatively, they may well have been known to ancestral Eurasians even before people entered the New World, their use simply evolving and spreading from an ancient tradition.28 Considering that many of the medicinal plants used in northwestern North America also have names that are related across languages and even language families, the likelihood is that – despite the degree of privacy around medicines in recent times – knowledge of medicines was fairly widely shared through one means or another and that the sharing extended back at least four or five millennia to the time of Proto-Salish and other ancestral language groups. Another indication of active exchange of medicinal plant knowledge is the congruence in the ways that these medicines are prepared and administered. Many different peoples, for example, make salves from tree pitch – most notably pitch from coniferous trees like spruces and true firs and resin from cottonwood buds – heated with animal fat. Drinking infusions or decoctions of plant materials, especially of tree barks and leafy twigs of trees and shrubs, is a predominant way of administering medicine internally. Plant materials are sometimes mixed together to make particular medicines, and it seems more than just coincidence that both the Saanich (Coast Salish) and the Saik’uz Dakelh, or Carrier (Dene, or Athabaskan), are known to make a medicinal mixture containing ten different ingredients.29 At some point, through some venue, it seems that there was a connection, direct or indirect, between these two distant and unrelated peoples. Bathing in plant infusions or decoctions is widely used as a treatment for arthritis and muscular aches and pains. Sweat bathing – in a framed sweat lodge covered with skins or matting (commonly used by Interior Plateau peoples) or on a bed of aromatic plant materials laid over hot rocks (a usual coastal method) – is another well known treatment for arthritis and rheumatism. Additionally, aromatic plant materials are widely applied in the form of smudges or incense, inhalants, or washes for disinfecting a household, furnishings, and clothing during times of death and disease. Scrubbing and ritual purification during bathing or sweat bathing, and using plant materials as washes for hunting and fishing gear, are also widely practised. There tend to be two different types of healing practised throughout the study area: herbal healing, mainly using plants and other natural products, which Ancient Pathways and New Pathways  |  369

is often practised by specialists who are particularly knowledgeable about the medicinal properties of plants; and spiritual healing, which may involve the use of plants, too, but also has a strong supernatural component and is administered by a shaman or “medicine man” (or woman), usually someone who has undergone prolonged training and may undertake spiritual journeys to ascertain the cause of a physical or psychological problem.30 In almost every family, there are herbalists who are called on for advice or to administer medicine for what would be considered mainly physical ailments, injuries, or conditions (e.g., assisting women in childbirth and with care of infants and children). Many of these herbal specialists are women. Practising herbal medicine also reflects spiritual values; herbal practitioners throughout northwestern North America and beyond uphold that, for a medicine to be effective, it must be gathered with care, focus, and respect, as well as with words of thanks given to the plants providing the medicine, both when the medicine is harvested and when it is being prepared and administered (Boas 1930; Turner and Hebda 1990, 2012).31 As with harvesting plant materials, the harvesting and use of plant medicines, intertwined with spiritual beliefs, would ultimately lead to sound resource management practices.32 Few of the hundreds of different medicines used by Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America have been clinically tested, but many are known to contain chemically active ingredients, most notably alkaloids or glycosides but also other compounds such as tannins, resins, and volatile oils. Many of the same or related species are used medicinally in other parts of North America and even in Europe and Asia (Blumenthal, Goldberg, and Brinckmann 2000; Moerman 2003), and it is possible that there are extremely ancient roots to some of these medicines.33 In summary, particular medicinal recipes and precise applications of individual medicine species tend to be closely held as private knowledge and not as widely shared as food and material plants, at least in the recent past. However, in terms of general processes of harvesting, preparation, and application, as well as of the belief systems underlying harvesting and use, herbal medicine practice seems to follow patterns similar to those of food and technology plant use. Overall approaches seem to be widespread across the entire study region, with many of the most intensively used medicinal plants being known and used in analogous, if not identical, ways, indicating both longstanding use of medicinal plants and extensive sharing of knowledge about which species are effective as well as methods and concepts of application. Resource Use: Places and Seasons

Variation in resource availability over the seasons and across space, as well as within different habitats and ecosystems, has always been an overriding determinant of peoples’ lifeways throughout northwestern North America. Starting 370 | part four – underlying philosophy

in earliest times, people had to accommodate short windows of opportunity when many of the products that they needed to survive were available at a particular place and had to travel to many different locales to obtain the total required complement of resources. People probably learned in the earliest times, too, that they could move upward in elevation with the progression of the harvest season, enabling them to obtain different resources – or sometimes the same types as at lower elevations – later in the year. Within certain margins of variability, the times and places to obtain the different resources would have been predictable to those who knew and understood seasonal and ecological patterns, making it possible to plan and to some extent anticipate the places within a given landscape and within a given time frame that yielded the greatest benefits in terms of resources. To allow enough time for harvesting and processing a sufficient quantity of a particular resource, whether salmon, roots, or berries, it was often necessary for people to remain in a harvesting location for many days or weeks. During this interval, not only did they have to provide themselves with food and shelter, but they also had to harvest and store enough excess resources to meet their winter requirements. Since there are normally limits to the productivity of any resource at a given place, having small groups of people – families or clan members, for example – spreading out over the territory is usually an excellent strategy for harvesting foods and materials without depleting the available supply. In a few cases, as formerly with the immense wapato patches of the lower Columbia Valley, the camas prairies of western and central Washington, and the salmon fishing sites along the Columbia, Fraser, Skeena, and other great northwestern rivers, the resources were abundant enough to meet the requirements for hundreds – or sometimes thousands – of people at a time. In some cases, too, resource sites can be rich in multiple resources – fish, edible roots, berries, and basket materials, for example – that are all available for harvesting at around the same time. Whether known for a single highly sought after resource or for a whole constellation of different resources, these particularly productive places, such as certain estuarine wetlands and subalpine parklands, became renowned centres of convergence for people (Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). These “cultural keystone places” not only provided families and communities with important resources but also gave them opportunities to socialize, trade goods, and exchange stories and cultural knowledge such as basketry or food preparation techniques. Over time, these places became nodes, or “interaction spheres” (Ames and Maschner 1999), of immense social networks that extended across the entire study region and beyond. Peoples’ regular movements over the lands and waters of their territories for resource harvesting, known as “seasonal rounds,” are described in detail in chapter 8. People made their seasonal rounds both on the coast and in the interior, in the north and in the south – across the entire study area; such harvesting and travelling patterns still continue to some extent for some peoples today. To Ancient Pathways and New Pathways  |  371

help determine the best times for their travels, people relied on seasonal indicators, including the relative positions of the sun, moon, and stars, the changing shape of particular snowbanks, changes in wind patterns, and tidal cycles, as well as on biological indicators (also known as phenological indicators), such as the growth stage of certain plants (e.g., the blooming of oceanspray or wild rose), the ripening of particular berries (e.g., salmonberries or saskatoon berries), and the appearance of certain migratory birds (e.g., geese or robins). Often, the knowledge of the timing of key resources is encoded in Indigenous languages as names of the moons or months of the year. These important indicators, however, have been shifting with global climate change, such that resource-harvesting times at particular locales are not always as predictable as they once were (Turner and Clifton 2009). The patterns of seasonal rounds followed by the First Peoples at the time of the arrival of the first Europeans were, in many cases, established hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. Around the beginning of the Late Holocene, when populations started growing and permanent winter settlements and houses became larger both along the Northwest Coast and in the interior, it became increasingly necessary for people to disperse across a wide landscape (or seascape) to obtain their resources.34 These predictable rounds would have been undertaken in concert with more intensive management of habitats and resources, as well as with greater assumption of control over resource-harvesting locales by individuals and lineages. Higher levels of investment of time and energy in resource production made it necessary for people to make claims on the results of their focused work. This also probably resulted in greater specialization of individual families and lineages in terms of the particular resources under their control and further encouraged and strengthened relationships of trade and exchange between families, including ceremonial, political, and formal economic activities such as with the potlatch and intermarriage arrangements. These relationships, in turn, would have resulted in even greater rates of knowledge exchange – including the sharing of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge – both across generations and between different groups of people. Social Organization and Plant Use

Division of labour between males and females has evidently been an ancient and widespread practice not only in the study area but also virtually worldwide, with men undertaking most of the hunting and fishing, carpentry, and implement manufacture and women most of the plant food and shellfish gathering and the processing and preparing of food for winter storage, as well as most of the harvesting of plant fibres and the weaving and manufacture of baskets, mats, and clothing (Barber 1995; Howard 2003). Associated knowledge and skills were thus passed down from mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaugh-

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ter, aunt to niece, father to son, and so forth, in some cases over hundreds of generations. Across the study region, as elsewhere in the world, there have been trends toward greater complexity and sophistication in resource use strategies and technologies since Pleistocene times. Social organization became increasingly complex in terms of societal stratification, intensified leadership positions, greater specialization of roles and activities, and social inequity, particularly over the last half of the Late Holocene. Larger populations and more focused settlements throughout the area meant a need for more resources both locally and regionally, which in turn required greater oversight and a higher level of economic and institutional control and regulation. Ceremonial and ritual ways of instilling societal understandings of cultural and ecological interactions also became more elaborate, as did artistic enterprise. Increased specialization in leadership, shamanism, woodworking, weaving and basket making, and various other occupations was a logical outcome. Along the Northwest Coast these developments occurred in concert with more stabilized sea levels and, evidently, greater predictability of coastal resources. Over the entire region, fluctuating but generally more stable environments – relatively similar to those of the modern era – were in place starting about 3,000 years ago. Intensification of resource use through focused management on various scales and correspondingly stronger systems of land tenure also occurred. Alliances and ties between communities and even across different language groups helped to spread the availability of particular resources through enhanced trade and exchange, including intermarriage. Inevitably, too, resource use conflicts resulted in wars and other forms of hostility. Wealth, prestige, and authority accrued for some families and communities, with sufficient resource accumulation to allow leisure and the development of elaborate artistic imagery, even on utilitarian objects. At the other end of the social scale, slavery was a common institution (Donald 2003; Martindale 2003), with slaves being treated as more or less low-class members of a family in some cases or as disposable property, or “goods,” in others. The labour of slaves and the knowledge and skills they contributed to overall societal development cannot be dismissed, nor can the contributions of women, children, and elders. Each and every individual had a role to play – varying somewhat with relative prestige, power, wealth, age, gender, life stage, inherited place in the nuclear family and community, intelligence, political and social skills, ability, and creativity – in building and maintaining the overall well-being of the family, clan, and community as a whole – including the nonhuman components: the plants, animals, and environments on which humans rely. All of these developments – from increasing social and economic complexity to intensification of resources – influenced the ways that plants were used for various purposes, how the uses were organized, and how knowledge about

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plants and environments was communicated and disseminated. Ultimately and collectively, they led to the patterns of plant use seen and documented by the European newcomers entering northwestern North America. Trade and Exchange

The archaeological record in the study region is rife with examples of how goods and information were exchanged across long distances over thousands of years. Obsidian – a volcanic glass that can, with skill, be worked into remarkable and effective tools and implements with edges sharper than a razor – is traceable with chemical analysis to its source volcanic mountain or formation and therefore provides a superb means of discovering the connections and travel routes of people. Other minerals, too, can be traced to source deposits, as can shells to some extent. The presence in archaeological contexts of obsidian and other rocks hundreds or even thousands of kilometres from their sources of origin, as well as of marine shells like dentalium, pecten, and abalone far from the coast in deposits dating back thousands of years, serves as a proxy for human interactions across landscapes and generations. Plant remains and plants as trade goods are not as readily discernable from the archaeological record, and when found, their origins are not necessarily easily determined, but it can be assumed that plants, too, were traded, in the form of both raw materials and processed goods – and possibly also as living propagules – back into the distant past, probably along the same routes and through the same venues as the more durable minerals and shells. Along with these botanical goods, associated information, names, and stories about the species and their applications would have been acquired and exchanged, resulting in the patterns of naming of plants reflected in recent and existing languages. We can obtain hints of how transmission of such knowledge occurred through accounts from more recent times (see chapter 4) of women who married into different communities and introduced new basketry techniques and new foodprocessing methods to their husband’s people; of Saanich families who travelled to Interior Plateau locations like Yakima for agricultural work and traded strings of smoked clams from the coast for goods and clothing from the interior peoples; of Nuu-chah-nulth and Cowichan families who transplanted cattails and wapato from the Fraser Valley to wetlands in their respective territories on Vancouver Island; and of Stl’atl’imx/St’at’imc families who travelled coastward from the Lillooet area on the mid Fraser River to the Pemberton Valley in order to pick huckleberries with their Mount Currie Lil’wat relatives and then hosted these same relatives for the soapberry harvest up in the Fountain Valley. Each one of these occasions represents the face-to-face contact of individuals at a particular place and time. These multiple, focused, small-scale interactions,

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repeated year after year and generation after generation, accumulate to reflect the intricate web of similarities (and differences) in ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge, practice, and belief that exists today. Resource Management Systems

A key attribute of plants – especially perennial species (which comprise the overwhelming majority of species used by First Peoples of northwestern North America) – is their versatility in regrowing and reproducing themselves, especially through regeneration by meristematic tissues and through vegetative reproduction.35 Combinations of strategies for encouraging plant regeneration, applied in concert with practices that mimicked natural processes, led to the maintenance and enhancement of individual plant populations and their habitats. Humans learned these strategies increasingly over time and by at least the Late Holocene had developed a whole suite of practices that can be termed “management” of plant resources: creating clearings and removing competing species through burning or weeding; harvesting at the optimal season for a plant’s regrowth and renewal; selectively removing roots or other parts of a certain size or growth stage to allow continued growth of the remaining parts; partially harvesting bark, wood, or pitch and then allowing the tree or shrub to heal itself; pruning back branches of berry bushes or fruit trees or cutting back stems to ground level to activate growth and renewal; finding ways to channel moisture or nutrients into the plants’ habitats to stimulate their growth and productivity; and scattering, replanting, and otherwise dispersing seeds, fruits, or propagules. All of these methods were employed in one way or another by Indigenous peoples in the study region, as well as elsewhere in North America and beyond.36 Collectively and on different scales, these actions resulted in sustained and enhanced plant resource production, as embodied in a Kwak’wala word shared by Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla): qw’aqw’alaʔowkw (“keeping it living”) (cited in Deur and Turner 2005). The “keeping it living” approaches can be considered – along with innovations in plant processing and storage – to be strategies for resource intensification that must have built up gradually over the entire Holocene but predominated in the recent millennia. Ultimately, people applied these diverse modes of resource management and intensification over a wide spectrum of ecological zones and habitats, from intertidal and estuarine environments to subalpine parklands. How they learned to manage resources and environments in these ways is not really known, but astute observation of the effects of natural fire, wind, floods, and other environmental processes – including the disturbances caused by the digging and browsing of birds and animals, as well as those caused by people themselves – was undoubtedly a major

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source of learning and inspiration. Disseminating and exchanging observations, ideas, and results through social means and incorporating references and descriptions of activities and outcomes of management into narratives, ceremonies, and songs would have helped people to retain and enact key information and practices that supported a community’s survival and well-being (Turner and Berkes 2006). As noted previously, investments of energy in intentional resource management seem to have strengthened synchronously with increased populations, more complex social organization, occupational specialization, and formalized land tenure systems within the Late Holocene. One of the keys to peoples’ success may well have been their reverent attitude toward the other species that served as their resources, embodied in their spiritual and kincentric belief systems, in which the lives of trees, berry bushes, and all other plants and animals truly mattered. The life of another living being was not taken heedlessly or wastefully or else bad luck would ensue. The species and habitats involved varied from place to place, but the underlying ideas were held in common throughout the entire area, and they pertained to animals as well as plants. Some plants – for example, western redcedar and yellow-cedar, western larch, or “tamarack,” spiny wood fern, skunk-cabbage, and devil’s-club – had direct associations with original supernatural ancestral figures. Others – like trailing blackberry and bunchberry in the “jealous husband” narratives – were specifically known for the legacy of their creation and transformation, sometimes through profound sacrifice on the part of an ancestor. Thus using the bark and wood of trees without killing them, grooming berry bushes to make them produce more and larger berries, and maintaining the camas prairies and estuarine and subalpine root gardens without depleting them were not just practical measures but also had profound and compelling spiritual foundations. Narratives as Reflections of Botanical Knowledge

Knowing which plants are named, what the names are, and how they compare and relate to plant names of other languages and cultural groups can give many clues about peoples’ past history and their interrelationships with the environment and with one another. Oral histories or traditional narratives add yet another dimension to the picture. Not only do they indicate – through common story themes and cycles of ancient stories – how people have connected with each other in the past, but they also provide insights into aspects of peoples’ history, as well as into their perspectives and worldviews – the belief systems that shape their actions and decisions even to the present day (Cruikshank 1998; R.E. Ignace 2008). The origin stories – those “from the beginning of time,” to use the words of Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth) and Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) – are recounted over and over and serve as teachings for children

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and adults alike. Important lessons are embedded within them: proper conduct toward animals and plants, as well as respect for the powers of the environment. The stories inspire generosity by recounting the consequences of greedy behaviour, and they instil a sense of gratitude for all of the gifts bequeathed to humans, often at great cost, by those who have gone before. The kincentric view of the world is reflected particularly in the transformation stories, in which the boundaries between humans and other life forms are eliminated and all beings – humans, animals, plants, and even rivers, mountains, and stars – are seen to be in one big society, each with potential spiritual powers to help or impact the lives of others, and in which humans are by no means the most powerful force. The idea of Skunk-Cabbage, Tree Fungus, Yellow-Cedar, or Blueberries as people who variously walked around, talked, paddled canoes, or dried salmon may seem strange, but the stories in which these individuals show their human forms are reminders of their close relationships to us and of their generous contributions to the lives of humans today. The ancient and time-honoured stories thus serve to connect people to their communities of kin, their ancestors, and their environments, engendering respect, appreciation, and right ways of behaviour. The consequences of breaching these protocols, as warned about in the narratives, are severe and can result in suffering and even death, not only for individuals but also for entire communities.37 Sometimes stories – such as those about the antics of Raven trying to imitate other animals or attempting through trickery to get more berries or food than he deserves – are amusing and entertaining, but they also carry serious lessons about socially acceptable behaviour. Other stories inform the audience about techniques and ways of doing things: how to make a “slow match” with which to carry fire, how to make a fish weir, how to use pitch as a protective coating for implements, how to treat a killed animal or fish, how to show respect for berries or other resources, how to burn the seeds of q’əxmín (“wild celery,” Lomatium nudicaule) in order to feed the spirits of the salmon, or how to follow appropriate training, such as sweat bathing and purification with devil’s-club, in order to gain luck, supernatural strength, and power. Many stories embody local ecological and geographical referents, so they teach people lessons about their own home places, including key historical and sacred landmarks, expected distributions of plants, which plants are useful (such as stinging nettle or Indian-hemp as sources of fibre), and species on which one can rely in times of food scarcity. They also remind people about how their ancestors acquired knowledge from other animals, like bears, mountain goats, and mallard ducks, who taught them about edible roots and other food they could eat. Origin stories like the “Old-One” narratives of Interior Salish traditions also explain how deeply engrained peoples’ knowledge and customs are, demonstrating the division of labour between men and women, the kindling of fire, the making of spears and birch-bark baskets, the construction of mat lodges, the search for food during

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famine, and the digging of roots and drying of berries. As the narratives recount, all of these practices are based on instructions from the Creator and are therefore embraced as cultural norms. Although many of the stories are programmed to particular localities and environments, they also carry common themes that resonate widely across cultures and language groups, sometimes in far-distant places. For example, versions of the story of the origin of sunlight – in which Raven transforms himself magically into the tiny needle of a hemlock or other conifer – occur up and down the coast, from the Tlingit and Haida to the Coast Salish and Nuu-chah-nulth. Similarly, the stories of Salmonberry Bird and his magical song that ripens salmonberries and other berries, of Spider teaching people to make fishnets, of the blind Duck women cooking roots in the sky country, of the “dog children,” and of the berry-picking woman of high status who married a Bear extend throughout the Northwest Coast and beyond. Some of the stories from the study area also align with narratives from other parts of North America and even from Asia and Europe. There are over 100 versions of the “Star Husband” tale, in which young women root diggers are transported into the sky country as the wives of stars and manage to lower themselves back to earth by making a long rope of fibre. This theme extends all along the Pacific Coast from Alaska to California, across the Interior Plateau and the Great Plains, east to the Great Lakes and the Maritimes, and north to the boreal forest (Boas 2002). The diffusion and integration of themes and stories across such a wide geographic and cultural space are a testament to the remarkable network of communication and exchange that has existed for millennia in northwestern North America and right across the continent. It is quite likely that other cultural traits, including knowledge, practices, and beliefs that relate to numerous types of plants, were similarly spread, transformed, and integrated into diverse languages and cultures; the patterns of influence across various linguistic and cultural boundaries are probably as relevant for botanical and ecological knowledge as they are for stories and other forms of cultural expression. Philosophy and Worldviews

Recognition of the close relationship between humans and other entities of the environment – kincentricity, or kincentric ecology – is fundamental to the belief systems of Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America. Another, related aspect is the deeply spiritual relationship people have built with their environments. Every activity – from gathering foods and basket materials to harvesting cedars for canoes, preparations for hunting, and administering medicines – has an essential religious and spiritual side to it, reflecting the perceived powers and influences seen in the plants, animals, mountains, and environments that must be acknowledged and respected. If these established protocols are not followed

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and if proper expressions of appreciation are not directed to the spirits of the salmon, the fruits, and the other life forms that give themselves to people, these beings will withdraw themselves as supernatural benefactors and may, instead, actively harm those individuals and communities that commit transgressions. Peoples’ stories, dances, First Food ceremonies, and symbolic representations carved in wood or painted on rock also serve as reminders of the spirit within and underlying every part of the universe. Social constraints against wasteful, greedy, or thoughtless actions toward the plants, animals, and powers that provide for humans – communicated over generations through parables, rituals, and art – may be even more powerful and more enduring than formal laws or regulations. Community-mediated controls against improper resource use, embedded in cultures and institutions of local and Indigenous peoples worldwide, exemplify alternative models for conservation and management (L. King 2004). As argued by political scientist Elinor Ostrom38 (1990; see also Dolšak and Ostrom 2003), such community-based cultural controls feature in the management and regulation of so-called common property resources and are potentially effective and formidable forces in our current global efforts to conserve biodiversity, manage natural resources and protected areas, and even reverse trends in climate change (see E.N. Anderson 1996; and Berkes 2012). Accumulating Botanical Knowledge: A Synthesis The immense diversity of knowledge, practice, and belief around plants and environments among the many Indigenous groups in the study area had its roots among small numbers of people entering the region by land or, more probably, along the coast toward the end of the Pleistocene glaciation over 14,000 years ago. Indications are that the people arriving here were already well acquainted with many plants – species that are widespread and still important to Indigenous peoples of the past few hundred years. These include food plants like northern riceroot, lingonberry, soapberry, fireweed, cow-parsnip, spiny wood fern rootstocks, bracken rhizomes, and pine cambium; material plants like birches, spruces, lodgepole pine, poplars, willows, bull kelp, sedges, and stinging nettle; and medicinal plants like yarrow, sagebrush, and tree pitch and barks. The Monte Verde archaeological site in Chile, dating to this early time, gives us some understanding of the lifeways and technologies of the contemporary people of northwestern North America since it is likely that the Monte Verde people travelled along the Pacific Coast via the “kelp highway.” The earliest peoples in the study area, from this and other evidence, used fire and different fuels, knew how to cook their food, used wooden implements like wedges and digging sticks, made cordage and matting from plant fibres, including stinging nettle and willow bark, probably stored at least some of their food in woven

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or stitched bark containers as well as in caches and caves, and probably had some type of boats. These early peoples would have had names for the plants they used, probably shared stories and songs about them, and may well have held worldviews that included reverence for plants and that imbued them with spiritual powers, as they did animals. They probably practised smudging, bathing, and purification using plant materials, and this would have enhanced their hunting success and helped to protect them from predators. Shamans, as well as herbal healers, likely would have been active then as in more recent times. Knowledge about new useful plant species encountered and about effective new techniques in weaving, woodworking, harvesting, fishing, or hunting would have spread from family to family and group to group – just as obsidian, shells, and other valued materials did – along trade routes, trade networks, and nodes of gathering that were established very early on, as documented in the archaeological record. Likewise, new names and vocabulary, stories, and ideas about plants and their use would have been continuously developing and spreading across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Life would have been undeniably harsh in the early millennia, with residual ice, torrents and floods, and changing sea levels requiring flexibility and strong adaptive capacity, although many of the seemingly dramatic changes actually occurred over centuries, rather than days, years, or decades. Judging from some of the origin stories, however, famines and food shortages would have been frequent, and in these narratives, knowledge of plants as more predictable food sources – especially root vegetables like bracken and spiny wood fern and fruits like rosehips, highbush cranberries, and kinnikinnick berries that remain on the bushes over winter – often meant the difference between life and death. Knowledge about firewood, tinder, and ways to keep fires burning was also a common theme of the stories from deep time. Human populations remained sparse and relatively mobile throughout most of the area, although some places, such as around river estuaries and lakeshores, where people had access to a variety of different ecosystems and resource species, would have supported higher numbers of people in more permanent settlements. Some of these places, such as Namu on the central coast of British Columbia, have remained more or less continuously occupied to the present, probably with some of the very same plant species being used initially as more recently, although the plant diversity would have been significantly lower since some species – like western redcedar – apparently did not extend their ranges that far north until around the Mid Holocene. Ancestral languages – and plant vocabularies distinctive to those languages – were initiated at least by the Mid Holocene and possibly earlier: Proto-Haida in the area of Haida Gwaii today; Proto-Na-Dené (including what would become the Eyak, Tlingit, and Dene [Athabaskan] languages) in central Yukon, Alaska, and north-central British Columbia; Proto-Salishan in the lower Fraser Valley;

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and so forth. These early languages would not have been as complex or nuanced as they later became but would have had terms for firewood, for common trees like willow and spruce, and for edible roots, berries, and other types of plants of cultural salience. Many of these names probably reflected key characteristics of colour, shape, texture, taste, or odour, as well as how they were used or the animals with which they were associated. A good example is the name for soapberry, evidently derived in both Proto-Salish and early Dene (Athabaskan) from a term meaning “to foam” or “foaming” (Turner and Burton 2010). Even languages like Haida that have retained much of their unique character over several millennia show evidence of borrowing of plant names from other people, indicating intergroup contact of one form or another. The similarity between the Haida name for western redcedar, ts’uu, and the name for spruce in several Dene languages and the congruence of the Haida and Ts’msyen names for highbush cranberry are two examples, although the time frame and direction of borrowing are uncertain in both of these cases. Likely, as in more recent times, men and women had generally separate roles in the very early days, with men undertaking most of the hunting, fishing, travelling, woodworking, and heavier construction and women undertaking the harvesting of plants and shellfish, processing of food, and harvesting and weaving of fibrous materials, as well as the care and teaching of infants and children. It seems, from all accounts, that around the beginning of the Late Holocene – from about 4,000 to 3,000 years ago – was a time when the patterns of plant knowledge and use as known and documented from the past few centuries were firmly established. Sea levels were generally stabilized, and resources became more predictable. The vegetation and forest composition seen today were largely in place, although there were intervals of fluctuation in temperature and precipitation, in the extent of grassland and upland meadow versus forest, and in the relative size of wetlands and water bodies compared to terrestrial habitat. Human populations expanded, houses became bigger (at least in some cases), and permanent settlements grew in size, accompanied by greater social stratification and occupational specialization, especially evident on the Northwest Coast. More people meant the need for more resources of all kinds and perhaps limits to certain key resources – including some berries, roots, cedar bark, or stinging nettles – which then had to be managed and regulated. Diversification of resource use through seasonal rounds – regular movements between different elevations and resource locales – with sites being accessed by smaller family or clan groups, was one strategy to limit stress on resources. Another was developing more sophisticated food-processing and storage techniques. Of particular interest is the development, over time, of management systems for plant and animal resources, including a suite of practices to maintain and enhance key resource species and habitats: burning over areas to create and maintain openings and mosaics of successional stages; selectively harvesting

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greens, root vegetables, and tree cambium; pruning berry bushes; replanting, transplanting, and scattering propagules; tilling and fertilizing the soil; weeding undesirable grasses and other species; and in some cases constructing and maintaining terracing for optimal plant growth and better access (Croes 2003; Deur and Turner 2005; Lepofsky 2009a; Peacock and Turner 2000; Turner, Deur, and Lepofsky 2013). Along with these practical techniques for encouraging productivity of resources were associated institutional, social, and cultural developments – including protocols for managing and sharing the resources. Especially on the Northwest Coast, but also to some extent in the Interior Plateau, increased social complexity – with the creation of a leadership class – was evidently yet another outcome of denser populations and resource limitations. Chiefs and nobility often took control and ownership of key productive areas, assuming not only the rights to particular resource species and locales but also the responsibility for their care and maintenance. They oversaw the harvesting, processing, and storage of the resources, and through various means, including feasting, they shared the resources with their communities, as well as exchanging them with others as gifts and trade goods, thereby bringing prestige and support to themselves, their families, and their communities. Thus, at some point, probably in the Late Holocene, prime crabapple groves, prime stands of cedar, prime patches of salalberries, highbush cranberries, and huckleberries, and prime root garden areas for springbank clover and edible camas became “owned” resources, which were subjected to more intensive management and enhancement under the oversight of chiefs or other recognized leaders or specialists. Combined with highly productive sites and habitats situated strategically at nodes or crossroads of travel and interaction, systems of social and ecological management and intensification of key resources led to the creation of “cultural keystone places” – places throughout the study area and beyond that are known as resource hubs and as centres for social, cultural, and economic exchange. Some of these, like The Dalles on the Columbia River and the Fountain area on the mid Fraser River, are extremely old; The Dalles shows evidence of being a focused harvesting site going back around 9,000 years at least. Some of these “cultural keystone places” are in montane regions (Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011); many are situated along the coast, beside waterways, or at river estuaries. These places are usually rich in multiple resources like fish, edible roots, berries, and basket materials, many of which are available for harvesting at around the same time. Not only are these places important as nodes of trading and social interaction, but in terms of transmission and exchange of botanical and environmental knowledge, their role has also probably been critical. Likely, it was at such nodes that new technologies (e.g., new designs for canoes, adzes, fishhooks, or digging sticks; basketry and spinning techniques; and bows and arrows), new ideas (e.g., cooking in earth ovens, creating clam gardens or root gardens, and pruning to

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enhance berry production), and novel products (e.g., edible roots, berries, basketry materials, and medicines from other places) were acquired, either directly from the original sources or indirectly through a second or third party travelling from some distant location. Along with these new technologies, ideas, and products came related names and vocabulary, as well as stories, songs, and ceremonies. Since spouses were met and slaves bought at such gathering places, they served as important sources of such information, resulting in even greater rates of knowledge exchange. Some of the travellers drawn to these nodes of interaction evidently came from far-distant places, just as peoples from the study region travelled to gathering places and communities far outside of the region, such as in the Haida and Heiltsuk excursions to California. Interior Salish and Nuu-chah-nulth peoples, too, may have travelled long distances to meet at some place like The Dalles and somehow transfer information, such as the name for skunk-cabbage, from one group to another; and this must have occurred far enough back for such a term to have been widely disseminated among both language subfamilies. Similarly, Nisga’a or Gitxsan people may have travelled far south, long ago, to the ProtoSalish homeland around the lower Fraser Valley area, where they somehow acquired the Salishan name for hazelnuts. There are other intriguing linkages: pit-cooking, basketry technologies, and other traditions that connect people in the study region with those of the southern Plains and Great Basin regions, possibly via the Willamette Valley region of Oregon or the Calispell Valley of eastern Washington; stories from the Northwest Coast that have themes similar to those from eastern Canada and even the southern United States; and practices around harvesting and use of birch bark from the Secwepemc and Dakelh peoples that are similar to those of the Anishenaabe of eastern Canada (Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty 2003). There are even ties through foods, technologies, story themes, and in the case of the Dene (Athabaskans), apparent language relationships with northeastern Asia (Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009a, 2009b; Kari and Potter 2010a, 2010b). In terms of the future of humanity, perhaps the most significant element to emerge from this study on the development of knowledge, practices, and beliefs that relate to plants and environments is the widely embraced belief system – common to virtually all of the Indigenous groups in the study area and beyond – that underpins peoples’ relationships with and use of the environment. Its fundamental nature is reflected in peoples’ food systems, technologies, and medicinal practices throughout the region (see F. Brown et al. 2009; Turner 2005; and Turner and Atleo 1998). Termed “kincentric ecology,” or “kincentricity,” it is the understanding that all plants and animals – and other elements of the environment – are sentient living beings, closely related to humans and often with the power to influence human lives positively or negatively depending on how we behave toward them. It brings an imperative for respect and

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reciprocity, including acknowledging and giving thanks to those life forms that help and provide for us, using them with care, and not wasting them. This philosophy, or worldview, is reflected in stories, songs, dances, and ceremonies – such as the First Foods ceremonies – throughout the study region. Although we associate traditional resource management practices with the past few millennia, the philosophical underpinnings of these practices must have ancient roots, as enshrined in narratives and other traditions, likely going right back to the time of people’s entry into northwestern North America and earlier. These belief systems have fostered a caring attitude toward plants, animals, and the environment that seems to be lacking in mainstream society. If such a world­ view could be more widely shared and adopted, we might have a better chance of maintaining ecological integrity and biodiversity in the world. Pathways and Venues for Learning and Knowledge Exchange We possess all of the information reported in this book that relates to cultural knowledge, names of plants, species that are edible or have medicinal properties, and technologies and approaches for using plant materials, enhancing plant growth, and maintaining habitats because people passed it along from previous generations, teaching, demonstrating, modifying, and adapting it. Even in the times of great change and loss, some individuals were able, through desire and circumstance, to retain the knowledge of the past and bring it forward to the present (see Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012). Given the crucial role of these remarkable individuals – these keepers of culture – in acquiring, adapting, and disseminating ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge, and given the rich legacy of knowledge about plants and environments revealed from ancient times, what lessons can be learned from examining the modes and circumstances of this learning and sharing? Furthermore, how can these lessons be applied as components of ongoing cultural revitalization and the maintenance of biocultural richness? The remaining sections of this chapter address these questions, starting with considerations of pathways and approaches to knowledge transmission and adaptation. Acquisition, transmission, and adaptation of cultural knowledge, practices, beliefs, and language that relate to plants and environments are an integral and essential component of Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems (Berkes 2012; R.E. Ignace 2008; Turner, Ignace, and Ignace 2000; Wyndham 2004). The patterns of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge of northwestern North American First Peoples identified from this research have resulted from intricate combinations of social-ecological processes, some of which had their beginnings even before humans first stepped onto the North American continent with their botanical and environmental knowledge from their ancient

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Asian homelands. In terms of ecological processes, the same forces that affect patterns of distribution and abundance in plants and animals can also influence humans. For example, the fortunes and opportunities for survival of all life forms, from ancient times to the present, are directly affected by sea level fluctuations, climatic shifts, volcanic eruptions, droughts, floods, and the abundance and productivity of biotic resources. Additionally, peoples’ names, uses, and cultural practices that relate to other life forms depend on their familiarity with them and thus on the immediacy or availability (i.e., abundance, frequency, and distribution) of these organisms as living entities, as raw materials, or as finished goods. In turn, humans are active participants in the system, and their activities can directly influence the abundance, frequency, and distribution – and even the genetic composition and evolutionary trajectories – of other biota. Ethnobotanical and ethnoecological patterns align well with biogeographical patterns and processes; application of the latter can facilitate our understanding of the tremendous complexities, congruences, and variations in the former. Concepts such as endemism, isolation, association, disturbance regime, microclimate, vector, geographic barrier, and corridor can all be adopted into the realms of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge transmission, as can terms related to biological change and transformation: centre of origin, parallel and convergent development, selection, adaptation, replication, fragmentation, dissemination, affinity, incursion, and diffusion. Metaphorically, processes like propagation, germination, cross-pollination, hybridization, and symbiosis can also be applied in the context of patterns in ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge. As with the patterns of biological species, the existence of any particular cultural knowledge – the name or application of a given plant in a particular language or culture, for example – is dependent not on one thing but on a combination of many influences. Some of these predominate, however, and may apply simultaneously to suites or clusters of cultural knowledge. Identifying those factors that, in combination, are the most influential in determining ethnobotanical and ethnoecological patterns in northwestern North America requires a detailed examination of many different phenomena on different spatial and temporal scales. Although this research provides the beginnings of such an examination, it will not provide conclusive answers but rather will suggest ideas to be further considered and built upon. Contact between two or more individuals at a single place and at a single time is generally required for information to be transmitted orally – although there are exceptions, such as with new knowledge acquired through dreaming or spiritual training, as explained by Dr E. Richard Atleo (Chief Umeek) (2004, 2011; see also Turner and Atleo 1998).39 Many Indigenous specialists in herbal medicine or art can attest to gaining inspirational teachings through fasting and ceremonial purification in the form of visions and spiritual guidance, which

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they have then enfolded into their personal accumulating store of knowledge, practice, and belief. Furthermore, considered through the lens of kincentric ecology, individuals participating in knowledge transmission need not necessarily be human since animals and plants – and, some would say, even rocks – can be teachers and conveyors of critically important information. Coming to a deep understanding of humans’ place in the ecosystem can thus involve diverse routes and pathways even on the most restricted scale. There are many different interpersonal relationships involved in the transmission and acquisition of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge. Intergenerational teaching, as noted previously, has tended to take place within the circle of a family – between spouses, parents and children, or grandparents and grandchildren. Each stage in an individual’s life has had its own balance between learning and acquiring knowledge, on the one hand, and sharing, teaching, and enacting knowledge, on the other. For First Peoples of the study region, infants, even while still unborn, began their journey of learning through songs and stories from their mothers, shaped in some cases by intended roles determined through inherited positions or prophetic dreams. Training and instruction continued in many forms once the baby was born. Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (pers. comm., 2009) described how, in Kwakwaka’wakw traditions, a newborn infant’s umbilical cord would be made into a bracelet, dried, and given to a talented person admired by the parents – a canoe builder, basketmaker, or healer, for example – to wear in order to create a bond between the child and the expert and to encourage the talents that would be offered and taken up as the child grew. Being confined to a cradle and carried around or being positioned on a tree branch while its mother dug roots or picked berries nearby taught an infant patience and contemplation (Mary Thomas 2001). Washing a baby with mushroom juice gave it strength and independence, according to Nlaka’pamux traditions (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). Ashes from sea palm (Postelsia palmaeformis) rubbed on the spine of a Ditidaht infant destined to be a whale hunter prepared him for the difficult training and harsh trials he would endure in his future life (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Children of nobility, especially in the highly stratified societies of the Northwest Coast, were groomed as chiefs and matriarchs from the time of their infancy and often underwent intensive and strenuous training in oratory and other skills of leadership (E.R. Atleo 2004, 2011; Recalma-Clutesi 2007). Toddlers and children in general were carefully observed by parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles as they grew up in order to determine their aptitudes and interests so that by the time they were eight or nine years old their future specialization in a profession could be supported and encouraged as much as possible. All children were provided with opportunities to observe and practice the basic skills they would need as adults: hunting, fishing, and carpentry for boys; and plant gathering, food processing, basketry, and so forth for girls. Experiential learning through participation in a family’s or clan’s essential activities was an 386 | part four – underlying philosophy

overriding method for children to acquire all kinds of cultural knowledge. Even young children participated in food harvesting, for example, and many provided themselves and even their families with a substantial portion of their required daily nutrition by foraging for greens, berries, and clams, by fishing, and by snaring birds and small mammals (Gerald Amos, pers. comm., 2008; Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2008; Turner and Thompson 2006). Times of travelling and camping out with their families were also effective learning opportunities for children and youth. Key landmarks, sacred ancestral sites, important harvesting places, springs of water, and species of plants and animals not normally encountered were pointed out on such travels, often emphasized by associated place names and stories, to be recalled and passed on many decades later. Children and young adults also witnessed and participated in management practices like landscape burning, pruning of berry bushes, replanting of roots, and ceremonial scattering of berries when they were out on the land with parents and elders. Focused instruction of children and youth during teachable moments, especially around food preparation and eating, was another time-honoured mode of passing on information. As children take food into their bodies, it is often said, they are particularly situated for taking in knowledge. As recounted by Tlingit elder Betty James, “They usually talked to younger people after dinners in the evenings, make them sit down so they can listen, sometimes usually around a fire and make them sit, make sure they listen. And later on, they’re through eating, sometimes still around the table, they used to do that to us, my dad. He made us sit so we listen to what he’s telling us. And they never used mean words when they’re trying to explain anything. It’s usually told in a nice way” (cited in Kake 1989, 20–1). Stories, rich with cultural lessons and teachings about plants and environments, were told to children over and over again by grandparents and other elders in a household, with some individual narratives continuing over three or four nights. Children were rewarded with stories for tasks that they undertook, like pulling the bones out of dried fish, helping to pick berries, or bringing in fuel or water. Many of today’s elders, like Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), remember these occasions and the stories that were told to them, which they are now recounting to their own grandchildren and great grandchildren (Turner, Recalma-Clutesi, and Deur 2013). Formal oration by knowledgeable elders – historians and experts in narratives and traditions – at feasts, potlatches, and other gatherings was another means of transmitting important knowledge: origin stories of families and communities, accounts of the boundaries of a nation’s or clan’s territories, stories of war, conflict, and resolution, and instructions on cultural protocols and the dangers of transgressing them. Even young children were made to listen carefully to these speeches, as recalled by Chief Earl Maquinna George (2003). Children were also brought into the spiritual and ceremonial life of families and communities from an early age. Young children participated, and still do, in dances and were sometimes key participants in First Foods ceremonies – in Ancient Pathways and New Pathways  |  387

the Saanich First Salmon ceremony, for example, where young children were the ones to bring the first salmon up from the water to an elder to be ceremonially welcomed. Children were taught through stories and by example to respect and appreciate other life forms and never to torment or needlessly kill animals, never to point at certain mountains, and not to pick certain flowers. As they grew older, they learned to offer formal thanks to medicinal plants and other resource species before harvesting, and they were taught associated protocols such as only removing one piece of cedar bark from each tree, not cutting too deeply into a birch tree when removing the outer bark, or leaving a gift of food behind if they took nuts or roots from a rodent cache. Children also learned through contests, competitions, and games, such as the Nuxalk game with tsayamuus (paintbrush, Castilleja unalaschcensis) (see chapter 6) or the Ditidaht pilaa-pilaa contest with sword fern fronds (see chapter 9), which helped children learn to control their expressions of emotion, in the first case, and trained boys to hold their breath for long periods of time, in the second. Puberty was a special time in a young person’s life that included training focused on the various tasks they would be responsible for as adults. As already noted, grandparents often had an immense influence on their grandchildren’s acquisition of knowledge and skills. Children were often cared for by grandparents while parents were otherwise occupied, and grandparents provided many opportunities for detailed and ongoing instruction, including participatory learning (Turner 2005; Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012). The memories of grandparents held by knowledgeable elders of recent generations – Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth), John Thomas, Joan Morris (Sellemah), Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim), Dr Margaret Siwallace, and Dr Mary Thomas – are invariably filled with affection, and the teachings they imparted have remained clear and compelling – in some cases, over six or seven decades. Marriage presented opportunities both for learning and imparting new knowledge from, and to, the clan or community of one’s spouse, as well as for eventually passing on teachings and skills to one’s children. For example, Gitga’at matriarch Helen Clifton came to the Gitga’at community of Hartley Bay as a young bride from the Prince Rupert area, and in the early years of her marriage, she was taught many critically important methods of food preparation by her mother-in-law, Lucille Clifton, and by her sisters-in-law, who were older than she was: how to cut and sun dry halibut and salmon, how to smoke fish and seal meat, and how to harvest and process seaweed. Now Helen, herself an elder, is a major instructor of other women in these skills. Many women, like Helen, moved after marriage to their husband’s community, which might be some distance away and sometimes even from a different language group, since marriages were often arranged to provide opportunities for resource access and trading alliances in different places.40 These women would become functionally

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bilingual or, later, multilingual since, in the time following European contact, they usually also spoke Chinook Jargon and English. They, in turn, often taught their children some of the language and traditions of their original community, as well as of their adopted community, and served as conduits for channelling information and resources – including plant resources like wapato, camas, seaweed, bitterroot, huckleberries, and soapberries – from one group to the other. Cultural exchanges from place to place could, at times, be fleeting and unpredictable. Sometimes a single traveller or group of travellers, visitors from a distant location – perhaps like the young man in the Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį discovery described in chapter 2 – might encounter others on the way and exchange observations, experiences, and stories. They might also stop and stay at another community for a period of time, such as over a winter, to be hosted by a family and, in turn, contribute new techniques, new stories, and new ideas to their hosts. Such stops might sometimes become routine, resulting in the establishment of “cultural edges” and augmenting opportunities for both learning and introducing novel ideas, terms, and innovations (Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty 2003).41 One can also imagine chains and networks of learning that must have taken place, where innovations, stories, or new vocabulary acquired by one or more individuals in one location would be passed on to others and then retransmitted – sometimes very quickly – over and over until they became widely known and practised. Some of these ideas and practices would be adapted to new situations as they were transmitted, applied to different species and products, or altered in various ways to meet different cultural norms. Thus variations were produced – and reproduced – until, over decades, centuries, and millennia, the original source of a particular procedure, name, or application that related to plant use, for example, was altogether obscured. One can assume that the use of the bow and arrow as a hunting implement represented such a rapidly transmitted innovation since, over a relatively short period of time, bows and arrows replaced the spear and atlatl (spear thrower) almost everywhere. Most people were quick to adopt a new and more effective technology, as they are today. The variations existing in the designs and materials used for bows and arrows in different areas reflect the adaptations to particular environments and cultures. Learning from others also took place at shared harvesting grounds and nodes of convergence – those “cultural keystone places” where people routinely gathered to harvest resources like salmon, oulachens, camas bulbs, or huckleberries, as well as to trade with each other and share cultural events. Wintertime feasts and potlatches also served as institutionalized networks of social and cultural exchange, providing chances for people to visit each other and to bring novel goods and ideas, as well as vocabulary, songs, dances, stories, techniques, and technologies, thereby increasing the resilience of individual family units and reciprocating communities. Less exotic but equally important opportunities for

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learning took place in the context of peer groups during harvesting expeditions, food preparation, weaving, carving, or other tasks – times of mentoring – when older people instructed younger ones and participatory learning occurred naturally and consistently, turning novices into experts over the course of the years. One can assume that most of these traditions and venues for knowledge transmission go back to earliest times. The routes or pathways of dissemination of names and knowledge, and possibly even the plants themselves in some cases, would have followed major transportation routes: along the Pacific coastline; up and down the major riverways, namely the Stikine, Skeena, Bella Coola, Fraser, and Columbia; across peninsulas, headlands, prairies, plateaus, and lakes; and through the mountain passes. The actual vectors of dissemination – travellers, chiefs, slaves, brides, or combinations of people – can only be speculated about or inferred from oral traditions or from more recent experiences. Of course, the types of knowledge transferred would have varied with the individuals involved. Groups of people travelling, moving, and settling into new territories would also bring their knowledge, practices, beliefs, and language with them, possibly blending these with the cultural knowledge and practices of people already inhabiting the destination area and adapting them to new environments and new vegetation as encountered. Such blended knowledge systems reflect elements from the two – or more – original sources, but often these elements may be difficult to distinguish unless they are obviously based on species not occurring in one or the other locales. Similar patterns may emerge for suites of characters, such as groups of plants that have similar distribution and use patterns across similar areas.42 Perhaps the most important lesson to be deciphered from examining modes and pathways of learning about plants and environments is that practical knowledge and cultural teachings can accumulate and convert themselves into mechanisms for social and environmental adaptation and change. As those who study political economy and human ecology can confirm, we humans are linked inextricably to our environments and are capable of causing profound changes to species and ecosystems through deforestation, overharvesting, introducing species, and other forms of disruption. Sometimes human impacts on resources and environments are cumulative and indirect or are manifested across different scales of time and space, making it even more difficult to detect the interplay of causes and effects. Nevertheless, key indicators – including an alarming loss of biocultural diversity – tell us that we need to change our behaviours if we wish to stem the tide of global deterioration that we have, collectively, let loose. Currently, many of us in the so-called “developed” world are using resources and degrading ecosystems beyond the capacity of the earth to recover and restore itself. We are depriving other species and future generations of the habitats they likely will need to survive. Furthermore, because of past colonial practices and current government policies, Indigenous peoples’ rich

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and complex knowledge systems, as discussed and reflected in this book, have been eroded, and their once-strong ties to their lands and territories have been weakened and in some cases lost altogether. Over the past several generations, children have not been learning the details and levels of knowledge about plants and environments that their parents and grandparents knew. A two-pronged approach for mainstream society is therefore needed that will, first, reverse the environmental degradation we humans are causing on the earth and, second, strengthen and renew the planet’s rich cultural diversity, including local and Indigenous knowledge systems. Thus finding ways to learn new and better behaviours for living within our means and developing new and better relationships within the “global commons” are crucial (E.R. Atleo 2011; Berkes 2012; K.M.A. Chan et al. 2007; W. Davis 2009; Dolšak and Ostrom 2003). Cultural Renewal in the Twenty-First Century Most of the circumstances of recent change described in this book, particularly in chapter 4, have not been positive for Indigenous peoples in terms of maintaining their cultural identity and overall health and well-being. In some ways, one could argue, their botanical knowledge has expanded, with the influx of many new species and plant products and with the increased opportunities for exchange of knowledge across language and cultural divides, both among Indigenous groups and between them and the newcomers, including Europeans, Euro-Americans, and Euro-Canadians, as well as those of other ethnic groups such as Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, and Mexicans. For many Indigenous groups, dozens of new names for introduced vegetables and other plant species were incorporated almost seamlessly into vocabularies, along with many other new terms based on all of the novel devices and species made accessible (Kay 1993; L.C. Thompson and Thompson 1996; Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). This seeming language enrichment, however, occurred only in the short term, until the languages started to disappear, to be replaced by English. As well as the wide array of new and diverse plant foods that were introduced to the First Peoples throughout the area, new materials and implements allowed woodworking and other forms of art and sculpture to flourish.43 In terms of travel, first horses and then cars, trains, and new kinds of watercraft of all sizes, from small motorboats to fishing boats, large steamboats, and later diesel ferries, made transportation of both people and products easier and faster. Imported woven fabrics of wool, cotton, burlap, and canvas, Hudson’s Bay blankets, and sewing machines – along with European styles of dress – increased the possibilities for clothing, shelter, household furnishings, and art. New types of tools, containers, and vessels for cooking and storage enhanced food harvesting and production methods. The advancement of electricity – with its lights, electric stoves, freezers, and refrigerators – facilitated life in many ways, not only

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for the Indigenous peoples but also, equally or more so, for the newcomers, depending on economic circumstances and proximity to power generation sources. Sadly, all of these innovations and introductions were accompanied by an overt policy by the colonial government to eliminate Indigenous languages and cultures and to assimilate Indigenous peoples as much as possible into the European mould. The newcomers were almost successful in their endeavours, but thanks to the staunch efforts of many people who struggled to maintain their cultural traditions against all odds, these rich cultures and many of the languages still endure. Generations of Indigenous people, who loved and believed in their cultures (the foods, the stories, entire ways of life) and saw the value and beauty in their languages (their place names, their plant names, their songs) have worked hard in many different ways to keep them alive and to pass them on to others. Their efforts can be seen in the publications and notes of ethnographers like Franz Boas, James Teit, John Swanton, Thomas McIlwraith, and Marius Barbeau, none of whom would have been able to accomplish their detailed descriptions and reports of the various languages and cultures with which they worked if not for their Indigenous teachers, colleagues, and friends who spent their time and energy meticulously explaining, translating, correcting, and answering what must have been countless questions and requests for information. The commitment of these people to keeping viable the rich botanical knowledge of their ancestors can be seen in the many books and other publications, theses, and films related to ethnobotany and ethnoecology in Northwestern North America that they have authored or directed or that have cited them as major consultants and collaborators (see Turner and Lepofsky 2013). Some of these dedicated people have been recognized with awards and honorary degrees at universities and colleges for their work in maintaining and teaching about their language, culture, and knowledge of plants and environments.44 Other Indigenous scholars have undertaken postsecondary education, achieving graduate degrees in areas related to ethnobotany or ethnoecology.45 Countless others, equally committed to the maintenance, revitalization, and renewal of their botanical traditions and environmental knowledge, are known only to their own families and communities but must nonetheless be recognized. Without all of these people and their individual and collective work – in many cases alongside non-Indigenous scholars, supporters, and allies – the immense richness and diversity of these cultures and the languages within which they are embedded would have long disappeared, and humanity would be much poorer for this loss. Today, in the twenty-first century, there are an increasing number of Indigenous people of all ages who are interested in learning or relearning their own languages (J.C. Thompson 2012). There is also continuing and expanding interest in Indigenous arts like basketry – with immensely beautiful spruceroot and cedar-bark baskets and hats being made by Haida and Tlingit weavers,

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for example, that are valued as priceless gifts or sold at a fair market value as works of art. Weaving traditions in other areas and with other materials are also strong.46 Of course, the economic value of such items can in no way account for their cultural or intrinsic worth as iconic art works of immense and lasting importance that reflect the innovations, adaptations, and interconnections between peoples and environments over thousands of years. The use of natural resources in local economic development has come to be known as the “bioeconomy” (R.B. Anderson et al. 2008). Indigenous peoples have always harvested and used their local resources, including trading goods and items to which they may have ready access or for which there is a particular abundance to neighbouring families and communities, sometimes over fairly long distances (see chapter 10). Today, there have been various initiatives within Indigenous and other local communities, sometimes assisted by academic institutions, governments, and nongovernmental organizations, to develop smallscale industries and markets for products from wild-growing plants and other species found in forests, wetlands, and montane and marine environments. Such products have been called “nontimber forest products” (NTFP s), among other terms (Turner 2001). Despite their potential to provide jobs while still sustaining the growth and productivity of important species and habitats, these initiatives to market NTFP s are regarded by some Indigenous people as a dangerous commercialization of their cultural property and knowledge. There are fears that commercial use of culturally valued plant products like black huckleberries and edible seaweed will ultimately deplete them and reduce their availability as traditional foods, as well as impact the lives of bears and other wildlife that depend upon them. Small-scale harvesting of basketry materials such as cedar bark (both western redcedar and yellow-cedar), cedar and spruce roots, and birch bark, as well as the use of specialty woods such as yellow-cedar and red alder for carving, has generated significant income for Indigenous artisans, but given the destruction of these species through industrial forestry, there is still a fear that the supplies of these products are limited and that they are becoming more and more scarce. Large, monumental cedars are increasingly rare. This is mostly due to “high grading” – selectively harvesting only the biggest and best trees – and to often wasteful use of old growth cedar and other timber species in the forest industry. As early as 1918 Whitford and Craig (1918, 182) wrote, “The waste in the manufacture of lumber in this province is appalling to one accustomed to more conservative methods. Huge slabs of absolutely clear wood, 3 to 6 inches thick, are sent to the fuel pile [to be burned for fuel at the mill or perhaps sold for heating] … It is estimated that at least 25 per cent of the tree is left in the woods and another 30 to 35 per cent is wasted in the mill.” Recently, an Indigenous canoe maker flew by helicopter with forestry officials over an entire coastal watershed and was unable to find a single redcedar tree large enough to make

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14-1  |  Haida dugout canoes, on the beach at the Haida Heritage Centre at Kaay Llnagaay, Skidegate, BC , in 2008.

an oceangoing canoe. The spokesman for the Gitga’at at the McKenna-McBride Commission hearing of 1916 was mistaken in assuming “the day of the canoes is passing if it has not already passed” (McKenna-McBride Commission 1913–16). In fact, the day of the canoes is returning, and people are again crafting large, elegant dugout canoes and seeking the big cedars for these projects (figure 14-1).47 The potential marketing of traditional medicinal plant products brings a fear of overharvesting and disappearance of the medicinal plants and a fear of misuse of the medicines by those who do not understand the complexities of how they are to be administered. The spiritual aspects of their harvesting and use must be considered, for example, when publicizing cultural and intellectual knowledge that is normally kept private and that is subject to potential misappropriation. All of these concerns are valid, and some have already been

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borne out in one way or another. In the first part of the nineteenth century, as mentioned previously, some people earned a living by harvesting cascara bark or other products for the pharmaceutical industry, but there was a widely recognized depletion in cascara populations following this intensive harvest, and eventually the pharmaceutical companies started to grow their own cascara. The lessons learned in these cases are reflected in the more recent “gold rush mentality” harvest of Pacific yew when a potent anticancer compound, Taxol, was isolated from the bark. To make a profit and fill orders from the pharmaceutical company that began the manufacture of Taxol, many people started to harvest immense quantities of the bark without regard for the Indigenous peoples who had used it medicinally for generations and had relied on the tough, dense wood for a whole range of tools and implements (Turner 1998, 2001). Fortunately, commercial growing of Pacific yew and new technologies to synthesize Taxol from more basic molecules allowed a reprieve for the remaining yew trees. However, the lesson of what can happen with commercialization of a forest-based medicine remains. Another lesson could be that any harvesters of products like yew bark should follow the protocols established long ago by First Peoples: harvest only a strip of bark from the tree trunk or take bark only from some of the branches to allow the tree to heal itself and continue to grow. With this caution in mind, especially for medicines that might potentially treat serious illnesses like diabetes or cancer, some Indigenous people believe that as long as they are used with care and respect, it is acceptable to harvest or grow certain types for commercial use. Others consider such a practice to go against their fundamental belief that “medicines are for healing, not for sale” (Barbara Wilson [ Kii’iljuus], pers. comm., 2008). Other bioproducts that are being harvested commercially by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people include floral greens from species like evergreen huckleberry and salal (Turner and Cocksedge 2001). Here again, however, although the foliage of these species is not “used” in any quantity by Indigenous peoples (except for use of salal branches in pit-cooking), the berries of both species are highly valued, and there is a concern that heavy and prolonged harvesting of these greens will eventually reduce their potential to produce fruit. Another, somewhat novel type of nontimber forest product, at least novel for the Nisga’a in the Nass Valley, is the pine mushroom, or American matsutake (Tricholoma magnivelare). The Nisga’a, like many other peoples of the boreal forest and Northwest Coast, did not eat mushrooms originally.48 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, pine mushrooms from North America gained high value in Japanese markets, where the original matsutake (T. matsutake) was becoming scarce. Pine mushrooms were identified in the valley by a non-Nisga’a resident and plans were made to develop a mushroom-picking industry there. This case provides an interesting example of adaptive management and governance of a new resource, in which protocols for sustainable harvesting and

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jurisdiction of gathering sites were developed based on Nisga’a conventions. Whereas pine mushroom harvesting in other areas was taken over largely by Asian immigrants, in the Nass, the Nisga’a – with their newly acquired treaty rights – gained control of the mushroom harvest. In the end, it provided a new venue for younger Nisga’a to regain knowledge of their lands and historic harvesting sites owned by their waaps (“houses”). Contrary to a “tragedy of the commons” situation, which has developed in some other places around mushroom and other NTFP harvesting, the Nisga’a pine mushroom harvest serves as a promising model for sustainable land and resource use (Menzies 2006a). Perhaps one of the biggest concerns expressed by contemporary elders about the future of their botanical knowledge is how to impart the spiritual values and beliefs that they have always considered to be a requisite part of plant use and relationships with the natural world. They believe that cedar-bark harvesters need to continue to pay their respects to the tree before they remove any bark, that people gathering medicine still need to pay tribute to the medicine plants ceremonially and ask for their help and assistance if they are to be successful in healing, that the spirits of the mountains and rivers should be recognized and respected, or some misfortune will ensue, and that resources should never be wasted and always generously shared among the group. Some elders are worried that younger people, caught up in the consumeroriented society of today, are not learning the values of their cultures, including a respect for others and proper treatment of fish, game, and other foods. Some attribute the notable declines in berries and other plant resources to the lack of attention to these important protocols. The beliefs of Tsilhqot’in elder Helena Myers (Ìnkél) are cited in her daughter Linda Smith’s (2008b, 135–6) thesis on Tsilhqot’in oral traditions: Ìnkél recalls that in her youth, the Saskatoon bushes across the lake from T’èt’ághíntíl (a place along Konnie Lake, Xèní ), used to get so heavy with berries that one could mistake the berry patches for black bears, and the flowers from the spring beauty patches appeared as if covered in snow. Now, there are many Saskatoon berry patches and spring beauty grounds in the Tsìnlhqút’in [Tsilhqot’in] territory that are less productive and the plants in some areas have completely died out. Tsìnlhqút’ín elders often blame this scarcity on people who are nímính, saying they are ignoring traditional codes. There are many who are not receiving the essential cultural education and some simply do not believe in these cultural restrictions, therefore few practice it. Elders also point to wasteful and selfish behaviour by some that transgresses the social order. For example, with the convenience of freezers, some families put away more fish than they need, and then they have to throw it out the

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following year because it is too old. Another observation that relates to the use of freezers is that since families are now able to freeze an entire side of deer or all of the berries they are able to pick, some do not share these foods with other families as much as formerly. There are many others, however, who are carefully observing cultural protocols and continuing and strengthening their cultural traditions, including ceremonies and dances that reinforce unique perspectives and relationships with the natural world. In the summer of 2008, for example, the Tsawout community of Saanich hosted a traditional food feast, with pit-cooking of root vegetables, and a traditional First Salmon ceremony to show respect and thanks for the salmon.49 This ceremony, in various forms, has been enacted throughout the Northwest Coast as well as in some interior areas. For the Saanich, children were selected to bring the salmon from the ocean on a tray of sword fern fronds. The children, wearing sword ferns on their heads and around their waists, solemnly carried the salmon along a pathway of fern fronds and then presented it to the elders to cook and share with all of those present, along with prayers of thanksgiving. Similarly, the Atlágimma (Spirits of the Forest) dance, or Grouse dance, recently performed under the authority of Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla), both at the big house at Kingcome Inlet and at the Society of Ethnobiology meetings at the University of Victoria in the First Peoples’ House,50 brought the magic of the deep ecological teachings of reciprocity and interrelationship among all things and all actions to a new generation of Tsawataineuk youth and young adults – and to a broad international audience – who had never witnessed this dance (figure 14-2). In many different communities, as well as through academic institutions, there are educational programs and publications intended to help both document and pass on traditional knowledge about plants and environments (e.g., Nuxalk Food and Nutrition Program 1984; and Turner and Thompson 2006). Courses in ethnobotany have been offered in Indigenous-led institutions such as Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a (“Nisga’a House of Wisdom”), the postsecondary education institution of the Nisga’a Nation, which offers a bachelor of arts degree in First Nations Studies–Nisga’a in cooperation with the University of Northern British Columbia (figure 14-3). Demonstration ethnobotanical gardens have been established in many places, and new buildings and park areas are being landscaped with native species, which function simultaneously as beautiful ornamentals, as living examples for educational purposes, and as potential resources for culinary and artistic endeavours (Mackin 2004; Pukonen 2008; Turner and Wilson 2006). Native plant nurseries are producing quantities of culturally important indigenous species like wapato to aid in landscaping and restoration projects (Senos et al. 2006). On a broader scale, in a program called Recovering America’s Food Traditions (RAFT ), Nabhan (2006; see also Nabhan

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14-2  |  Grouse dancer, during the performance of the Atlágimma (Spirits of the Forest) dance under the authority of Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) in May 2010.

14-3  |  Diana Smith, Nisga’a elder, in a Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a (Nisga’a House of Wisdom) ethnobotany course in 2012, holding a sample of northern riceroot on a fieldtrip to Gingolx at the mouth of the Nass River, BC .

and Rood 2004) and others are working toward documenting the biological diversity of indigenous and other local foods, especially those that are endangered, either through scarcity or through diminishing use. The revival of the cedar canoe culture through a program known as Tribal Journeys is another manifestation of the many enterprises in cultural renewal. In the words of one participant in the canoe journeys, “We are taking our canoes out of the museums and putting them back in the water – and showing the world our culture is alive” (Celletti 2009). Described as “one of the most significant cultural movements of our time,” the Tribal Journeys program serves as an example of healing through tradition, in which coastal Indigenous people are literally following the paths of their ancestors and, in so doing, are regaining their knowledge, skills, identity, and pride, as well as participating in demanding physical exercise and group training that has many health benefits (ibid.; see also Halber Suarez 2012).

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Treaty rights and land negotiations continue at a number of levels, especially in British Columbia. In some cases, as with some of the Salish communities who signed Douglas treaties, efforts are underway to better define the extent and nature of rights granted under these treaties and to incorporate more up-todate understandings of Indigenous cultivation practices and land tenure than were recognized at the time the treaties were established. For the most part, the British Crown (and later the federal government of Canada) did not conclude treaties with First Nations west of the Rocky Mountains, leaving the subject of Aboriginal title to lands and resources largely unresolved in British Columbia for the past 150 years. First Nations never accepted that their rights to lands and resources were extinguished, and many used civil disobedience, court action, and political lobbying to force the public governments to reassess their position on the question of Aboriginal lands and rights (Tennant 1990). In the past three decades, the federal government, and later the provincial government as well, entered into treaty negotiations. Until these treaties are concluded, the governments are legally obliged to consult with First Nations before allowing any activity on publicly owned lands within their territories (the majority of lands in British Columbia) that may infringe upon Aboriginal rights arising from original use and occupancy. Although an awkward, and often acrimonious, process for protection, the legal acknowledgment of Aboriginal rights and title has opened up interest in and research on traditional knowledge of plants and animals of First Nations in British Columbia. Some First Nations in the province have opted to exchange their general and undefined Aboriginal rights for a clearly defined set of rights within defined geographical areas through modern-day treaties.51 These modern treaties, such as the Maa-nulth Final Agreement,52 provide some examples of how First Nations’ traditional plant and animal resources are being managed. Even without treaties, but backed by Aboriginal rights recognized in the Canadian Constitution and other legal venues, many First Nations throughout British Columbia are initiating their own land use plans that take to heart their needs for plant resources and land bases on which to practise and sustain their cultures. Others have negotiated with provincial and federal governments, and with supportive nongovernmental organizations, to collaborate in the sustainable use of traditional lands and resources – for example, in the development of marine protected areas and in the co-management of national park reserves.53 Much more needs to be done in developing co-management and co-governance systems, in establishing laws that effectively protect Indigenous peoples’ lands, waters, and resources from overexploitation, and in giving a real voice to Indigenous peoples’ needs and perspectives. As modern treaties are being slowly negotiated, however, there is a policy and legislative gap in providing protection for medicinal plants and other culturally

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valued species, as well as for culturally important lands. Currently, for example, the Heritage Conservation Act of British Columbia (HCA ), despite its stated purpose “to encourage and facilitate the protection and conservation of heritage property in British Columbia” (British Columbia 1996, part 1, 1), is limited in its application and does not explicitly protect medicinal plant populations or, necessarily, their habitats or culturally valued habitats in general – even when such areas are known from oral history to have cultural significance over many generations – unless these have some verifiable associated archaeological feature. Recently, for example, a large patch of obviously very old q’exmín (“wild celery,” Lomatium nudicaule)54 was destroyed by construction of a new bridge at the Little River ferry terminal near Comox on the east-central coast of Vancouver Island. As the site did not contain physical evidence (in the form of a culturally modified artifact) of past human use, it was not afforded automatic protection under provincial heritage legislation. The HCA appears to accommodate the heritage of First Peoples, but the legislation’s criteria of what is worthy of protection were selected through a decidedly European lens, which favours and values the built environment (e.g., monumental structures, works of art, and archaeological sites). Significantly, even an archaeological site can be legally demolished once it has been “scientifically” documented and the artifacts and/or human remains have been excavated. Further, although the HCA protects sites where there is physical evidence of past human use or occupation, this legislation was written at a time before archaeologists and anthropologists recognized the physical evidence of Indigenous-managed root gardens, berry gardens, orchards, and clam gardens. As a result, there is no explicit policy or practice associated with the HCA to include these unique and highly significant heritage features within the province’s heritage site system. Although there is other provincial and federal legislation in Canada that addresses indigenous plants, as well as threatened species and ecosystems, none explicitly considers the protection of First Nations’ cultural keystone species or managed landscapes; thus protection is by accident rather than by purposeful inclusion. Frustrated by the lack of legislative avenues to protect their traditional food, medicinal, and material plants and unique sites, First Nations have often asserted their Aboriginal rights and title through the courts. Although this action has provided some real success for First Nations, proving they have Aboriginal rights and title to a given area is an expensive, time-consuming, and acrimonious solution of last resort. Another venue that might help in this endeavour is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2007),55 which Canada and the United States have both endorsed. Along with the United Nations

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Convention on Biological Diversity (United Nations 1992), to which Canada is a signatory, this agreement requires Canada and the United States to conform to international standards in supporting their Indigenous citizens, including their rights to continue their traditions, languages, and use of their territories and resources. Steps Toward a Healthier World How can the lessons of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge and its modes of dissemination, transmission, and adaptation be applied as components of ongoing cultural revitalization and maintenance of biocultural richness? In the previous section, some of the diverse ways that knowledge is acquired and shared in Indigenous societies were identified. The process of knowledge building is not a static one but is cumulative, dynamic, and adaptive, as seen from the means used by First Peoples to fit themselves into the new situations imposed by the arrival of Europeans and other newcomers in the study region and from how they managed to retain key elements of their cultural practices and, in many cases, their languages through a period of immense and profound change. The endurance and strength of their belief systems and spiritual practices is particularly notable because worldviews and philosophies guide behaviours toward other humans and other species (Berkes 2012; L. King 2004; Nigh et al. 2002). In promoting ecocultural knowledge and practice, engagement and empowerment of individuals and communities of all types are fundamental. Both old and new modes of knowledge generation must be employed. Learning and teaching activities on diverse geographic and temporal scales, and through a range of formal and informal institutions, will assist in the appropriate and respectful dissemination of ecocultural knowledge and in the reconstruction and renewal of culturally and ecologically sound practices and processes. Successful models will provide lessons and tools and help to build ever more flourishing, effective, and resilient systems of transformative learning and practice, whereby we might be able to change attitudes and behaviours of mainstream society to less destructive and more conservation-oriented ways of living. A series of strategies for achieving long-term biocultural conservation – drawn from the teachings and examples of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological systems of Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America and supplemented from other sources – is presented below. These strategies provide, I hope, some initial steps for reversing the current trend of biocultural erosion and loss and for restoring a more balanced relationship between humans and their home places. Taken together, they comprise a blueprint for more diverse, resilient, mutually supportive, and environmentally aware human communities.

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Although embedded in time-honoured perspectives, the guiding principles are presented in a contemporary context, being intended for use by educators, planners, decision makers, and policymakers at all levels. Although they are categorized for convenience, the inextricable connections between them are acknowledged. They should be considered collectively and not in any particular order. Strategies Supporting Positive Change in Biocultural Systems Connecting with Communities and Places

It is important for any individual to identify with – and to love – particular places where they feel at home and particular people (and other life forms) whom they view as family and community. These personal connections are vital because they motivate people to care about the future, not just for themselves but also for others, and instil in them a desire to learn about seasonal and biological cycles and how to sustain and support those people and places that they care about (Cajete 2000; Feld and Basso 1996; Helin 2008; McKibben 2007; Thornton 2008). Furthermore, ethnoecological knowledge and learning are “situated” and contextualized in place, right across the spectrum of aesthetic, ceremonial, economic, personal, familial, historical, political, social, spiritual, and practical considerations (Feld and Basso 1996, 27; Nazarea 1999). When an individual’s or a community’s connections and relationships with a central place have been severed, they need to be renewed or rebuilt. Celebrating Intergenerational Continuity in Learning and Teaching

Learning about sustainable lifestyles and environments takes place at all stages of life, and each contributes to the knowledge system in unique ways. The knowledge, teachings, and guidance of elders are essential because of their long experience and the wisdom and judgment they provide. They are uniquely placed to pass on knowledge, skills, and perspectives to children, and on many occasions they are major contributors to a child’s learning experiences, in terms of both gentle instruction and providing opportunities for practice and participation. Often elders are also the storytellers and the memory keepers of a family and community. Young and middle-aged adults and parents are both teachers and receivers of instruction from peers and elders. Men and women each have their separate perspectives and areas of knowledge and specialization that should be recognized and incorporated into any strategies for biocultural renewal. Children represent the future; they take their acquired teachings, skills, and values with them through their entire lives. As Wyndham (2004, 175) writes, “Children’s home educational environments and peer interactions are central to understanding processes of knowledge transmission and acquisition and

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recognizing changing knowledge structures.” In addition, as noted by Ramirez (2007), long-term collaborative educational and research programs developed with young members of communities can lead to many decades of involvement and commitment – decades in which real changes can be realized and enacted. Facilitating all of these aspects of intergenerational teaching and learning – especially between elders and children – is an effective contribution toward greater cultural continuity, sustainability, and resilience (Turner and Thompson 2006). Recognizing Holistic Relationships and Interacting Processes

All things – whether in human or nonhuman communities, whether biotic or abiotic – are connected through relationships with each other and with the land in a web of interactive entities and processes, as reflected in the Nuu-chah-nulth phrase hishukish tsawaak (“everything is one”) (E.R. Atleo 2004, 2011; Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1995). Effective learning must engender this understanding: every action and every decision has consequences and outcomes, both for human endeavours (the “ethnosphere”) and for ecosystems at large (the “biosphere”), because they are inextricably connected (W. Davis 2001). The priorities and choices that we make, collectively, must reflect this reality. How humans treat each other and their environments will reflect back on their lives in various, sometimes very complex, ways. Instilling Gratitude, Accountability, and Responsibility

Everything we humans use – our foods, medicines, building materials, and water – is a gift, but with the gifts come obligations; we need to give back in some way whatever we take. Engendering a sense of appreciation and responsibility, even in young children, is a key to careful and wise use of resources and provides motivation for promoting biocultural sustainability. Teachings of respect are complex and require contextual knowledge and reflection, and they might be reinforced through participation in ritual and ceremony. Valuing and Supporting Diversity

Diverse species and populations, habitats, cultures, and languages provide greater opportunities and choices, thus increasing our collective resilience in the face of change. In the words of one of Henry Lewis’s (1977, 38, cited in A.M. Miller 2010, 34) informants in a study of traditional burning practices in the boreal forest, “it is better to have all kinds of places not all the same.” Similarly, recognizing diversity in strengths, skills, and aptitudes of individuals and communities is important in allowing people to reach their full potential and to make the best possible contributions to society, as skilled artists, healers, or wise leaders, and in allowing each community to contribute in its own way.

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Some individuals seem to be biologically predisposed toward conservatism and others toward seeking adventure and innovation; having these opposing forces within a population can lead to a healthy balance of cultural stability and adaptation to change. To gain as many potential solutions to problems as possible, it is necessary to ensure that everyone and every view has a voice and an ear and that everyone is empowered to participate. This includes particularly Indigenous peoples and their perspectives because of their unique knowledge and experience. As Ts’msyen author and lawyer Calvin Helin (2008, 168) explains, “In the same manner as we take ownership of our problems, we must also take ownership of our future.” Embracing Different Teaching Approaches and Learning Styles

Cultural and environmental learning and teaching occur through many venues and forms, as described previously. Therefore, employing multiple styles and strategies for imparting knowledge and skills will achieve a greater overall effect than restricting instruction to a single method. Learning is dynamic, cyclical, and cumulative. It involves instilling memory in all of the physical senses as well as emotions. Stories, creative arts, music, dance, ceremony, and ritual are thus important elements in a holistic learning process. Place-based learning, away from routine situations (e.g., at fishing or harvesting camps) can also be effective. Transformative education – taking people to new levels of understanding – occurs through building on learning stages over time and providing a range of experiences, including allowing times for contemplation and reflection, for observation, for practice, and even for learning from mistakes. Integrating Old and New Materials and Technologies

Although Traditional Ecological Knowledge is grounded in a people’s history and traditions, it is by no means static or fixed in the past. One of its key features is its ability to incorporate and integrate new information, ideas, and skills with those already existing. This has happened over and over again, all through human history, as demonstrated in many examples presented here. Some refer to this process as “cultural evolution.” It is thus not only possible, but also completely appropriate, to embrace new and different materials and technologies, for example, in supporting learning and teaching. With the availability of a whole range of educational and interpretive tools – board games, books, magazines, photographs, posters and printed material of all kinds, films, digital recordings, computers and other electronic media, geographic information systems, analyses of nutrients, of phytochemicals, and of genes, interactive multimedia, and Internet sources – opportunities for effective learning have, in some sense, expanded significantly.56 A caveat is that these devices sometimes result in a further separation of children and others from direct human

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interaction and its associated opportunities for learning, as well as from the natural world on which they depend, and may reduce their familiarity and empathy with other living things. Recognizing the Importance of Scales of Interaction

Human activities that relate to environments are manifest on many different scales, resulting in complex and nonlinear outcomes of actions and processes. These must be linked and integrated to achieve a fuller understanding of problems and opportunities. For example, on a small spatial and temporal scale, fire that people might use to clear a patch of forest can result in severe damage to trees and other vegetation and to wildlife. Over time, however, it can bring renewal by encouraging the growth of a range of new, early successional species and by creating ecological edges that tend to be highly productive.57 Across a wide landscape, many burns occurring at different times can enhance the overall biodiversity and productivity of a forest by creating a mosaic of diverse successional stages of vegetation. Examining only the negative short-term outcomes of a single fire will not give the full range of understanding needed to develop effective resource management strategies. In terms of supporting ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge transmission, too, multiple scales of learning and interaction must be developed – ways of linking short-term personal experiences to broader understandings at the community, societal, and intergenerational levels. Developing and Utilizing Diverse and Interactive Institutions to Support Knowledge Transmission

Schools and universities are major institutional venues for education in Western society, but they are by no means the only type of institutions that support learning. There are many institutions in Indigenous societies that represent norms and conventions that are embedded in cultural belief systems, thus serving as effective means of imparting knowledge and skills related to peoples’ cultural and environmental relationships (Berkes and Folke 1998; Natcher and Hickey 2003). For example, the clan system of central and northern Northwest Coast cultures provides an entire alternative kinship network complementary to that of the extended family. Access to resources and important learning opportunities are provided through one’s clan and clan chief. Various types of formal and informal apprenticeships and mentorships are another example of institutions that can promote a person’s knowledge of cultures and environments. Potlatches and feasts serve as key institutions for environmental and cultural teaching through demonstration and oratory. Any of these could serve on a broad scale as models for developing new venues for environmental and social-cultural learning across society in general and could add power and effectiveness to biocultural conservation programs.

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Finding Ways to Revitalize Languages and Retain Linguistic Diversity

Language is a critically important component of cultural transmission and embodies key information about environments and biocultural relationships (T.J.S. Carlson and Maffi 2004; Chipps-Sawyer 2007; J.C. Thompson 2012). When a language disappears – or even when people who speak the language forget its specialized vocabulary, such as names for places, for plants and animals, and for different practices related to resource use, processing, and management – much important knowledge is lost. When language revitalization programs are developed, care must be taken to preserve and restore these special components of languages, along with the grammatical and phonological as well as regular speech elements. Bringing back terms, such as the recently officially recognized name “Haida Gwaii” to replace the European name “Queen Charlotte Islands” in the gazetteer, is an excellent step toward renewing these languages. More could be done to reinstate such original Indigenous place names as well as terms for plants, animals, and environments.58 Using Food for Biocultural Renewal

Because it is such a basic human resource and need, and because it is environmentally dependent and culturally mediated, Indigenous food can serve as an important and effective element in supporting biocultural renewal and transmission of biocultural knowledge. For Indigenous peoples of northwestern North America, as well as elsewhere in the world, overwhelming changes in their food systems have had serious consequences for their overall health. Society in general is suffering from a “fast food” addiction that has, often indirectly, placed many environments at risk. As Heron (2008) describes, “We love fast food … and it’s really bad for us. It’s bad for our health, our culture, the environment. In short, it’s unsustainable. But our once-diverse food lore and skills have been scattered to the four winds. Our taste buds have been jammed on salt, sugar and every conceivable molecular permutation of corn. We literally eat petroleum-derived substances, and ask for more … How do we kick our fastfood addiction and re-establish a relationship with what’s good for us and good for the planet?” Maintaining and restoring key elements of our original food and accompanying lifestyles, wherever possible, are considered to be desirable goals by a number of authorities (Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Creed-Kanashiro, et al. 2006; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Spigelski, et al. 2013; Parrish et al. 2007). Renewing local and Indigenous food systems can be undertaken at many levels and in diverse ways. One collaborative strategy has been the “Feasting for Change” initiative on Vancouver Island (Devereaux and Kittredge 2008).59 Reinstating First Foods ceremonies (CUJ 2008) and publishing cookbooks featuring Indigenous foods and recipes (Nuxalk Food and Nutrition Program 1984; Uu-a-thluk 2008; Watts and Watts 2007) are other ways of renewing and restoring connections with food systems and local environments.

Ancient Pathways and New Pathways  |  407

The confederated Umatilla tribes (CUJ 2008) have developed a “First Foods mission statement” to help guide their efforts “To protect, restore, and enhance the First Foods – water, salmon, deer, cous [Lomatium cous], and huckleberry [Vaccinium membranaceum] – for the perpetual cultural, economic, and sovereign benefit of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. We will accomplish this utilizing traditional, ecological and cultural knowledge and science to inform population and habitat management goals and actions, and natural resource policies and regulatory mechanisms.” Renewing and Recreating Vibrant Ethnoecosystems

Recognizing that humans need not always be destructive to the environments in which they dwell or to the resources on which they rely can foster new perspectives and approaches to resource management as well as to educational processes, planning, and decision making. Engagement and empowerment at the community level – for example, through school projects and cultural programs related to environmental relationships – are fundamental to reconnecting the crucial cultural ties with our environments and resources and, ultimately, to increasing environmental and cultural sustainability. Activities ranging from developing relevant school curricula to assisting with the dissemination of ecocultural knowledge and creating projects that focus on the reconstruction and renewal of culturally and ecologically sound practices will assist in restoring the processes of cultural-environmental interactions at various levels and on different scales. In turn, these activities can be employed as models for other endeavours, to be tested, adapted, and applied in diverse situations.60 As another aspect of this renewal, parks and protected areas should continue to be reassessed and reconfigured since not only do natural features and native species and habitats need to be maintained and preserved, but so, too, do the time-honoured relationships and interactions people have developed with their environments. These relationships and the knowledge systems that support them are, in many cases, as endangered as the places and species themselves, and frequently it is the very human presence and activities that have helped to develop certain habitats and populations (M.K. Anderson and Barbour 2003; Hunn et al. 2003; Senos et al. 2006; K.L. Turner and Bitonti 2011). Conversely, places of high cultural importance, featuring culturally important and culturally maintained species, should be restored and preserved in their own right – along with the dynamic processes that are essential in their maintenance – as significant and recognized legacies of our common human heritage. In the spirit of adaptive management – and given the complexity and unpredictability of these systems – actions and initiatives aimed at promoting and maintaining biocultural diversity should be monitored and frequently assessed in order to ensure that their effectiveness is maximized. Successful biocultural management and conservation rest on our capacity to understand and

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adapt to environmental and cultural change over time and across geographic and cultural space. Hence ecological knowledge and understanding among those people most closely affected plays a key role in this context, and the means by which this knowledge and understanding are shared and accepted are critically important (Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2000). Conclusions What we have come to understand in recent decades is that there is a vast complexity in the many and varied interactions between the First Peoples of northwestern North America and the biological diversity of this region. In particular, in the case of this study, the role of plants in supporting and sustaining Indigenous cultures and lifeways for countless generations has been immense and diverse. It was not so long ago that those of the dominant Western society, including many academics, understood little about how plants have been fundamentally important to First Nations. Political leaders, educators, policymakers, and bureaucrats often recognized little beyond the importance of salmon, and perhaps deer, as the key resources for Indigenous peoples of this area. Across their traditional territories, “reserves” and “reservations” were designated to accommodate their “needs,” but these were generally restricted to immediate village sites and, in some cases, to places used for fishing or hunting. Metaphorically, communities were left without their gardens, their pharmacies, their hardware centres, and their sacred places.61 The reserve and reservation systems in Canada and the United States respectively reflect policies often based on greed, but perhaps more on ignorance, under a philosophy that First Peoples in northwestern North America and elsewhere were not really “using” most of the land they claimed as their territory. Similar notions were taught widely in the public school system as recently as a couple of decades ago. Gradually, this incomplete understanding is changing. Of course, many First Nations individuals, particularly culturally knowledgeable elders, knew that this Western view was deeply flawed, but their voices were seldom heard and usually ignored. At last, however, through their efforts, and through a growing awareness of society in general, this situation is changing. Many recent initiatives at the global, national, and regional levels have focused on the significance of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and on their rights to influence policy formulation and to exert some control over activities occurring within their territories.62 The imperative for consultation, listening to their perspectives, and respecting their deep knowledge and wisdom has resulted in a change and a growing appreciation of First Peoples’ histories, cultures, perspectives, and knowledge. In these endeavours, knowledge and understandings of plant resources and culturally valued environments have been prominent. However, there is a long

Ancient Pathways and New Pathways  |  409

way to go. Now as perhaps never before there is pressure for conformity, not only at a community level but also at a global level. Languages are disappearing and cultural distinctions are blurring across the planet as the large multinational companies offer the same products and as media spread the same messages far and wide. People will have to work hard to maintain their cultural distinctiveness in the face of these forces, but diverse knowledge systems and perspectives bring advantages in terms of offering more and potentially better solutions to problems and thus increasing our resilience as humans in these times of great change (W. Davis 2009). By no means do Indigenous peoples have all of the answers for sustaining humans and other life forms over long time periods, but they have had – and still do in some measure – distinctive approaches and different worldviews and related values that might help humanity collectively to find a better and less destructive relationship with our environment. As a global community, we must come to a better understanding of our collective impacts, both on the environment and on countless local and Indigenous cultural groups in different parts of the world. Not only are these peoples being deprived of their cultural and linguistic heritage, but we are also depriving humanity as a whole of the richness and resilience that biocultural diversity can bring; we are losing a major portion of our combined environmental knowledge, practices, beliefs, and relationships, which are such an integral part of human existence (W. Davis 2009; Hunn 1999). The ability to access, use, care for, and perpetuate the plants, animals, habitats, and landscapes of their own homelands is essential for the continued health and well-being of Indigenous peoples and for the continuation of Indigenous cultures, languages, and identities. These peoples, together with their cultures, languages, stories, and ceremonies, are inextricably linked to their traditional territories and to the other species that dwell there. Consequently, their identity and their ability to maintain and use this environment are critical to their future success and survival as distinct peoples. Ethnobotany and ethnoecology have finally come into their own in northwestern North America. The recognition that these knowledge systems are vastly more complex and important than was appreciated only a few decades ago is reflected in many ways – not only in publications such as this one (see also Turner and Lepofsky 2013) but also in the very vibrancy of programs being developed by Indigenous communities and their collaborators in schools, in local economic development initiatives, in videos and educational productions shown on television, and in the celebrations of Indigenous foods and feasts that are occurring in many places on Vancouver Island and beyond. The message is now loud and clear: Indigenous peoples in northwestern North America were not just casual wanderers through a bountiful land, hauling salmon from the rivers and perhaps plucking a few clusters of berries as they were encountered. They were active participants in managing their environments and in using

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their resources sustainably, treating them with care and consideration. This newly recognized paradigm serves as an excellent starting point for all of us to create better, more respectful, more meaningful, and more careful relationships with our local environments, with other species, and with the entire natural world on which we rely. Helin (2008, 168) writes, “In going forward, Aboriginal people must understand the realities of their ancestors’ success and self-reliance over millennia (a foundation of independence, interdependence, self-discipline, ethical leadership, and cultural cooperation).” More than this, all of us need to recognize this history of success and self-reliance. Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, skills, values, and approaches can contribute substantially to humanity’s efforts to achieve the “paradigm shift” that is needed if we are truly to reduce our impacts on the earth and to reverse the tide of global environmental and cultural change and loss. Indigenous perspectives – about the interconnectedness of life, about plants and animals as relations or kin, about the importance of a long-term view of the future, about the linking of human health and well-being to the health of the environment as a whole, and about what is truly important to the human condition – need to be communicated effectively to Western urbanized society so that they can be considered and potentially adopted more widely. I hope that this synthesis will contribute to the advancement of knowledge and understandings both about cultural adaptations to specific places and environmental situations and about influences of people on these places and ecosystems. Moreover, the inclusion of scales of time and space over which patterns have been identified in this project will hopefully lead to a clearer understanding of humans’ capacity for learning, exchanging, retaining, and regenerating knowledge. This understanding is critical to our efforts to reformulate our behaviours in ways that will allow us to live more sustainably in the world we have inherited and to bequeath it to the future in a fully functioning, healthy, vibrant, and diverse state.

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N ot e s

Chapter Eight 1 For British Columbia, E-Flora BC: Electronic Atlas of the Plants of British Columbia (Klinkenberg 2013) provides comparative information on the frequency of occurrence of different plant species in the various biogeoclimatic zones of the province, with distribution maps based on actual records and collections. This has been an invaluable source of information here. 2 Human strategies for management and enhancement of plant resources – including transplanting some species on occasion – are discussed further in chapter 11. 3 This variance may relate to weather conditions during bud formation and flowering, availability of insect pollinators, or other factors, or it may simply be part of an organism’s innate reproductive pattern. 4 For example, sometimes, in years when saskatoon berries are less productive in the Interior Plateau, people will harvest more black hawthorn fruit, which many would normally use mainly as a secondary, or alternative, resource. 5 Edible “root” species include bulbs, corms, tubers, and rhizomes, as well as true roots, that are harvested and eaten. 6 For some reason, apparently no one has reported finding this sugar for some decades, and some elders have suggested that introduced honeybees or ants may be preventing it from accumulating. 7 This name possibly refers to the reserve name at Neskonlith in Salmon Arm, Switzmalp, but another interpretation, provided by Marianne Ignace (pers. comm., 2011), is sxitseméłp (“cut or shear plants”), which refers to people gathering grass or hay there (see also Mary Thomas, Turner, and Garibaldi forthcoming). 8 Both ʔeniyud and Ts’ilʔos were later turned into mountains, part of the homeland of the Xeni Gwet’in and other Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008b). 9 This is probably due to lower levels of phototoxic furanocoumarins in shadegrowing cow-parsnip (Kuhnlein and Turner 1987).

10 Today, however, climate change is affecting the window for harvesting and processing seaweed since, for the past decade or more, early May has been generally rainy, making it impossible to pick the seaweed then (Turner and Clifton 2009). 11 The earliest spring salmon are indicated for the Stl’a’tl’imx/St’at’imc by the blooming of the sagebrush buttercup (Ranunculus glaberrimus), called “spring salmon eye,” whose bright yellow blossoms are said to resemble the eye colour of these fish. 12 For Tlingit, see Thornton (2008) and Thornton et al. (2004); for Heiltsuk, see Rath (1981); for Nuu-chah-nulth, see Bouchard and Kennedy (1990); for Gitxsan, see Johnson (1997); for Dakelh, see Poser (2008a, 2008b); and for Sahaptin, see Hunn, Selam, and family (1990). 13 Secwepemc named habitats and geographic features include alpine, alpine meadow, on the high plateau, in the mountains, mountain, hill (also mound and domed shape), little hill, knoll, prairie, clearing, meadow, valley, waterfall, well, cave, side­ hill, gully, canyon, burned-off area on a mountainside (through landscape burning), rockslide, sunny/south side of a mountain, shady/north side of a mountain, little lake, outflow and drainage creek of a lake, melt-water runoff, mouth of a river, river, island, creek, and shore, as well as a suite of lexical suffixes that occur in place names and terms for geographic features that denote parts of the human or animal body (R.E. Ignace 2008). 14 “Oulachen” is also spelled “eulachon” or “ooligan.” 15 The responsibility of Kwaxsistalla, as oulachen guardian, was to carefully monitor the fish coming up the river and to ensure that the river was kept clean and that the fish had a chance to spawn along the banks far up the river, before allowing the people to catch them on their return to the ocean. He would also ensure that people kept to their own harvesting sites and did not encroach on those of others. 16 Some people celebrated the first harvest of springtime greens, like thimbleberry shoots, with a special ceremony, similar to the First Salmon ceremony (see chapter 13). 17 Giant kelp is called ngaal by the Haida, gyoós by the Ts’msyen, and q’áxq’əllis by the Kwakwaka’wakw. 18 Sometimes people stayed upriver until fall, harvesting berries, hunting, and fishing, before returning downriver for the winter to stay in well-protected areas like Baker Inlet, where they could harvest salmon, groundfish, and other winter foods (McDonald 2003). 19 They broke the eelgrass rhizomes into short lengths, peeled off all but the finest central leaf, and wound this around the rhizome to make a bite-sized piece, to be dipped in oulachen or seal oil and eaten fresh (Cullis-Suzuki 2007). 20 Besides western hemlock, the cambium and secondary phloem of Sitka spruce, amabilis fir, black cottonwood, and red alder were eaten by various coastal peoples. 21 Besides western redcedar and yellow-cedar, these species included bitter cherry bark; willow bark (Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra), used by the Saanich for their reefnets; and the inner bark of Rocky Mountain maple. 22 The Secwepemc also call this time snexwixuyt (“leaving”) (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001). 23 These plants reach their peak blooming period in the northern Interior Plateau montane regions around mid-June and are considered best when collected just before or just after blooming. 24 An archaeological complex at Cattle Point on San Juan Island dating back over 2,500 years was likely an ancient reefnet site, judging from the presence of net weights,

414  |  Notes to pages 14–40

25 26

27

28 29

perforated anchor stones, and a whole assemblage of tools and evident fish-drying systems (Kirk and Daughtery 2007). An alternate name for saskatoon berry is juneberry. Black huckleberries were the main fruit around which the Indian Heaven archaeological site near Mount Adams and other sites in the northern Cascade Mountains were centred (see Mierendorf 1999). In fact, throughout the interior, black huckleberries and their relatives (e.g., V. caespitosum, V. deliciousum) were – and are – highly favoured, and the places where they grew were destinations of many, from the Nisga’a and Gitxsan and peoples farther north to the Ulkatcho Dakelh, Tsilhqot’in, Ktunaxa, Sahaptin, and all of the Interior Salish groups. In a diary entry for 19 August 1843, missionary H.K.W. Perkins noted, referring to a Tenino-Wishram group from a village at The Dalles on the Columbia River, “People moving to the mountains for berries. They obtain at this season the large mountain huckleberry [Vaccinium membranaceum] … They are usually absent on these excursions [away from their village at The Dalles], from four to six weeks during which, each family lays in, for winter use, four or five pecks of nice dried berries” (cited in Boyd 1996, 275–6). Women were also known to fish, on their own or in small groups, for trout and other species. Edith O’Donaghey, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, recalled that her family harvested three or four large gunnysacks of this lichen each year. Chapter Nine

1 Moss (2011) and Dana Lepofsky (pers. comm., 2011), however, both caution that the seeming sudden appearance of these large middens may be a result of other factors: the obscuring of earlier middens by changing sea levels, increased preservation of shell once a certain threshold of accumulation is reached, and/or people piling up shells to create house construction sites. Similarly, the high visibility of salmon in the archaeological record may be due, in part, to the relative size of their bones, as compared with, for example, herring, which may have been as important but not as visible. More finely focused research approaches may change these perceptions. 2 The large plank and frame houses of the ancestral Makah at Ozette (see chapter 2) illustrate one model of multifamily living arrangements from the latter part of the Late Holocene. These houses were around 18 to 20 metres long and about 10 to 11 metres wide, constructed of split cedar planks lashed onto a framework of upright cedar posts. Each building probably housed six to ten nuclear families, along with any visiting relatives and slaves, and each family had its own living area, with raised platforms around the living space providing places for beds and for storage. Beneath one excavated platform, a storage basket, a loom, a canoe paddle, two seal clubs, and a bow were found together. On top of the platform was a sleeping mat, still in place, and on top of it was a flattened box (Kirk and Daugherty 2007, 109). 3 As Moss (2011) points out, however, it is important to remember that the respective roles of men and women varied according to cultural norms and circumstances. As a result, the stereotype of women undertaking plant food gathering, cooking, and work with fibres and of men being the hunters, fishers, and woodworkers was not always accurate, and there were many exceptions. 4 Weaving spruce-root baskets and hats has continued unbroken in Isabella Edenshaw’s family for five generations, ever since Florence Davidson became a well-

Notes to pages 41–59  |  415

5

6

7

8 9 10

11

known weaver, as did her daughters, including Primrose Adams, and Primrose’s daughters, including Isabella’s namesake, Belle, and her sisters Joyce and Alice, and Primrose’s granddaughters, including Alice’s daughter, Ariane Medley, who recently made an exquisite spruce-root basket for a friend to use as a gift (see Turner 2004a). For example, a Spokan woman berry picker knew that raising her voice and shouting was considered disrespectful to the plants in an area, but group singing was acceptable and reinforced a sense of consciousness of kind. Women had to know about controlled burning and how to care for the traditional huckleberry patches (J.A. Ross 2011). In summary, the following tasks and responsibilities, along with their associated tools, techniques and skills, and spiritual knowledge, have been largely relegated to women in the study area (Turner 2003b, 2006b): harvesting (plant food, shellfish, eggs, basketry materials, firewood, medicinal plants); processing (all types of food, fibrous materials, hides, medicines); storing (all types of food, materials, medicines); manufacturing (basketry, mats, hats, etc.; buckskin work; tools for these projects; temporary shelters); provisioning (food for family meals, feasts, travel; use and care of baskets; medicinal herb administering; general family health); managing land and resources (clearing, selective harvesting, weeding, pruning; gardening of food plants; management, trimming, etc. of basketry materials); leading and participating in ceremonial and spiritual activities related to men’s hunting and fishing and to women’s harvesting rites (First Fruits ceremonies, medicine gathering rituals); maintaining and monitoring animal and plant populations; keeping fires and hearths; coordinating household activities; bearing and nurturing children (caregiving, storytelling; educating children, especially girls and young women); and contributing to the cultural life of family and community. One of the most skilled basket makers on the northern coast, Ts’msyen artist William White (Tsymiyaanbiin) of Prince Rupert, was taught weaving by his aunt. He spends much of his time teaching others – both men and women – how to make cedar-bark baskets and how to weave wool and other materials as well to make Chil­ kat blankets. For example, Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim) (pers. comm., 2011) noted that in some Hul’qumi’num families, only men pit-cooked the camas bulbs. People peeled and ate these green shoots with oulachen grease and a little sugar sprinkled overtop; they were a much sought after treat in the spring (Turner and Turner 2008). Many of the digging stick handles found in archaeological settings are marked with geometric zigzag designs, and these may be symbolic representations of the practice root trenches dug by girls at puberty as described by Teit (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Nord 2009; M.B. Ignace, Ignace, and Nord 2009). Alan Marshall (1977, 138) notes that the Nez Perce ceremony held when the canyon serviceberries (saskatoon berries) were ripe was presided over by a respected old man, who gave thanks for life and food, and that four highly respected elder ladies directed the younger women on gathering, preparing, and serving the food. When Simon Fraser descended the river named after him in 1808, he and his men encountered, around the present site of Lytton, a venerable elderly man who was blind and had to be carried but who obviously had a high position of authority. This man was an eloquent orator and spoke a great length, obviously taking on a role as a welcomer to the strangers (Lamb 1960; Turner 2005; see also Teit 1912, 414–15).

416  |  Notes to pages 59–71

12 Lopatin (1945, 90) suggests that for the Kitamaat region, the price paid for a woman slave might be two or three boxes of oulachen grease (approximately or somewhat more than the value of one canoe). 13 The salmon were counted out in twos; if there was an uneven number, the extra salmon was returned to the ocean. Also, there was an opening at the far end of the net that always allowed a certain number of salmon to escape and continue on their way to the spawning grounds of the Fraser River (Dr Earl Claxton Sr, pers. comm., 1999). 14 Ida Jones described how a group of Ditidaht women would cook their silverweed and clover roots together in the same pit, but each woman tied her roots in bundles using her own unique knot so that when the pit was opened, everyone would recognize whose roots were whose (cited in Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983; see also Turner and Kuhnlein 1982). 15 At least, this has been the practice until recently, when rainy weather has caused a change in the timing of seaweed processing. If there is too much rain in June, the women now might have to wait until there is a long enough stretch of sunny weather to continue processing their seaweed: compressing, chopping, and drying it. In 2011, for example, Helen Clifton (pers. comm., 2011) was not able to spread her seaweed to dry until mid-August. 16 This food has not been commonly harvested within the past two or three generations. In Hartley Bay, for example, until the spring of 2004, when Gitga’at elder Archie Dundas (pers. comm., 2004) demonstrated harvesting ksiiw, the edible inner bark of amabilis fir and western hemlock, the last time anyone from the community had harvested ksiiw was around 1945. The Gitga’at practised a communal activity for harvesting, scraping, and processing ksiiw that was similar to the method described for the Kwakwaka’wakw (Turner and Thompson 2006). 17 According to Keith Carlson (2001), the island dialect, Hul’qumi’num, is a mixture of two Fraser Valley Halkomelem dialects, reflecting the exchange networks in which they partook. 18 Until the mid-1900s, camas bulbs were routinely served at potlatches in Duncan and Nanaimo (Ida Jones, pers. comm., 1979). 19 In Kwak’wala, for example, the name for nobility, ninogad (plural), essentially translates as “knowledgeable ones” (Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith, pers. comm., 2009). 20 Later on, the people moved to Kitsumkalum and Port Essington at the mouth of the Skeena River. Robintown became overgrown, but it still reflects remnants of this thriving village, with a series of level terraces staged down the embankment, each formerly occupied by different clan groups (Downs 2006; McDonald 2003). The entire slope is still a mosaic of “orchard gardens,” with many important edible and medicinal species (discussed further in chapter 11). 21 Unfortunately, as noted by Croes (2003), perishable artifacts like baskets, which can serve as a major source of information about prehistoric exchange, are rare in the archaeological record, especially from the earlier millennia. 22 Note that ü is an unrounded u. Chapter Ten 1 These berries are called məxáz’ in the Pemberton (Lil’wat) dialect and ʔúsaʔ (“egg/ berry/round object”) in the Fraser River dialect of the Stl’atl’imx.

Notes to pages 72–101  |  417

2 This railway, running from North Vancouver to Prince George and other parts of central and northern British Columbia, was originally known as the Pacific Great Eastern Railway. It was renamed the British Columbia Railway in 1972 and later became known simply as BC Rail. The railway operated passenger service, which from the mid-1950s on used Dayliners or Budd Rail Diesel Cars, and many people living in communities along the railway used it as a major form of transportation for visiting, going to school, and travelling to larger urban centres. Passenger service ended in 2004. 3 Ames and Maschner (1999, 172) provide maps of Late Holocene (Early and Middle Pacific) obsidian exchange. 4 Contemporary accounts confirm such long-distance trading. In a general discussion about how children learned what they needed to know in their culture, the late Heilt­suk cultural specialist Cyril Carpenter (pers. comm., 2002) said that, for the Heiltsuk of past generations, until about eight years old, a little child was simply steeped in the stories, songs, and culture. Then, from the ages of about eight to twelve, the child started to show his or her own talents and participated in activities according to those talents, whether it was canoe making, art, fishing, or carpentry. Then, “in the old days,” if a young person really worked hard for about three years, he was given a “holiday” and was allowed to participate in a canoe trip to trade. They used to go as far south as Catalina, taking Heiltsuk dried berries, herring eggs, salmon, halibut, seaweed, and other goods to trade for abalone and goods from other regions. The large oceangoing canoes used to travel about 30 kilometres offshore, where it’s not too rough; they would have two large sails set. 5 Peoples of Ukshi Lake Kamchatka sites as early as 11,000 years ago had a similar pebble tool culture based on use of salmon (R.L. Carlson 1976). 6 In fact, Oregon may well owe its name to the Cree word for “oulachen” or “ooligan”: ourigan (Byram and Lewis 2001). 7 Another example, from just south of the study area, is Iwamkani, or “Huckleberry Mountain,” just west of Crater Lake in the southern Cascade Mountains in Klamath territory (Deur 2002a; Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011). 8 Oberg (1973) distinguishes between the concepts of “gift exchange” and “trade” or “barter,” noting that the former takes place within the context of social relationships and networks, whereas the latter pertains to strictly economic interchange without regard for social or cultural values. In reality, it would be difficult to develop systems of reciprocity in purely economic terms without some type of cultural and social context. 9 The women who came would give the first bucket of berries they picked to Ambrose Robinson, as the owner of the patch, and could then keep the rest for their own use. Later, with the highbush cranberries he received, Ambrose would host a feast for the entire village. 10 More recently, such gifts might be in the form of money, although blankets and food are still used in many circumstances to recognize the witnessing of events. 11 Gitga’at matriarch Helen Clifton (pers. comm., 2005) recalled an occasion when Lucille Clifton, the Eagle clan matriarch and Helen’s mother-in-law, requested that the Eagle clan use some of Helen’s half-smoked coho salmon for a feast that they were hosting. Helen, who is of the Blackfish clan, willingly contributed her fish. Although she did not receive any immediate compensation, when Christmastime came that year, she received an exceptionally fine gift from her mother-in-law (see also Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012).

418  |  Notes to pages 101–13

12 A similar situation might occur between those people along the coast who spent their time and energy harvesting and drying edible seaweed and those who were mostly fishing and drying halibut (Helen Clifton, pers. comm., 2005; Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2005). 13 Nitinat Lake is a long, narrow tidal lake, connected to the ocean on the west coast of Vancouver Island by a narrow channel, on the south side of which Whyac village (now mostly unoccupied but still a designated reserve) is situated. The West Coast Trail crosses Nitinat Narrows at this point, and hikers are taken across the channel via a small ferry. 14 The village, called Tl’uqtinus, was located on Lulu Island, on the South Arm of the Fraser River, adjacent to a cranberry peat bog, where the Cowichan tribes lived for significant periods of time throughout the year, obtaining berries in the summer and fall, harvesting cattails, tule, and many other plant resources, and fishing for salmon and sturgeon. 15 This scenario might have occurred with breakthroughs in food production – for example, in the intensification of salmon with improved storage techniques that allowed people to thrive, to develop more complex social structures, and to gain prestige as individuals and communities by hosting feasts. Matson and Magne (2007) suggest that such a situation may have allowed Athabaskan peoples moving south from the British Columbia region to occupy areas of northern coastal California at a time when salmon were plentiful and the peoples already in the region didn’t mind having an influx of newcomers. 16 The Secwepemc, for their part, were known to have traded dentalium from the coast to both the Stoneys and the Ktunaxa (Teit 1909). 17 Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith’s ancestor lived for an extensive period of time with the Nuxalk but eventually returned to her Kwakwaka’wakw relatives. Many years later, a peace treaty was signed and a valued ceremonial “Echo” mask that had been taken by the Nuxalk at that time was replicated so that each community had its own (Reid and Sewid-Smith 2004). 18 Nephrite is a highly localized stone, found in only a few places, such as along the middle Fraser Canyon, along the Rogue River in southern Oregon, on the lower Nooksack River, and in the upper Skagit Valley. The production of finely crafted nephrite celts, therefore, was probably a specialized occupation, with their rarity in most parts of the Interior Plateau and Northwest Coast leading to their particularly high prestige value (Schulting 1994; Lepofsky and Lenert 2005). 19 For example, in May 2008, at the Kitsumkalum House of Simoygets in Terrace, along the Skeena River, there were large zip-topped bags of dried Metlakatla seaweed for sale at fifty dollars apiece. Although this may seem expensive to some, considering the time and effort required to produce this amount of dried seaweed, it is a reasonable price. 20 Compare these to the animal product equivalents: herring grease was valued at fifty cents per gallon, seal grease at seventy cents per gallon, and oulachen grease, the most expensive, at one dollar per gallon. A cake of goat grease cost two dollars, a cake of deer grease was one to two dollars, and half a dried deer was $1.50. One dried salmon was worth ten cents, and a biscuit box of herring eggs cost upward of $2.50 (Emmons 1991). 21 Indian-hemp cordage is said to equate with the strength of modern synthetic fibre, with a test weight of 100 kilograms or more. 22 Prime Indian-hemp locations are open moist swales where the plants can grow very tall and straight.

Notes to pages 114–27  |  419

23 When raphia (fibre of a palm, Raphia farinifera) and corn husks were introduced by Europeans, Indigenous weavers also readily incorporated these materials into their work. Similarly, Coast Salish women travelling from Vancouver Island to pick hops in the Fraser Valley or at Yakima in central Washington were happy to use cotton hop-growing strings in their tule mats in lieu of stinging nettle twine (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1994). 24 Later, a new market for their baskets developed with the white settlers of the region. These women traded their baskets for second-hand clothes, potatoes, beef, or “anything we could get” (Margaret Lester, pers. comm., 1984). In fact, within the past century, many Aboriginal women maintained their families almost entirely by selling their baskets to non-Aboriginal travellers and neighbours (Turner 1996; Turner and Kus 2002). 25 The Nisga’a and Gitxsan names for hazelnut bush, ‘tsak’a tyaýtkw and sgan-ts’ek’ or sgan-ts’ak’ respectively, apparently have an ancient derivation from the Proto-Salish word s-ts’ik’ or s-ts’ik, which refers variously to “nut, acorn, or conifer cone or seed” (see Kuipers 2002; see also reference to seeds of whitebark pine, Pinus albicaulis, in chapter 3). For example, the Squamish name for hazelnut is ts’ichn, and the Halkomelem name is stth’itsm. 26 Cattail (Typha latifolia) possibly followed a similar trajectory of introduction. The Nisga’a name for cattail mat, t’uuna’awkw (Burton 2012) or t’una’ax, also apparently derives from Proto-Salish t’unxwn or t’unxw (Kuipers 2002), and cattail’s distribution in the Nass-Skeena region is quite restricted (Klinkenberg 2013). 27 Variants reflected in basketry include: material, weaving style, age, rims, ornamentation, context, size, shape, element widths, weaving gauge, attachment, placement and material of handles, design, decoration, and colour contrast (Bernick 1998c). 28 For example, three spruce-root hats were twined in the Haida-Tlingit style, up-tothe-left, and employed an ornamental skip-stitch typical of Haida and Tlingit work. Three complete coiled cedar-root baskets of distinctive Salish style are presumed to have come from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and there were also fourteen intentionally cut coiled basket pieces, which Croes (2003) surmises may have been potlatch gifts. From the south came distinctive forms of small Salishan overlaid-twined cylindrical baskets, common to the Quinault, Chehalis, Squaxin, and Skokomish (Croes 2003, cited in Matson, Coupland, and Mackie 2003). Croes (2003) suggests these baskets were traded to Ozette rather than being made there by women marrying into the Ozette community. 29 Of twenty-five species of trees and shrubs whose bark was used medicinally, all except Oemleria cerasiformis (bird cherry) reportedly have been used medicinally by other peoples of North America. A perusal of Moerman’s (2003) ethnobotanical database for North American First Peoples confirms a widespread commonality of medicinal plant applications. 30 These “seeds” (fruits) of Lomatium nudicaule are called by variants of the name q’exmín by Salish and Wakashan peoples from Puget Sound to northern Vancouver Island. 31 This was a difficult treatment, but Annie recovered well from this accident. 32 Soapberries (Shepherdia canadensis) are called russet buffaloberries by McIlwraith (1948, vol. 1, 88). 33 Soapberries are particularly variable, geographically and seasonally; even where they grow, their populations might be scanty, and they often vary in abundance from year to year, so some trade was necessary to ensure a constant supply. In some years, for example, if the local bushes were not productive, the people around

420  |  Notes to pages 128–33

34 35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42

Lillooet and “The Fountain” (Xaxl’ep) had to go to Bralorne, or up in the mountains, to get their supply of soapberries (Sam Mitchell, pers. comm., 1974). Saanich elders remembered travelling to the Malahat area, to East Sooke, or over to the San Juan Islands to pick soapberries. Notably, the south side of Mitchell Bay on San Juan Island is called Sxwésm (Soapberry) (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994; Turner and Hebda 2012). Teit (1909, 535) also lists as interior trade goods glacier lily bulbs, fibre and woven bags of Indian-hemp, silverberry-bark bags, whitebark pine seeds, hazelnuts, wolf lichen, “woven baskets of the best type,” and smoke-tanned moose hides. Other goods included Labrador tea leaves, Pacific crabapples and highbush cranberries preserved in water or oulachen grease, cedar-wood boxes and other cedar products, and yew wood and vine maple (Acer circinatum) wood for bows (Turner and Loewen 1998). Teit (1930) noted that for the Okanagan, the introduction of horses resulted in a shift of trade routes to uplands rather than valley bottoms since canoes and water transportation became less essential with the option of travel by horseback. These items are given in recognition of the guests’ service as witnesses to important events for which the potlatch is held, those of highest value going to the chiefs and matriarchs visiting or invited from other villages, houses, or clans. Potlatches are occasions for public and formal recounting of a group’s history, the extent of its territories, and the rights of access to and control over resources held by its chiefs and their designates, as well as occasions for re-enacting origin stories through dance and song, presenting and upholding names, holding memorials for those who have passed on, and recognizing special accomplishments or experiences of people. For example, as noted previously, names for edible camas (Camassia spp.) among a number of Coast Salish groups and for nodding onion (Allium cernuum) among the Interior Salish are derived from a common ancestral term, which shifted semantically at one or more points in its evolution and divergence. A similar story exists for some of the Coast Salish and Interior Salish terms for hazelnuts (Corylus cornuta) and whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) seeds respectively (see chapter 3). Procuring soapberries (called nexweskén) through trade is well remembered by contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw elders, including Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) and Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth) (pers. comm., 1996, 1998), who described trading for them both to the south (Parksville-Courtenay region) and to the north (Bella Coola region) of the Alert Bay–Campbell River–Kingcome region. An illustration of the importance of soapberries as a contemporary product of gifting and exchange is the fact that, before my work on this book in Dawson City, Yukon, where I would be surrounded by soapberry bushes as a major boreal forest understory species, at least six Indigenous friends and colleagues, from Straits Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, and Ts’msyen communities, specifically requested that I bring them soapberries from the north, if at all possible. This time depth is based on findings of the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (n.d.), as of 3 April 2009 (Cecil Brown, pers. comm., 2010). The usual practice for harvesting the berries is to hold a berry-laden branch taught and hit it sharply with a stick, causing the ripest berries to drop en masse onto a mat or into a container. References for this information on soapberry include ‘Ksan (1980), Kuhnlein and Turner (1991), McIlwraith (1948, vol. 1, 88), Turner (1995, 1997a, 1998, 2004a), Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy (1980), Turner and Burton (2010), and Turner, Thompson, et al. (1990).

Notes to pages 133–42  |  421

43 For example, “timbergrass,” or pinegrass (Calamagrostis rubescens), is called “soapberry grass” in Tsilhqot’in. 44 In one Massett Haida story (told by Walter, a member of the Rear-Town-People of Yan), a chief (lit. nangʔiitlagadaas, “wealthy/respected one”) of the town of A’nagun hosted a feast in which “They brought different sorts of food down out of the Stikine. They brought down [highbush] cranberries, soapberries, crabapples and dried fruits (or berries)” (cited in Swanton 1908, 537). In another story, “A-Slender-OneWho-Was-Given-Away,” the heroine was taken in a magical canoe: “the canoe was filled with good food, with cranberries, berries in cakes, soapberries, and the fat of all kinds of animals, grizzly-bear fat, mountain-goat fat, deer fat, ground-hog fat, beaver fat – the fat parts of all mainland animals” (John Sky, cited in Swanton 1905, 164). 45 There is oral evidence that one Haida group may have originated on the mainland. Chapter Eleven 1 Merriam-Webster, online dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/manage (accessed 11 July 2013). 2 This is reflected, for example, in the writings of E.N. Anderson (1996), M.K. Anderson (2005, 2009), Beckwith (2004), Boyd (1999b), Deur (2000), Deur and Turner (2005), Hunn, Selam, and family (1990), Johnson (1994, 1997), L. King (2004), Lake (2004), Lepofsky (2004, 2009a, 2009b), Loewen (1998), McDonald (2003), Peacock (1998), Peacock and Turner (2000), Senos et al. (2006), L.R. Smith (2008b), Thoms (1989, 2008a, 2008b), Thornton (2008), Turner (2004a, 2005), Turner and Berkes (2006), Turner, Deur, and Mellott (2011), Turner, Ignace, and Ignace (2000), and Turner, Smith, and Jones (2005). 3 For discussions on this topic, see also Beckwith (2004), Lutz (1995, 2008), Natcher (2004), Trusler and Johnson (2008), Turner (1999), and Weiser and Lepofsky (2009). 4 This aspect of resource management is discussed in chapter 4, on changes in plant use and knowledge since the arrival of Europeans. 5 See M.K. Anderson (2005), Bandringa (1999), Beckwith (2004), Chambers (2001), Chambers et al. (2002), Cullis-Suzuki (2007), Deveau (2010), Joseph (2012), Lloyd (2011), Loewen (1998), Mellott (2010), Peacock (1998), Proctor (2013), Pukonen (2008), and Wyllie de Echeverria (2013). 6 See also chapters 5, 6, and 7 for discussions on practices of harvesting plant foods, materials, and medicines respectively. 7 An example is the Atlágimma (Spirits of the Forest) dance, whose performance is a prerogative of Kwakwaka’wakw clan chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla). He was given the rights to the performance by the family of Heiltsuk and Wuikinuxv elder Evelyn Windsor of Bella Bella. This dance, a visual and auditory lesson in conservation and human relationships with the forest and forest processes, was performed under Kwaxsistalla’s direction in May 2010 at the Society of Ethnobiology’s annual meetings in Victoria, British Columbia. Members were astonished and moved by the deep lessons of environmental stewardship embodied in this dance. 8 This is indicated, for example, by the quantities of charcoal layered in the soil, the presence of fire scars on trees in greater numbers than expected naturally, and evidence of a high abundance of grasses and forbs in extant populations or in the pollen record (K.J. Brown and Hebda 2002a, 2002b; Lepofsky and Lertzman 2008; Weiser and Lepofsky 2009; White 1980, 1999).

422  |  Notes to pages 142–55

9 Examples are soapberries, huckleberries, saskatoon berries, camas, wapato, bitterroot, stinging nettle, Indian-hemp, and cedar bark (Turner and Loewen 1998). 10 For further examples of possible berry intensification, see Budhwa (2007), Gill (1983, 2005a, 2005b), Lepofsky (2004), Lyons (2000), Norton (1981), and Trusler and Johnson (2008). 11 See, for example, Alcorn et al. (2003), E.N. Anderson (1996), M.K. Anderson (2005), Baker, Davies, and Young (2001), Balée (1994); Berkes (2008), Berkes, Colding, and Folke (2000), Blackburn and Anderson (1993), J. Ford and Martinez (2000), Hunn et al. (2003), Minnis and Elisens (2000), Turner, Ignace, and Ignace (2000), N.M. Williams and Baines (1983), and N.M. Williams and Hunn (1982). 12 See Boas (1921, 186–94), A. Jones (1983), Turner (1997b), Turner and Berkes (2006), and Turner and Kuhnlein (1982). 13 It is even conceivable that, in the ancient past, the long claws of the digging grizzly bears – or other, earlier bears – inspired the development of root-digging sticks as implements for humans to extract roots more readily. 14 In Ontario some Anishenaabe elders believe that bears are capable of starting fires by scraping their claws against rocks to throw a spark and that they do this because they know that berries will grow after a fire and be available as food (Andrew Miller, pers. comm., 2009; A.M. Miller 2010). 15 This narrative, “Deer and Beaver,” was told by Walter of the Rear-Town-People of Yan. 16 James Douglas to Sir E.B. Lytton, Secretary of State to the Colonies, 14 March 1859, in British Columbia (1875). 17 See Peacock (1998, figure 4.5); see also Peacock and Turner (2000), and Turner and Peacock (2005). 18 This total is based on oral evidence of elders like Christopher Paul of Tsartlip, just north of the Songhees area (cited in Babcock 1967; see also Turner and Hebda 2012). 19 This estimate is based on a calculation of 100 bulbs per litre and on accounts of families in the early 1900s digging several “50-pound” potato gunnysacks, or bushels, of camas bulbs in a season (see Deur and Turner 2005). 20 They went up to Potato Mountain in groups of four or five families together, the men to hunt and the women to harvest the corms. Once one group had enough corms to meet their needs, they would start to help other families until everyone had enough. As of the 1940s and 1950s, people used large cotton flour sacks to transport their mountain potatoes, and they had coffee cans tied around their waists with a scarf in which to place their immediate diggings. 21 Now, however, if immediate drying is not possible, people can store the fresh seaweed in the freezer, to be worked on later as time or weather permits (Deveau 2010; Turner and Clifton 2006). 22 The five days would include two full days for harvesting and initial drying, one and a half days for cleaning, wetting, and pressing the seaweed into boxes, and one and a half days for chopping and redrying the seaweed and storing it away; these are minimum time requirements under ideal conditions. The seaweed itself was used in many ways, including being toasted and eaten dry as a snack and being used as an ingredient in soups and various other dishes throughout the year (Turner and Clifton 2006; Turner, Robinson, et al. 2012; Turner and Thompson 2006). In addition, a portion of it was set aside to be exchanged for oulachen grease and other goods from trading partners in other communities – for example, the Nisga’a of the Nass Valley and the Haisla and Hanaksiala of Kitamaat, in the case of the Gitga’at.

Notes to pages 157–77  |  423

23 The cedar bentwood boxes people are still using to press their seaweed at Hartley Bay have been in service for 100 years or more; these are passed down from generation to generation and are highly valued and used with great care (Turner and Clifton 2006). 24 As with the seaweed, cedar bark was generally gathered by groups of women going out together and harvesting many strips of bark over a period of hours. They would take time to break off the brittle outer bark and then bring bundles of the raw, uncleaned inner bark back to the village or camp, to be further cleaned and split apart into inner and outer sections. 25 For example, burning over an area may simultaneously increase the reproductive capacity and productivity of berry bushes and root vegetable species, reduce fungal and insect pests, initiate new growth and provide better forage for deer and other game, and create clearings, allowing easier movement and access to these resources. Cutting trees around a village site not only provides wood for house construction but also creates openings for defensive purposes and produces tree stumps within the clearings that are an ideal substrate for the production of berries such as red huckleberries, blueberries, trailing currants (Ribes laxiflorum), and salal (Johnson Gottesfeld 1994; Turner 2004a; Turner and Peacock 2005). 26 For example, the use of fire to burn over a berry patch or root-harvesting site requires tremendous knowledge and experience if one is to know when, where, and how to kindle the fire so that it will yield the maximum benefits in the years to come and will not negatively impact the species and habitats being managed. 27 This tobacco, discussed previously, is also sometimes called Tlingit tobacco. It is closely related to Nicotiana quadrivalvis, a species cultivated by Indigenous peoples of southern Oregon, California, and some other parts of the southwestern United States. Rather than being smoked, the leaves of this tobacco were usually chewed, sometimes in elaborate ceremonies, together with lime produced by burning mussel, clam, or abalone shells. According to Dawson (1880) and Swan (1972), one elderly woman grew the tobacco at Cumshewa on Haida Gwaii up to the 1880s. However, commercial tobacco (N. tabacum) introduced by European traders and sold in plugs soon replaced native tobacco. 28 The leaves of this tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata), after harvesting, were finely cut and then dried, thoroughly mixed with mountain ram’s grease, and ground between two stones or with a mortar and pestle. It was said to be milder than the commercial “white man’s” tobacco (N. tabacum), which was generally mixed with kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) leaves or red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) bark to cut its strong taste and effect (Dawson 1892; Teit 1906a, 1909). It is unclear whether people actually cultivated it, but Teit (1909, 574) noted, “In some places where tobacco was scarce, it was gathered under the surveillance of the chief, in order to give every person an equal chance. It grew luxuriantly on some village sites, and some Indians think the seeds must have been planted in these places.” Samples of N. attenuata were collected by early botanists at places like Lytton and Spences Bridge up to the turn of the twentieth century, but the plant has not survived well in modern times in the region and is known recently only at Osoyoos in the Okanagan Valley (Klinkenberg 2013). 29 The most likely Chenopodium to be represented, and perhaps propagated at least incidentally, is strawberry blite (C. capitatum), whose brilliant red fruits, in which hundreds of small, black seeds are embedded, are used as a face paint and stain (Turner 1998).

424  |  Notes to pages 177–94

30 Even today, distinctive smooth patches on the trunks of Douglas-fir trees around southern Vancouver Island reflect the legacy of long-ago harvesting for fuel (Mathews and Dady 2008). 31 Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2005) noted that the Secwepemc preferred to use windfall trees when they needed logs for pithouse construction. When they needed trees, her mother, Christine Allen, said, they would “wait for Mother Nature.” The people sought out big cedars or firs that had been blown down in the winter storms. They would then cut the limbs off and pull the trunks out onto the river ice in wintertime and allow them to float down to campsites or village sites after the spring thaw. 32 Picking the seaweed by grasping, twisting, and pulling off the lengths of fronds by the handful left residual portions that were said to regrow readily. The second growth of edible seaweed was said to be finer and of better quality and was ready for harvest within about three weeks to a month after the first harvest from the same site (Turner 2003a; Turner and Clifton 2006). 33 Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (pers. comm., 2004) explained that the Kwak’wala term that refers to burning back a berry bush is the same verb used in reference to singeing the hair of a ten-month-old baby during the naming ceremony: “Our berry bushes were pruned, weeded, and they also singed them a bit. Just enough … so that it would come back and the following year it would have more berries. Now, when our babies are ten months old, we cut the baby’s hair, and we singe it as well … Because that baby now at ten months [is] … ‘out of danger.’ It’s going to live now. And we singe the baby’s hair so the hair would grow back in abundance. And he will be handsome – or she will be beautiful. So that is similar to what we used to do with the berry bushes.” 34 This information was provided by Tsartlip elder and plant specialist Christopher Paul (cited in Babcock 1967), although in this case, size preference may actually have indicated a preference for bulbs of Camassia quamash over those of Camassia leichtlinii, whose mature bulbs are considerably larger. However, Hul’qumi’num plant specialist Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim) (pers. comm., 2011) stated that people preferred the bulbs of C. leichtlinii because they were larger. 35 The Kwak’wala name for the process of weeding, siixa, also means “cleaning” and was further used in reference to practices like separating the brittle outer bark from the inner bark of western redcedar and picking out bits of dirt and sticks from roots and berries after they were harvested (Clan Chief Adam Dick, pers. comm., 2008; see also Deur 2000). 36 Exceptions are cases in which these practices can possibly be proven from DNA analysis of given individuals and populations of plants. 37 The First Huckleberry ceremony of some First Nations south of the study area, such as the Klamath of southern Oregon and northern California, entailed throwing handfuls of huckleberries to the ground, or “giving them back” to the earth, as a means of recognizing and showing respect to the earth. As Douglas Deur (pers. comm., 2007) explained for the Klamath ceremony, “Though conceived of as a cosmological act, it is clear that by fanning out to remote picking areas, regrouping at campsites, and tossing berries to the ground each year, these people effectively reseeded huckleberries around their camps.” This, alongside burning practices that cleared the ground each year, tentatively explains the anomalously high densities of huckleberries immediately surrounding traditional campsites (see Turner, Deur, and Mellott 2011).

Notes to pages 194–205  |  425

38 As a child, Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994) watched her father and the other men undertake this task in the late spring and early summer in the Vernon area. They used a piece of smouldering birch bark tied onto the end of a pole to smoke out all of the tent caterpillars. 39 I am indebted to Jennifer Carpenter, director of the Heiltsuk Cultural Education Society and culture and heritage manager at the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, for permission to include her late husband’s account of the berry gardens here. 40 See, for example, accounts in Boas (1921, 1934), Edwards (1979), Turner and Kuhnlein (1982, 1983), Deur (2000), Deur and Turner (2005), Turner (2005), Turner and Efrat (1982), and Turner, Thomas, et al. (1983). 41 For example, Pacific hemlockparsley (Conioselinum gmelinii) was also sometimes planted and tended (Compton 1993a). For the Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuxalk, Nootka lupine was produced in their t’əkkillakw (estuarine root gardens), and for some Nuuchah-nulth, especially the Huupachesath and other peoples of the Port Alberni area, edible camas was also grown (see chapter 5). 42 The families used to travel downriver from Gwa’yee to the gardens at the mouth of the Kingcome River in large dugout canoes when the tide was going down and then return to the village upriver when the tide came up so that they wouldn’t have to fight the current. 43 There is a place called Miłgeelde, the name of a territory of the ganhada laxyuup (“Raven lands”) of the Kitsumkalum band, that can be translated as “burned shrubs” or “burned mountain tops,” evidently reflecting this practice. People still remember burning cranberry patches (either Vaccinium oxycoccos or V. vitis-idaea or possibly Viburnum edule) at the Lockerby Creek camp and on the Ecstall River in this area (Mcdonald 2003, 53). 44 See Deur (2000, 2004), Deur and Turner (2005), Johnson (1999), McDonald (2003), Norton (1979a), Thornton (1999), Turner (1999), and Turner and Thompson (2006). 45 As noted previously, this has occurred for many of the prairies that have been documented from oral history and other lines of evidence as having once been much more extensive (M. Kat Anderson, pers. comm., 2009; Lepofsky, Heyerdahl, et al. 2003). 46 Chiefs and designated leaders were also placed in charge of other harvesting and management endeavours, including deer drives (Interior Plateau), reefnet and weir fishing (Straits Salish and Northwest Coast peoples in general), and oulachen fishing (Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuxalk, Haisla, and Nisga’a), as well as overseeing various activities in plant harvesting and management. 47 The sxw’pʕápm (“burner”) also directed the manual clearing of Indian trails clogged by unmanageable debris or trees blown down, as well as the clearing of debris from important springs and water seeps and from naturally occurring game salt licks within the group’s territory, along with overseeing the driving of deer into a “deer surround” (J.A. Ross 2011, 271). 48 For example, Yup’ik Inuit would traditionally bury some food in the tundra, usually fish, before going berry picking in order to feed the “little men,” or berry spirits, so that they would provide a rich harvest (Thornton 1999). 49 As noted in chapter 9, some sites, such as the estuarine root gardens along the San Juan River, owned by an ancestor of Chief Charlie Jones (Queesto) of the Pacheedaht First Nation, were so valued that they were actually guarded by slaves against intruders (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). Tlingit berry gardens were sometimes similarly guarded by slaves or other sentinels (Thornton 1999).

426  |  Notes to pages 206–23

50 For example, the Katzie (Halkomelem) families of the Fraser Valley, who owned large patches of wapato on the west bank of the Pitt River, traded these tubers to the Straits and Halkomelem Salish on Vancouver Island, to the Squamish, and, inland, to the Lower Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) in exchange for camas bulbs and, in the last case, products from the interior. Similar trading of wapato occurred around the lower Columbia River in Chinook territory (Darby 2005; Galloway 1982; Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Suttles 1955, 1987a, 1987c). 51 See, for example, E.N. Anderson (1996), M.K. Anderson (2005), E.R. Atleo (2004, 2011), Berkes (2012), Johnson Gottesfeld (1994), Minnis and Elisens (2000), J. Ford and Martinez (2000), Fowler (2000), Deur and Turner (2005), Turner (2005), and Turner and Berkes (2006). 52 For example, Yakima women traditionally sweat bathed and refrained from sexual relations for five days before beginning to dig roots, and only certain, ritually clean, women were allowed to prepare the earth ovens for roasting roots. Men, conventionally, did not participate in root roasting or even look in the direction of the earth ovens while women were tending them (Kirk and Daugherty 2007; Peacock 1998). 53 This description is related to the scattering of spring beauty seeds by recently bereaved women as recounted previously for the Tsilhqot’in. 54 This protocol continues to the present day. Chapter Twelve 1 Mayanilth is from the Mamaliliqela and Qwiqwasutinuxw of Village Island and the Broughton Archipelago. 2 The cracks in the tree were smeared over with spruce pitch, and bumblebees were assigned to guard any potential entrance so that no one else could break in to the cedar tree. 3 See, for example, E.R. Atleo (2004, 2011), Barbeau (1961), Boas (2002), Bouchard and Kennedy (1979), Cove and MacDonald (1987), Kennedy and Bouchard (1983, 1994), Mackin (2004); Maud (1978a, 1978b, 1978c), Mourning Dove (1933), Wilp Wilxo’os­ kwhl Nisga’a (1995), J.A. Ross (2011), Swanton (1905, 1908), and Teit (1898, 1909, 1912, 1919). 4 Some of the Boas (2002) stories were translated from one or more dialects of Kwak’wala, Nuu-chah-nulth, or Secwepemc-tsín into Chinook Jargon, then into German, and much later into English (translated by Dietrich Bertz). 5 At a conference of the Society of Ethnobiology at Anchorage, Alaska, in May 2005, an apprentice Tlingit storyteller related, in the presence of his teacher and mentor, how he had to work hard over many years, memorizing hours of text, so that he could repeat, word for word, the stories of his ancestors. The ability to do this was considered a gift, an art, and a heavy responsibility. As well, having heard Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith and Clan Chief Adam Dick recounting stories on many occasions, even in English, which is not their first language, I have been struck by the accuracy of replication of the wording and conversations embedded in the stories about Mink and the other powerful characters who made the world into its present form. 6 Deer is well known as one who obtains fire for people, with stories on this theme recorded in Boas (2002) from the Tlingit, Ts’msyen, Heiltsuk, Nahwitti, Nuu-chahnulth, and Comox; the Heiltsuk name for Deer is “torch bearer” because he stole fire with the aid of wood, which he had tied to his tail (ibid., 495).

Notes to pages 225–35  |  427

7 A “slow match” is comprised of a wad of tinder, sometimes of dried root fibres of bracken fern or other plant material or sometimes of shredded cedar bark, which is ignited and encased as a smoldering coal within bivalve shells or a wrapping of birch bark or cedar bark and then buried in the ground. “Slow matches” were commonly used until quite recently and are easier to use than having to start a fire with a drill. As well as being buried on site, they can be carried by travellers and used to rekindle fire at a new camping spot. 8 Similarly, with supernatural help, the young man meets all of the other challenges set by his father-in-law and at last obtains his acquiescence. 9 The use of fire in cooking, smoking, and dehydrating food, technologies related to fire and fuel wood, and the use of fire in traditional vegetation management are all topics addressed in this book (see chapters 5, 6, and 11). 10 A common element in several of these stories involves a situation in which the brother takes revenge on his sister’s husband for her death and is then “discovered” when he tries to imitate his sister pounding bracken fern rhizomes to eat because he does not hit the roots in the same way a woman would. The two women to notice this were Mallard Duck sisters (Boas 2002). 11 Ngexw is a delicious “pudding” comprised of roots, berries, fat, and other ingredients, including combinations of yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum) bulbs, spring beauty (Claytonia lanceolata) corms, tiger lily (Lilium columbianum) bulbs, onions (Allium cernuum), bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva), saskatoon berries (Amelanchier alnifolia), and black tree lichen (Bryoria fremontii), along with deer fat and sometimes salmon eggs (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990). 12 Told by Walter, a member of the Rear-Town-People of Yan (cited in Swanton 1908, 448). 13 Oil and fat are also commonly mentioned foods in many stories, sometimes being served as an accompaniment to berries or other plant foods. 14 Fog Woman is an Earth-Mother figure who appears to have evolved from Volcano, or Frog Woman, also known as Creek Woman, or Jilaa Kuns in Haida. 15 Q’əxmín refers to the seeds (fruits) of “Indian celery,” or Indian consumption plant (Lomatium nudicaule). 16 Possibly this is Chatham Island, right beside Discovery Island, called Tl’ches. 17 The Saanich name for willow, especially Pacific willow (Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra), is sxwələʔ-íłch (“reefnet-plant/tree”). 18 Cured stipes of bull kelp furnished the long lines used for the gear for halibut and other groundfish (chapter 6). 19 This narrative was told by Mrs Harriet Hudson of Kitselas to Ts’msyen ethnographer William Beynon in 1948 (cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 84–8; see also Johnson 1997, 138–9). 20 In early spring, the nettles normally would have died back for the winter, but the seasonal timing of the story isn’t necessarily in accordance with modern times. 21 For example, McIlwraith (1948, vol. 1, 89) reported the following for the Nuxalk oulachen nets: “In the beginning of time, Raven told two men to make a net according to a pattern which he showed them and gave them some [nettle] fibre. It was insufficient and when the workers asked for more, Raven told them to draw it from their own intestines. This they did and ever since, spiders have had the same ability.” The Heiltsuk have a similar tradition (Boas 2002). In these last narratives, there is a direct association between spider webs and fishing nets.

428  |  Notes to pages 244–52

22 It is not surprising that for some of the cultural groups in southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico, Spider is equivalent to the Creator, or first being (Archambault 2006). 23 Although the species of fern in this case is not mentioned, it is probably the rootstock of spiny wood fern (Dryopteris expansa), a well-known wintertime food and famine food (Turner, Johnson Gottesfeld, et al. 1992), although possibly the “roots” are bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) rhizomes, which are also known as a famine food (Norton 1979b). 24 Told by Walter of the Rear-Town-People of Yan (cited in Swanton 1908, 574). 25 I wish to acknowledge Randy Bouchard and Dr Dorothy Kennedy, David Stevenson and his Oowekeeno consultants, and Evelyn Windsor and Clan Chief Adam Dick (pers. comm. to Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, 2001) for explanatory annotations related to this narrative. 26 As Nōak.aua wished, Masmasalā’niq also made a box with four dancing flutes that had the voices of various birds, as well as a dancing staff. 27 Told by Walter of the Rear-Town-People of Yan (cited in Swanton 1908, 460–6). 28 Told by John Sky to John Swanton within the series of episodes of “Raven Travelling” (cited in Enrico 1995, 62–3; and in Swanton 1905, 126). 29 A Secwepemc story about Tłéesa, the eldest of four Transformer brothers (who was changed into a dog), also alludes to such a tree: “They now crossed the river. Soon they saw a ‘tobacco tree.’ As soon as anyone tried to get tobacco, one of the tree’s branches began swinging around in circles and killed him. Tlē’esa [Tłéesa] took a small stick and walked up to the tree. When the branch began swinging, he lopped it off with the stick and tossed it into the river. Then, using his stick, he dug up the tree and pushed it over. Now the brothers came up and picked off all the tobacco. Tlē’esa did not get anything” (Boas 2002, 64). 30 This same woman later encountered a wolf giving birth and assisted her in delivering the cubs. In gratitude, the wolf gave her midwife the power of a shaman (McIlwraith 1948, vol. 1, 691). 31 This is a different species from the tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) created for the Nlaka’pamux people by Coyote. The Haida tobacco is a now-extinct relative of N. quadrivalvis, whose closest known relatives today grow in Oregon and California (Turner and Taylor 1972). 32 Here, “Indians” refers to the first people or ancient people (tlldluu xàadagaay) or to their more contemporary equivalent (tllsdaa xàaydagaay) (John Enrico, pers. comm., 2002; see also Turner 2004a). 33 Included are the Tlingit, Ts’msyen, Haida, Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Oowekeeno, Nahwitti, Nuu-chah-nulth, and various Coast Salish peoples (Boas 2002; see also Barbeau 1961, 78–9). 34 A similar version is told by the Nuxalk (Boas 2002, 507). 35 In regard to Raven’s craving for berries, Boas (2002) cites stories from the Tlingit, Ts’msyen, Heiltsuk, Nahwitti, Nuu-chah-nulth, Nuxalk, and Comox (for the Ditidaht, see also Kennedy and Bouchard 1994). 36 Mourning Dove (1933, 125) adds, “That was Coyote’s ruling near the Beginning. That is why his hair, the long black timber-hair, hangs from trees in the mountains. It is called sqwel’íp. It is the black moss that the people cook in pit ovens.” Secwepemc elder Ike Willard told a similar story to Bouchard and Kennedy (1979, 22) about the origin of black tree lichen, but in this case, Coyote tried to imitate Spider sliding down to the ground from the top of a tree on a strand of his web: “Coyote climbed

Notes to pages 253–78  |  429

37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50 51 52

up the tree and lay on his back on the top of the branches. He … used his fur as a web and started to slide down it, but when he was halfway down, he became stuck. Spider unhooked Coyote from the tree and helped him back to the ground. ‘Coyote, when the coming people live on this land, your fur that is still hanging from the branches will be black tree moss. The people will gather it and cook it to eat.’” One such version is told by Ike Willard (also Secwepemc) (cited in Bouchard and Kennedy 1979, 15–18; see also M. Dixon, Palmantier, and Kuipers 1982). He stayed many years with the Wolf people, and later when he returned to his village he was helped by the Wolves (told by Nathan Shaw, Gitxaata, to William Beynon in 1952, cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 275). Boas (2002, 494). See also Boas (ibid., 538), Swanton (1905, 499, 503, 521), and Cove and MacDonald (1987). These language groups include the Tlingit, Kwakwaka’wakw, Comox, Halkomelem, Quinault, Nuxalk, and Kathlamet (Chinookan). Other Dene (Athabaskan) peoples who carry similar stories include the Apache of the Southwest, who re-enact it in puberty ceremonies, and the Dogrib of the Northwest Territories, who believe themselves to be descendants of the people in this story (Boas 2002; L.R. Smith 2008b). Similar stories are also found among Inuit peoples from Greenland, Hudson Bay, and Alaska, as well as in Cree and Cherokee (Boas 2002). Examples are the Tlingit, Ts’msyen, Heiltsuk, Straits Salish, Klallam, Quinault, Lushootseed, Chehalis, Quileute, Cowlitz, Maidu, and Washo. Examples are the Shoshone, Ktunaxa, Blackfoot (Siksika), Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Arapaho, Arikara, Hidatsa, Cheyenne, Crow, Dakota, Kiowa, and Ponca. Examples are the Tahltan, Tsetsaut, Dakelh, Tsilhqot’in, Sarsi, and Cree. Told by Emma Wright, Gitlaxdamks, to William Beynon (cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 306–7). Exchanges of the past are reflected today in similar plant names across language groups, even between groups that are linguistically unrelated or only distantly related (see chapter 3). Names and specialized terminology tend to be transmitted with goods and information for speakers of different languages. Soapberry is apparently not known to grow anywhere on Haida Gwaii today (see Calder and Taylor 1968). Boas (2002, 639) observed, “The self-contained structure of the Raven Legend, as found in the region’s north, and its gradual shrinking towards the south with simultaneous modification of the traits common to the north, prove that a gradual transmission of a legendary cycle from the north southward has taken place here, which essentially found its conclusion in Newettee (Nahwitti) although, even from there, isolated traits, strongly modified, still penetrated southwards … it can safely be deduced that the Raven cycle was diffused southward along the coast as a selfcontained structure and gradually lost cohesion.” In fact, Boas (2002) found, the Nuxalk and Comox had the highest percentage of common features of all tribes surveyed. This observation is based on the assumption that the Nuxalk diverged north from an original Proto-Salish homeland in the lower Fraser River region. The Comox were followed by the Nuu-chah-nulth, Nahwitti, Nuxalk, and Heiltsuk. An example is the Ts’msyen story “The Origin of the Name of Chief Mountain,” told by Mathew Gurney and Robert Stewart of Kincolith (Gingolx) to William Beynon (cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 340). See also McDonald (2003). Significantly, Boas suggests that this last group (the Chinookan) was the entry point to the coast not only for this story but for others as well. A further example of more

430  |  Notes to pages 280–8

53 54 55 56 57

northerly groups borrowing elements from the Chinookan is in the Nuu-chah-nulth name Tsítsikle, for the benevolent stranger who provided herring to a boy and his starving family (Boas 2002, 269–70). Boas identifies this name as a reduplicated form of the Chinookan name for the Wanderer, Tsikla. Recounted in Cove and MacDonald (1987, 252, 254). See also the Nlaka’pamux story “The Hunter and the Goats” in Teit (1912, 261). In some versions, it was a robin carrying a sprig of salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis). Told by Kenneth Harris (Chief Hax Bagwootxw) (cited in Johnson 1997, 140). See Swanton (1905, 212–13; 1908, 689–700) and Cove and MacDonald (1987, 80–1, 82–3, 167, 311). This story was recounted to William Beynon by Mrs Heber (Lucille) Clifton and Mrs Robinson, both of the Eagle (Laxsgiik) clan of Sen’arhait in Kitamaat, who had married into the Gitga’at community of Hartley Bay. See also Barbeau (n.d., cited in McDonald 2003, 127–34). Chapter Thirteen

1 The term used by Boas (1930 and elsewhere) is “prayers,” but Kwakwaka’wakw historian and language specialist Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth) (pers. comm., 1994) said that “words of praise” is a more accurate translation from the original Kwak’wala. 2 Examples can be seen in the north among the Koyukon (R.K. Nelson 1983), Yupiaq (Kawagley 1995), Yukon Dene (Cruikshank 1998, 2005), Tlingit (Emmons 1991; Thornton 1999, 2008), and Nisga’a (Wilp Wilxo’oskwhl Nisga’a 1995; Vickers 2008); on the west coast of Vancouver Island among the Nuu-chah-nulth (E.R. Atleo 2004); in the Interior Plateau among the Nlaka’pamux (Hanna and Henry 1995), Tsilhqot’in (L.R. Smith 2008b), Secwepemc (R.E. Ignace 2008), Spokan (J.A. Ross 2011), and Sahaptin (Hunn, Selam, and family 1990); on the Great Plains among the Plains Cree (Kovach 2006), Lakota Sioux (J.E. Brown 1953), and Pawnee (P.V. Beck and Walters 1977); in eastern North America among the Mohawk (Wall 1993) and Anishenaabe (A.M. Miller 2010); in the Southwest among the Hopi (Loftin 1994) and Navajo (Diné) (Cajete 2000); in California among the Miwok, Klamath, and other Native Americans (M.K. Anderson 2005); and in Mexico and beyond among the Rarámuri and other peoples (Wyndham 2004; Salmón 2000). 3 See, for example, E.N. Anderson (1996), M.K. Anderson (2005), E.R. Atleo (2004, 2011), Berkes (2008), P.V. Beck and Walters (1977), J.E. Brown (1953, 1986), Cajete (2000), Callicott (1989), Senos et al. (2006), L.R. Smith (2008b), Turner and Atleo (1998), and Wall (1993). 4 Teit’s notation under “flowers in general” recounted, “Flowers are the valuables of the earth or mtns and if they are plucked ruthlessly the earth sorrows or cries.” Then, under “siekEm [s-yíqm] grass in general,” he wrote, “Flowers, plants & grass especially the latter are the covering or blanket of the earth[.] If too much plucked or ruthlessly destroyed [the] earth [is] sorry and weeps[.] It rains or is angry and makes rain, fog & bad weather” (cited in Turner 2005, 20; and Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990, 54). 5 The Rarámuri, or Tarahumara, of the Sierra Madres in Mexico, for example, use a term, iwígara, that derives from the root word íwi (“soul, breath of life”). It pertains to everything that breathes or respires: plants, animals, humans, stones, the land – all of these share the same breath, and all have “souls.” Iwígara embraces the total interconnectedness and the integration of all life, physical and spiritual, within the

Notes to pages 290–310  |  431

6 7

8 9

10

11

12

Rarámuri universe, and it ties people to their songs and ceremonies, to their foods, and to the land that nourishes them (Salmón 2000). This practice of offering a small gift or tobacco is a widespread tradition, for example, among Plains Cree medicine gatherers when they remove medicinal roots (Kovach 2006). For example, the Tsilhqot’in are taught from an early age that one should not point at people because it is disrespectful. Xeni Gwet’in chief Roger William (2003) explained that the same situation holds for mountains: “In our ways, you know, you don’t point at people; it’s disrespect when you’re pointing at people and they can’t hear what you’re saying. So when you point at Ts’ilʔos and ʔEniyud – ʔEniyud’s a lot meaner than Ts’ilʔos – but it would rain on you or snow, or you would have bad luck. And it usually happens when you’re not ready. So … at the least time you expected, it could snow on you in the middle of the summer, depending what the situation was.” On Vancouver Island the Saanich Straits Salish also stress that one should never point at the mountains known as the Malahat because doing so will cause thunder; these mountains are the home of the Thunderbird (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1998). There was a similar taboo against harvesting giant California mussels (Mytilus californianus) while harvesting seaweed. Other plants are called maaya galipliip (“thunder berries”) in Sm’algyax, the Ts’m­ syen language, and are apparently also associated with thunder: wild lily-of-thevalley (Maianthemum dilatatum), false Solomon’s-seal (Maianthemum racemosum), and twistedstalk (Streptopus spp.) (Turner and Thompson 2006). In mythical times Sword Fern (Polystichum munitum) was said to be a supernatural person who controlled the weather. He was said to have a hairy face, earrings of dentalia, and cheeks smeared with red ochre, and he featured in rituals to call the northwest wind (Boas 1921). Pond-lily (Nuphar lutea ssp. polysepala) leaves tend to align themselves on the surface of a lake. When a southeast wind is blowing, they lie flat on the water; when the west wind blows, they lift off the surface, and “the whole lake would be moving.” Long ago, whenever there was a bad storm, when the southeast or southwest winds had been blowing for several days, the Hesquiaht would take a pond-lily leaf and slam it down on the water, calling out “Hachłiitł! Hachłiitł!” (“West wind! West wind!”). This was said to calm the storm quickly and bring in the gentler west wind the next day (Turner and Efrat 1982, 70). The letters of ethnographers Aurel Krause and Arthur Krause (1993) from their time in Tlingit country in 1882 describe some other instances of more recent transgressions: “The [Tlingit] Indians seem to protect a duck, the oldsquaw. One of the many causes given for the poor weather in February was that somebody killed an oldsquaw. The native name ja-a-uná is a good rendition of the melodic call of this duck” (156). “We learn that the Indians now accuse us of causing the bad weather. First we dragged a dead porcupine through the snow instead of carrying it, then we washed the mountain sheep in salt water. Today they want to burn us in effigy” (158). “The fish baskets laid out last night [at Deshu, Portage Bay] also yielded only an insignificant catch, so everybody was upset. Several times the word ch’lakass was heard. The presence of the gutzkakon, the stranger from far away, was definitely at fault for the low catch. Without doubt, his shooting of the raven, oldsquaws, and other sacred animals had caused the severe winter and heavy snowfall” (197). See also Emmons (1991).

432  |  Notes to pages 314–18

13 Even in the Secwepemc area, where people apparently did not eat bracken fern, it was known in the eastern dialect as pəp’əʔsésts’yə (“snake grass”) (Sarah Deneault, pers. comm. to Marianne Ignace, 1995). 14 Told by Jimmy Williams of Kispiox to Marius Barbeau in 1920 (cited in Cove and MacDonald 1987, 278–80; see also 79–83, 167). 15 This story has similarities to a number of others, including the story of the Copper Salmon, told by Walter of the Rear-Town-People of Yan (cited in Swanton 1908, 689–700). 16 Cf. the Haida names for devil’s-club, ts’iihlinjaaw (Skidegate dialect), and for gambling sticks, ts’iihl. 17 Devil’s-club berries are called “highbush cranberries of the grizzly” in the Nuxalk language (Turner 1973). 18 For example, the Saanich (Straits Salish) name is tuʔtuʔə́ləqəp (“echo”), a word that has been used more recently for “telephone.” 19 Potlatch ceremonies have many different components and vary considerably; one of the clearest accounts of the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch complex is in the film Smoke from His Fire (Recalma-Clutesi 2007). 20 For masru, the Kotzebue Inuit of Alaska would leave a piece of dried fish: “We carefully opened these [mouse caches filled with masru] and emptied the masru onto our bag to sort; big ones into the sack and small ones and any peculiar ones back into the cache. Then we put a piece of dried fish into the cache and covered it back up. That was in trade and a thank you. It is always done that way and it is most important at freeze-up because there is less time for the mice to gather more food” (A. Jones 1983, 117). 21 Four is a sacred, “magic” number, which, some people say, corresponds to the four directions. 22 As noted previously, Boas’s (1930) translation of the original Kwak’wala word as “prayer” is inaccurate; according to Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (pers. comm., 1994), the term implies “words of praise.” 23 The regalia, masks, rattles, and whistles used in the Hamatsa and other sacred ceremonies are themselves spiritual entities, to be handled only by those who are qualified and trained to do so. 24 See Kennedy and Bouchard (1983) for Sliammon/Tla’amin Coast Salish, E.R. Atleo (2004), and Turner and Berkes (2006). For example, de Laguna (1972, 102) reported for the Tlingit, “Animals were always treated with great respect. The hunter or fisherman appealed to them before capture; and after their death, followed certain observances that were supposed to propitiate their spirits. The folktales tell of punishment of those who even spoke disrespectfully or slightingly of the animals … it was reasoned that all humans and animals have the same attributes, and differ only in form.” 25 For descriptions of some of these ceremonies, see Hart (1976), Hunn and French (1981), Hunn, Selam, and family (1990), Hunn, Turner, and French (1998), Kuhnlein and Turner (1991), J.A. Ross (2011), and Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy (1980). 26 Hill-Tout referred to this as “wild raspberry” but identified it with the name “Rubus Nutkanus,” a synonym for Rubus parviflorus (thimbleberry), whose succulent shoots are most often eaten, along with those of Rubus spectabilis (salmonberry) (Turner 1995). 27 See Compton (1993b), Johnson (1997), Thornton (1999), Turner (1995, 1997a), and Turner, Ignace, and Ignace (2000).

Notes to pages 319–32  |  433

28 George (2003) recalled that he and the other children would ask for some of the sprouts, but most were eaten by the women and were considered a special women’s food. 29 In one example for fisheries, many First Salmon ceremonies lasted for four days, and over this period, no more salmon were allowed to be caught, thus ensuring a substantial run passed through before people started to catch and process their winter supply (E. Claxton and Elliott 1994; Turner and Berkes 2006). 30 According to Dr Earl Claxton Sr (pers. comm., 2005), the Saanich name for this plant, q’əxmín, is related to the term sq’əx (“to put a curse on someone”) because of its role in protecting people from evil curses. 31 Following her seclusion, the girl was ceremonially greeted as a woman and undertook ritual washing and cleansing. For a Nlaka’pamux girl, among others, during her period of seclusion she was not allowed to eat fresh meat or salmon, and she was never allowed to go near a stream in which salmon swam, or they would disappear from that stream (Laforet, Turner, and York 1993; Maud 1978c, 55). 32 Even the next child born after twins was a “mystery” and underwent the same types of restrictions as his or her twin siblings (Teit 1909). 33 John Ross (2011) notes that before burning over the remaining tules, the women would gather the edible seeds from the yellow pond-lily. 34 John Ross (2011) reports a similar belief system for the Spokan, noting, “A recent widow was forbidden to pick any berries … breaking this taboo could ruin an entire crop.” Teit (1930, 175) explained, “The belief was that the ghost might follow the widow to the berry patches and harm other pickers, and blast the crop.” Food was always shared with elder widows and widowers, so not being able to pick berries did not result in a food shortage for them. 35 California basket maker Jacquelyn Ross, of the Coastal Miwok, explained how Miwok weavers are taught to harvest their materials with respect and only from places that are “clean” and untouched by activities such as drinking or partying. Basket materials from such places would make baskets that would be unlucky for the people who used them. The materials for baby baskets, she said, were selected with especially great care, and the weaver was careful to think good thoughts and to think with love about the baby to be born so that the basket would protect the baby and surround it with a positive force (cited in Turner 1996). Similar sentiments have been expressed by basket weavers from northwestern North America, such as Mary Thomas (2001). 36 In the European tradition, the term “oak” in English derives from its name in Scandinavian languages, ek or eg, which, in turn, is related to the old Norse word for “reverence” or “respect,” igja (Jonsson 1996). 37 One kind of tree in the forests of Thailand called jan, for example, can be cut down only if it is to be used to make a coffin for a king or other member of a royal family (Chinatat Nagashinha, Phranakhon Rajabhat University, pers. comm., 2006). 38 See E.R. Atleo (2004, 2011) and McIlwraith (1948); see also Colding and Folke (2001), L.R. Smith (2008b), and Turner and Berkes (2006). Chapter Fourteen 1 See, for example, the writings of E.N. Anderson (1996), M.K. Anderson (2005), Berkes (2012), Callicott (1989), J. Ford and Martinez (2000), Gadgil, Berkes, and Folke (1993), and Minnis and Elisens (2000). 2 The ineffective methods of resource managers are described in numerous publications, including Berkes, Colding, and Folke (2003), Blaser (2004), T.J.S. Carlson and

434  |  Notes to pages 332–52

Maffi (2004), W. Davis (2009), Mascia et al. (2003), Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2003), and Stepp, Wyndham, and Zarger (2002). 3 As noted by Secwepemc language specialists Drs Ron Ignace and Marianne Ignace (pers. comm., 2011), the term “Mother Nature” is a Western term and does not occur in the Secwepemc language. Mary Thomas often used it metaphorically, however, to enable her to communicate effectively with those outside of her own culture about relationships with the land and environment. 4 As cited in tables 2-1 and 2-2, the following are examples of plants with evidently very long human associations in northwestern North America, based on their known more recent cultural importance, on their known presence in the region (or in northeastern Asia) in the Late Pleistocene and/or Early Holocene, and in some cases, on the pervasiveness of their names in the region’s languages: spiny wood fern, bracken fern, kinnikinnick, saskatoon berry, seaside strawberry, chokecherry, gray currant, wild roses, thimbleberry, red elderberry, soapberry, blueberries, lingonberry, bog cranberry, highbush cranberry, fireweed, cow-parsnip, western dock, northern riceroot, sagebrush/wormwood (Artemisia tilesii and other spp.), alders, birches, spruces, lodgepole pine, poplars, willows, and cattail. 5 The obsidian is estimated to have been brought to the site about 9,800 years ago (E.J. Dixon 1999). 6 This is a critical lesson today as well; we cannot consider the production of coffee or apples or fish in isolation from the host of equipment we apply in the growing, harvesting, and processing of these resources, and when we think of energy expended, we need to consider all of these peripheral but integral parts of the system. 7 In part, as well, the immensity of these middens may be a factor of better preservation as more shell accumulates; other middens may also have existed earlier, to be inundated as relative sea levels rose (Moss 2011). 8 As Moss (2011) emphasizes, however, it cannot be claimed that these trends were universal or that they happened within a measured, orderly trajectory. There are many exceptions to such generalizations and many gaps in the archaeological record that blur and distort any picture. 9 A case in point is the term s-ts’ik’ or s-ts’ik, identified by Kuipers (2002) as a ProtoSalish term for “nut,” “acorn,” and/or “fir or pine cone” (or seed). Derivatives of this term are found in some modern Coast Salish languages for “hazelnut” and in some modern Interior Salish languages for “whitebark pine seed.” Forms of the term also occur in Ts’msyenic languages (Gitxsan, Nisga’a) for “hazelnut” and in Athabaskan (Tsilhqot’in) for “whitebark pine seed.” Others use it for “Garry oak acorns” and still others for conifer seeds generally. 10 These Camassia species include both common camas (C. quamash) and the larger, more robust Leichtlin’s camas (C. leichtlinii). 11 There were, of course, positive outcomes from the new relationships, but as the stated goal of governments and the church was to assimilate Indigenous peoples into mainstream society, the negative consequences in terms of loss of languages, cultural practices, traditional foods, and overall health and well-being of Indigenous populations were immense (Duff 1997; Fisher 1992; Lutz 2008; Ommer et al. 2007; Suttles 1990b; Turner and Turner 2008). 12 Camassia quamash may also have existed during the Pleistocene in a few coastal refugia, such as the Brooks Peninsula on Vancouver Island, and possibly in western Washington (Tomimatsu, Kephart, and Vellend 2009). 13 According to Secwepemc elder Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994), ribs freshly extracted from a deer that has been pit-cooked can be hit in “just the right way” with

Notes to pages 353–63  |  435

a maul or stone for them to shatter into multiple sharp slivers, which could then be used as awls, in basketry, for stitching deer hides, and for other purposes. 14 According to the locality of the cooking and cultural preferences (see chapter 5), the types of vegetation used to surround the food being cooked in earth ovens have also varied: salal and sword fern, kelp and other seaweed, skunk-cabbage leaves, Douglas-fir boughs, ponderosa pine needles, wild rose branches, or fireweed plants. 15 The numerous acorn-processing pits here were lined with hemlock boughs and marked at the corners with stakes, and they were evidently ingeniously designed to capture moving groundwater from a well-situated aquifer in order to leach the bitter tannins from the kernels of potentially millions of acorns (Croes, Fagan, and Zehendner 2009a, 2009b; Croes et al. 2007). 16 The research of Tomimatsu, Kephart, and Vellend (2009) is an example of DNA analyses that can help to shed light on the origins and affiliations of key ethnobotanical species, although this study did not reveal any evidence of human transport of camas bulbs. 17 The Nuu-chah-nulth and Ditidaht did, however, within the past century or so, harvest this seaweed for sale to Chinese and Japanese people in the Victoria area (see Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). 18 Notable exceptions include hazelnuts, whitebark pine, and sometimes other conifer seeds, balsamroot seeds, and acorns, all of which were harvested and eaten within their ranges in the study area. 19 For example, wooden digging sticks with carved antler or wooden handles predominated in the Interior Plateau, whereas over most of the Northwest Coast, yew-wood root diggers with knobbed tops were more common. 20 Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 2001) recalled that the Secwepemc, at least, also made canoes of bundles of tule stalks (Schoenoplectus acutus), similar to those made by the Paiute and others living around the Great Basin wetlands, such as Stillwater Marsh in Nevada. 21 As well as detachable points joined to the main shaft with twined cordage, some of these spears comprised as many as three different kinds of wood, each with its own density, to yield a perfect balance for throwing (Turner, Thomas, et al. 1983). 22 Later, after Europeans arrived, the women adapted these same basketry techniques and materials to create items of interest to the newcomers: tea trays, cups and saucers, knitting baskets, and even coffee tables were created to cater to a new market for trade and sale. 23 The Coast Salish weavers also used dog hair and duck feathers in their weaving, and mountain goat wool was also spun and used for blankets of various types. Sometimes they added cattail and fireweed seed fluff to these materials in their spinning. 24 Basketry patterns reflect the weavers’ close connections with the natural world, as many of them – even those that are seemingly simple geometric designs – are symbolic representations of patterns in nature: ferns, mountains, or animals of various kinds. 25 After the major food harvesting was finished, the basket materials were often dried and stored, to be soaked and worked on during the winter. Schlick (1994, 142) estimates, from the southern Interior Plateau, that it may have taken a woman two to three months to complete a woven bag of about 15 by 20 inches. 26 For example, Annie York suggested that a Nlaka’pamux household might include sixteen or more large storage baskets for dried berries, perhaps as many for dried roots, several others for harvesting and cooking, and one for whipping soapberries, as well as various bags (Turner, Thompson, et al. 1990).

436  |  Notes to pages 363–7

27 Specific recipes for medicinal preparations are often considered a family’s property, said to lose their effectiveness if too many people know about them. 28 As noted in chapter 7, there is a strong correlation among food plants, medicinal plants, and plants that have recognized poisonous properties, a phenomenon that is, again, not limited to northwestern North America but quite widespread. In fact, the majority of widely used medicines of classical Greek and Roman times were actually food species. 29 Two of the ingredients, saskatoon berry bark and trembling aspen, are the same; others, like chokecherry for the Dakelh and bitter cherry for the Saanich, are similar. Furthermore, each mixture contains one herbaceous species: sarsaparilla for the Dakelh medicine and licorice fern for the Saanich (Elsie Claxton, pers. comm., 1993; Poser 2008b; Turner and Hebda 1990). 30 Shamanistic healing may also involve the use of plants, either as administered by the shaman or as taken by the shaman as part of his spiritual preparation, along with other types of training. 31 Some medicines are known to be particularly powerful spiritually and have the strength to ward off illness and protect people from any kind of evil or bad luck; although the medicines themselves may differ from place to place, the concept of such plants having spiritual power is universal in the study area. 32 Saanich elder Violet Williams (cited in Turner and Hebda 2012, 30) recalled, “The old people used to say, ‘Don’t take a big chunk [of bark for medicine].’ Just take a thin strip [about 3 to 5 by 30 centimetres], and then the tree will heal up, and the person who is being treated will heal up too, just like the tree.” Another protocol that she and Elsie Claxton (ibid., 29–30) described was that a healer should always go out to gather her medicine in the morning, before eating anything. Gitga’at elder Helen Clifton (cited in Turner and Thompson 2006) added that when one is harvesting medicine, she should always focus on that task and try not to do anything else – just think about the person for whom the medicine is intended. Mary Thomas (pers. comm., 1994) said that for the best results, one should gather medicine only from remote places far from human activity so that the medicine will not be subject to profane influences. 33 For example, the practice of burning the skin with birch conk (Inonotus obliquus) and other substances to “draw out” underlying pain (Mary Thomas, pers. comm., 2001; L.M.J. Gottesfeld 1992b; Johnston 1997; Poser 2008b) is very similar to the moxibustion practised in traditional Chinese medicine and may, in fact, originate from common ancestral practices from the ancient past. The use of stinging nettle as a counter-irritant to treat arthritic pain is also likely quite old and is shared by Europeans and other Indigenous peoples across North America. 34 This need for dispersal is described in Ames and Maschner (1999), Deur (2002), Hayden (1997), and Moss et al. (2004). 35 Most perennials are capable of continued growth through the activity of meristems – areas of unspecialized tissues in roots, stems, bark, and buds that can differentiate into more specialized tissues. Meristems enable plants to grow new roots, underground stems, vascular tissues, bark, branches, shoots, or leaves on an ongoing basis and, as required, to repair and renew these organs if they are damaged. This capacity for regrowth is an ability evolved over eons, enabling these plants to withstand various kinds of disturbance, such as breakage from wind or water, damage from insects or fire, or browsing by herbivorous animals. Similarly, some ferns and flowering plants, as well as producing spores or seeds, are able to regenerate entire new individuals from vegetative propagules. For example, a single leaf

Notes to pages 368–75  |  437

36 37

38 39 40

41

42

43 44

45

of stonecrop, or lavaberry, or a single tiny bulblet or sprout of northern riceroot or chocolate lily can grow roots and generate into an entire new plant. Human harvesting of such plants, if done with care, will actually trigger new growth and reproductive responses. See, for example, M.K. Anderson (2005, 2009), Berkes (2012), Blackburn and Anderson (1993), Boyd (1999b), Deur and Turner (2005), J. Ford and Martinez (2000), Gill (2005a, 2005b), Hunn, Selam, and family (1990), and Minnis and Elisens (2000). The Jilaa Kuns (Creek Woman or Fog Woman) story of the Haida and Tlingit and the Ts’msyen story of the “perpetual winter,” for example, not only embody the histories of volcanic eruptions and times of immense cold spells but also serve as lessons for people not to harm other creatures or cause needless suffering, as well as not to become arrogant and boastful toward powerful environmental entities. Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Today, as well, with the electronic means at our disposal, such meetings can be “virtual” since oral communications can be recorded and retransmitted at another place and time. Throughout most of history, this has not been the case. Haisla women sometimes married into Ts’msyen communities, for example (Helen’s mother-in-law, Lucille Clifton, was originally from Kitamaat, a Haisla community), and Cowichan (Hul’qumi’num) women might marry into the Saanich or Songhees (Straits Salish) community or vice versa (Kennedy 1995). Such a situation occurred between the Nuxalk of the Bella Coola Valley and certain Dakelh Ulkatcho families whom they hosted over the winter, at least from the early 1800s, and from whom they learned skills like making birchbark canoes in exchange for allowing the Ulkatcho access to their salmon (Turner 1973). The example of Interior Salish tree terms, cited in chapter 3, is a case in point. In general, trees that were widespread across the northern Interior Plateau (e.g., Rocky Mountain juniper and lodgepole pine) were found to have cognate terms between the three northern Interior Salish languages (Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux, and Stl’atl’imx), whereas those with disjunct distributions (occurring on the coast and again in the Interior Wet Belt) tended to have Secwepemc names that were different from those of the other two languages and in some cases cognate with those of Okanagan, Salish (Flathead), and other Interior Salish groups of the southern Interior Plateau. This pattern suggests a loss of contact with original coastal trees like western hemlock, western redcedar, white pine, and Pacific yew as the Secwepemc moved across the landscape into the Interior Dry Belt and then a reconnection with these species after the original names had been forgotten (Turner, Ignace, and Compton 1998). This idea has not been confirmed, however, by other plants’ names, attributes, and historical and current distributions (see chapter 3). In some cases, the new tools took the form of the traditional ones, as was the case with metal halibut hooks, which replaced the original bentwood hooks but retained their overall shape and style. Among these Indigenous scholars are Dr Louis Miranda (Squamish), Dr Margaret Siwallace (Nuxalk), Dr Mary Thomas and Dr Aimee August (both Secwepemc), Dr Earl Claxton Sr (YELḰÁTTE) (Saanich Straits Salish), Dr John Elliott (STOLȻEȽ) and Dr Samuel Sam (both Saanich), Dr Arvid Charlie (Luschiim) (Hul’qumi’num), and Dr Daisy Sewid-Smith (Mayanilth) (Kwakwaka’wakw). Among these Indigenous scholars are Dr E. Richard Atleo (Chief Umeek) (Nuu-chahnulth), Chief Earl Maquinna George (Nuu-chah-nulth), Dr Pakki Chipps-Sawyer (Beecher Bay Straits Salish and Ditidaht), Dr Ronald Ignace (Secwepemc), Roger

438  |  Notes to pages 375–92

John (St’at’imc), Dr Judith Thompson (Edōsdi) (Tahltan), Teresa Ryan (Ts’msyen), Linda Smith (Tsilhqot’in), Alestine Andre (Gwich’in), Nicholas Claxton (Saanich), and Dawn Smith (Nuu-chah-nulth). 46 Small Nuu-chah-nulth trinket baskets of wrapped twined construction with basket sedge (Carex obnupta) and “three-square” (Schoenoplectus americanus), which in the 1960s were being sold by the weavers from store to store in downtown Victoria for as little as fifty cents each, are valued at hundreds of dollars today, and a knobbed Maquinna hat of similar weaving style would have an economic worth of thousands of dollars. 47 The Haida have a cedar management plan that prescribes planting and protecting cedars all over Haida Gwaii where they have been logged so that, a thousand years from now, Haida carvers will be able to make their monumental canoes skim over the water, as they did a thousand years ago (Turner and Wilson 2008). 48 However, some of the Interior Plateau peoples ate pine mushrooms and some other types (A. Jones 1983; Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Turner 1997a; Turner, Kuhnlein, and Egger 1985). 49 The Tsawout Seafood Festival has become an annual event, with pit-cooking and a re-enactment of the First Salmon ceremony observed on each occasion (up to and including 2014). 50 Kwaxsistalla was given the rights to perform the Atlágimma dance by the family of Evelyn Windsor of Bella Bella. The dance was performed for the Society of Ethnobiology in May 2010. The story underlying the figures was interpreted by Adam Dick’s brother, Michael Dick, based on their mother’s teachings. 51 In 1999 the Nisga’a Lisms Government, the Province of British Columbia, and the Government of Canada signed a landmark “modern” treaty, giving the Nisga’a rights to control and use a substantial portion of their original lands. 52 See Maa-nulth First Nations (2008) for the final agreement between the Huu-ayaht, Ka:’yu:’k’t’h’/Che:k’tles7et’h, Toquaht, Uchucklesaht, and Ucluelet First Nations and the provincial and federal governments. Sections of interest include chapter 6, “Cultural Activities,” 70; chapter 20, “Heritage Sites,” 228; chapter 21, “Harvest of Monumental Cedar and Cypress on Provincial Crown Land,” 232; and chapters 22 to 24 on “Parks and Environment,” more specifically chapter 24, “Gathering,” 249. 53 Co-managed protected areas include Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, National Marine Conservation Area Reserve, and Haida Heritage Site on Haida Gwaii – perhaps the best example in Canada (see Parks Canada 2013) – as well as Gulf Islands National Park Reserve and Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. The Province of British Columbia in collaboration with First Nations has also developed a new “protected area” designation of “conservancy,” in which traditional harvesting practices are condoned but not large-scale commercial harvesting or resource extraction (cited in Turner and Bitonti 2011). 54 This is a slow-growing herbaceous perennial, whose taproots in this case were massive, 3 to 4 centimetres across and up to 20 centimetres or more long, indicating that the plants were probably decades old. 55 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was formally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly during its 62nd Session in New York City on 13 September 2007. 56 See Nolan and Turner (2011). Chipps-Sawyer (2007) explores the use of multimedia in knowledge retention and transmission in the context of her own family history and of knowledge from various communities on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Notes to pages 393–405  |  439

57 See H.T. Lewis (1977, 1982, 1993), H.T. Lewis and Ferguson (1988), A.M. Miller (2010), A.M. Miller, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty (2008), Turner (1999), and Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty (2003). 58 For example, Stuart Crawford (2007) proposes officially assigning the Secwepemctsín name wíla (or wíle) for Bryoria fremontii, which otherwise has only a descriptive common name, “tree hair” or “black tree lichen.” 59 In Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia, where people are facing similar health risks from erosion of their traditional food varieties, a “Go Local” campaign was initiated and has met with tremendous success in profiling and promoting foods that had almost been forgotten (Kuhnlein, Erasmus, and Spigelski 2009; Kuhnlein, Erasmus, Spigelski, et al. 2013). 60 See K.M.A. Chan et al. (2007), Colding and Folke (2001), Helin (2008), L. King (2004), and Wyllie-Echeverria and Cox (2000). 61 Many Indigenous people would argue, in any case, that all land is sacred. 62 An example of such initiatives is the recent “Idle No More!” movements across Canada and internationally (Anonymous 2013), intended to raise awareness of government, politicians, and the general public about the issues Canadian First Nations are facing, particularly in relation to treaty rights and government policy changes around environmental protection.

440  |  Notes to pages 406–9

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index of plant species

Italicized page numbers indicate figures and tables. Abies amabilis (fir, amabilis), 1.109, 343, 351, 364, 365; 2.76, 168, 183, 301 Abies grandis (fir, grand), 1.343, 365, 368, 370, 420; 2.183, 301 Abies lasiocarpa (fir, subalpine), 1.130, 175, 343, 368, 420, 422, 423, 425, 428; 2.172, 184, 301–2 Abies spp. (fir, true), 1.102 Abronia latifolia (verbena, sand), 1.53, 62 Acer circinatum (maple, vine), 1.364, 365, 366, 368, 370; 2.122, 185 Acer glabrum (maple, Rocky Mountain), 1.130, 178, 341, 342, 364, 365, 366, 368, 370; 2.122, 185, 240 Acer macrophyllum (maple, bigleaf), 1.108, 130, 341, 347, 364, 365, 366, 368, 370; 2.18, 185 Achillea millefolium (yarrow, common), 1.128, 152, 175, 344, 366, 415–17, 416, 422, 423, 426, 428; 2.185, 335 Achyls triphylla (vanillaleaf), 1.128, 156 Aconitum spp. (monkshood), 1.71 Acorus americanus (sweetflag), 1.203, 204, 536n9; 2.185, 204 Actaea rubra (Actaea rubra ssp. arguta) (baneberry, red), 1.130, 132, 156, 421 Adiantum aleuticum (fern, northern maidenhair), 1.128, 368

Agoseris glauca (dandelion, mountain), 1.156 Agropyron repens (couchgrass), 1.233 Agropyron spicatum (wheatgrass, bluebunch), 1.233, 290–1, 339 Alectoria fremontii (lichen, black tree). See Bryoria fremontii Alectoria sarmentosa and related spp. (lichens, “old man’s beard”), 1.128, 131, 421 alga, marine, “raven’s mustache,” 2.239 algae, marine (in general), 1.61, 70, 384; 2.35–6, 40, 62, 74–6, 75, 81, 82, 176–7, 238, 315 Allium cernuum (onion, nodding), 1.xix–xxi, xxi, 124, 128, 150, 175, 197, 270, 278, 287, 293, 324, 482–4; 2.122, 185, 240, 360 Allium geyeri and related spp. (onion, Geyer’s), 1.156 Allium schoenoprasum var. sibiricum (chives, wild), 1.62, 156, 275 Allium spp. (onions, general), 1.86–7, 281, 317; 2.122 Alnus incana ssp. tenuifolia (alder, mountain), 1.366, 368, 385–6; 2.185 Alnus rubra (alder, red), 1.62, 108, 341, 351, 365, 366, 370, 385–6, 420, 422, 424, 425; 2.185, 261, 303 Alnus viridis ssp. crispa (alder, green), 1.339, 341, 344, 365, 385–6, 425, 428; 2.185 Alnus viridis ssp. sinuata (alder, Sitka), 1.58; 2.18

Alnus spp. (alders, general), 1.62, 71, 102, 176, 365 Amelanchier alnifolia (saskatoon berry), 1.63, 96, 129, 152, 166, 176, 244, 272, 298, 300–1, 324, 341, 364, 365, 366, 367, 406, 417, 485–8; 2.18, 91, 101–2, 122, 168, 173, 185, 197, 240, 269, 303–4, 329, 325 Anaphalis margaritacea (pearly everlasting), 1.129, 157, 382 Anemone multifida (anemone, Pacific), 1.157, 422, 448 Angelica genuflexa (angelica, kneeling), 1.157 Angelica lucida (angelica, seacoast), 1.63, 157 Antennaria neglecta (pussytoes, field), 1.157 Apocynum androsaemifolium (dogbane, spreading), 1.369, 371 Apocynum cannabinum (Indian-hemp), 1.87, 130, 178, 342, 364, 368, 369, 371–3, 372, 399; 2.122, 126, 127, 127, 168, 173, 185, 241, 252–3, 269, 284 Aquilegia formosa (columbine, western), 1.132; 2.304, 315–16 Arbutus menziesii (arbutus), 1.109, 129; 2.185, 269 Arctium minus (burdock, lesser), 1.206, 233 Arctostaphylos uva-ursi (kinnikinnick), 1.63, 96, 102, 153, 176, 185, 212, 212–14, 272, 277, 304, 318, 417–18, 420, 422, 425; 2.122, 168, 186, 269, 335 Arctous alpinus (bearberry, alpine), 1.63 Arctous ruber (bearberry, red), 1.63 Argentina anserina (silverweed, common), 1.63, 178, 270; 2.122, 186, 241, 269 Argentina egedii (silverweed, Pacific), 1.63, 263, 270; 2.122, 168, 186, 246, 269 Armeria maritima (thrift), 1.102 Artemisia frigida (wormwood, northern), 1.178; 2.304 Artemisia ludoviciana (sagebrush, white), 1.248, 422, 424, 428; 2.304 Artemisia tilesii (wormwood, Tilesius’), 1.63, 424, 452 Artemisia tridentata (sagebrush, big), 1.178, 339, 342, 368, 369, 424, 427, 428, 464, 465, 522n27; 2.122, 304 Artemisia spp. (wormwoods, general, or sagebrush species), 1.71, 422, 428 Aruncus dioicus (goatsbeard), 1.129, 421 Asarum caudatum (wild ginger), 1.248; 2.304 Asclepias speciosa (milkweed, common), 1.369 Astralagus miser (locoweed), 2.18

504  |  Index of Plant Species

Balsamorhiza sagittata (balsamroot, arrowleaf), 1.138–9, 178, 266, 270, 275, 317, 422, 430, 430–1, 433; 2.122, 186, 199, 304, 320–1 Betula nana (B. glandulosa) (birch, scrub), 1.277, 344 Betula occidentalis (birch, water), 1.368 Betula papyrifera (birch, paper), 1.25, 176, 185, 339, 341, 342, 364, 365, 366, 368, 428; 2.11–13, 12, 122, 186, 241, 270, 304 Betula pumila (birch, bog), 1.277, 344 Betula spp. (birches, general), 1.26, 71, 111, 326, 335, 341, 350, 364, 366, 422, 424, 426, 450 Bistorta vivipara and related spp. (bistort, alpine, and related species), 1.66, 271 Boschniakia hookeri (groundcone), 2.304 Bovistella spp. (Bovista pila, Bovista plumbea) (puffballs, general), 1.131, 339; 2.301 Brassica rapa (turnip, garden), 1.507–9 bryophytes and lichens, 1.175; 2.239 Bryoria fremontii and related spp. (lichen, black tree), 1.277, 313–15, 317, 320, 369; 2.121, 183, 268, 278, 279, 301 Calamagrostis rubescens (pinegrass), 1.130, 369; 2.241 Calochortus macrocarpus (mariposa lily, sagebrush), 1.288–9 Caltha palustris (marsh marigold), 1.63 Calvatia spp. (puffballs, general), 1.131, 339; 2.301 Calypso bulbosa (ladyslipper, false), 2.304 Camassia leichtlinii (camas, giant), 1.xix–xxi, xx, 150, 270; 2.122, 186, 360 Camassia quamash (camas, common), 1.xix– xxi, 86–7, 150, 215, 221, 241, 257, 270, 278, 279, 281, 285, 292; 2.122, 186, 304, 360, 362, 279 Camassia spp. (camas, general), 1.80, 123–4, 251, 317; 2.37, 40, 127, 163, 167, 168–9, 173, 199, 200, 215–16, 241, 283–4, 331, 362 Campanula rotundifolia (harebell, blue), 2.304, 315–16 Carex obnupta (sedge, slough), 1.235, 342, 368, 369, 410; 2.122, 186 Castilleja miniata (paintbrush, red), 2.317 Castilleja unalaschcensis (paintbrush), 1.384; 2.305 Castilleja spp. (paintbrushes), 1.129; 2.317 Ceanothus velutinus (snowbrush), 1.129, 422, 424, 427

cedars, general, 1.97, 98, 101, 109; 2.177, 283, 284, 348, 393–4. See also Chamaecyparis nootkatensis (yellow-cedar); Thuja plicata (redcedar, western) Cercocarpus intercedens (mahogany, mountain), 2.122 Cercocarpus ledifolius (mahogany, mountain), 1.364; 2.122 Cercocarpus spp. (mahogany, mountain), 1.364 Chaenactis douglasii (yarrow, false), 1.422 Chamaecyparis nootkatensis (yellow-cedar), 1.90, 102, 185, 340, 342, 351, 355, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369, 373, 411; 2.121, 184, 239, 259, 261, 263, 302. See also cedars, general Chamerion angustifolium (fireweed). See Epilobium angustifolium Chenopodium album (lambsquarters), 1.206, 209 Chenopodium capitatum (strawberry blite), 1.96 Chenopodium spp. (chenopods), 1.306, 325; 2.194 Chiogenes hispidula (snowberry, creeping), 2.305 Cicuta douglasii (water-hemlock, Douglas), 1.434; 2.133 Cirsium brevistylum (thistle, clustered), 2.305 Cirsium spp. (thistles, general), 1.206; 2.305 Claytonia lanceolata (also C. tuberosa, C. acutifolia, Claytonia spp.) (spring beauty), 1.63, 178, 270, 288–9, 317; 2.9, 10, 14, 122, 167, 169, 173, 186, 199, 205, 226, 241, 270, 282, 305, 342, 349 Clematis ligusticifolia (clematis, western white), 1.129, 368, 369 Clintonia uniflora (queenscup), 1.132; 2.270 Conioselinum gmelinii (hemlockparsley, Pacific), 1.64; 2.186 Conocephalum conicum (liverwort, coneheaded), 1.128, 427 Cornus canadensis (bunchberry, Canada), 1.64; 2.169, 247, 248, 270 Cornus nuttallii (dogwood, Pacific flowering), 1.109, 341, 364, 365, 366, 367 Cornus sericea (dogwood, red-osier), 1.96, 129, 132, 325, 341, 344, 365, 366, 396, 426, 441, 442; 2.186, 305, 314 Corylus cornuta (hazelnut, beaked), 1.79, 80, 110, 135–6, 136, 215, 219, 275, 307, 317, 364, 365, 366, 369, 373–4, 488–91; 2.122–3, 129, 157, 186–7, 198, 212

Crataegus douglasii (hawthorn, black), 1.178, 185, 272, 293, 317, 341, 364, 365, 366, 387; 2.18, 169, 187, 305 Cupressus nootkatensis (yellow-cedar). See Chamaecyparis nootkatensis Dasiphora fruticosa (cinquefoil, shrubby), 1.64 Delphinium glaucum (larkspur, wild), 1.428 Dodecatheon hendersonii (also D. pauciflorum, D. pulchellum, D. jeffreyi) (shootingstars), 1.102, 132; 2.305 Drosera rotundifolia (sundew, roundleaf), 2.305 Dryopteris expansa (wood fern, spiny), 1.61, 152, 175, 270, 293, 294, 317, 318, 330, 476–9; 2.34, 86, 172, 183, 239, 260, 268 Echinodontium tinctorium (fungus, Indian paint), 1.387; 2.121 Elaeagnus commutata (silverberry), 1.64, 178, 342, 368, 369, 370; 2.123, 187 Elymus arenarius (lymegrass), 1.343 Empetrum nigrum (crowberry, black), 1.64, 272, 425 Epilobium angustifolium (fireweed), 1.64, 71, 153, 176, 185, 276, 343, 344, 368, 369, 371, 420, 449; 2.18, 86, 187, 254, 270, 291 Epilobium latifolium (riverbeauty), 1.64 Equisetum arvense (horsetail, common), 1.61, 131 Equisetum hyemale ssp. affine (scouring rush), 1.422, 426, 428; 2.260, 268 Equisetum telmateia (horsetail, giant), 1.275; 2.260, 266, 267 Equisetum spp. (horsetails, general), 1.61, 317, 343 Ericameria nauseosa (rabbitbrush, common), 1.339 Eriophorum angustifolium (cottongrass), 1.64 Eriophorum spp. (cottongrass species), 1.64, 71, 129 Erythronium grandiflorum (lily, yellow glacier), 1.140, 141, 178, 271, 284; 2.14, 123, 161–2, 169, 174, 187, 201–2, 241, 270, 282 Erythronium revolutum (lily, pink fawn), 2.305, 316 Eurybia conspicua (aster, western showy), 1.427 Exobasidium vaccinii (fungus, dog ears), 1.277 Fomes fomentarius (fungus, tinder), 1.339, 343

Index of Plant Species  |  505

Fomes spp. and Laricifomes spp. (Fomitopsis spp.) (fungi, tree), 1.70, 216; 2.260, 263, 301, 324 Fontinalis antipyretica (water moss, common), 1.106; 2.18, 107 Fragaria chiloensis (strawberry, seaside), 1.54, 64, 273; 2.174, 187, 200 Fragaria vesca (strawberry, woodland), 1.176, 251, 273; 2.169, 187 Fragaria virginiana (strawberry, blueleaf), 1.176, 251, 273; 2.187 Fragaria spp. (strawberries, wild), 1.64, 153, 185, 318 Frangula purshiana (cascara), 1.109, 130, 185, 248, 366, 420, 421; 2.187, 305 Frasera montana (frasera, white), 1.424 Fraxinus latifolia (ash, Oregon), 1.108–9; 2.123 Fritillaria affinis (lily, chocolate), 1.318; 2.123, 187 Fritillaria camschatcensis (riceroot, northern), 1.64–5, 76, 129, 151, 271; 2.162, 169, 187, 201, 202, 241, 270, 305, 399 Fucus gardneri and related spp. (sea wrack), 1.128, 275, 421 fungi, general, 1.131, 175, 277, 282, 313, 317, 320, 332–3; 2.63, 301, 364 Galium triflorum (bedstraw, sweet-scented), 2.305 Ganoderma applanatum (fungus, tree). See Fomes spp. and Laricifomes spp. Gaultheria shallon (salal), 1.27, 109, 110, 142, 151, 159, 186, 273, 277, 297, 298, 317, 318, 344, 370, 422; 2.123, 169, 174, 187, 395 Glaux maritima (milkwort, sea), 2.187, 241 Goodyera oblongifolia (rattlesnake plantain, western), 1.129, 130, 422, 426; 2.187 Halosaccion glandiforme (alga, sac), 1.128 Hedysarum alpinum (licorice root), 1.65, 271; 2.159, 199–200 Heracleum maximum (cow-parsnip, common), 1.65, 124, 124–5, 153, 178, 183, 276, 318, 344, 491–5; 2.10, 18, 174, 188, 261 Heuchera chlorantha and related spp. (alumroot, meadow and related spp.), 1.132 Heuchera cylindrica (alumroot, roundleaf), 1.178, 422, 425; 2.188 Hierochloe hirta (H. odorata) (sweetgrass), 1.203, 214, 248; 2.123, 305, 334 Hippuris vulgaris (marestail), 1.65

506  |  Index of Plant Species

Holodiscus discolor (oceanspray), 1.130–1, 151, 159, 248, 341, 347–8, 364, 365, 366; 2.18, 188, 197 Honckenya peploides (beach greens), 1.65 Humulus lupulus (hops, common), 1.234, 241 Inonotus obliquus (fungus, cinder conk), 1.130, 339, 350, 447 Juniperus communis (juniper, common), 1.62, 128, 132, 175, 343, 420, 421, 423, 426, 427, 428; 2.302 Juniperus maritima (juniper, seaside), 1.128, 421, 423, 427, 428, 454–5; 2.302 Juniperus scopulorum (juniper, Rocky Mountain), 1.248, 340, 364, 366, 368, 421, 423, 426, 427, 428, 454–5; 2.184, 269, 302 Juniperus spp. (junipers, general), 1.62, 70, 421, 423, 427, 428; 2.333–4 Koeleria macrantha (junegrass), 2.305 Larix laricina (tamarack), 1.339, 340, 342 Larix occidentalis (larch, western, or “tamarack”), 1.340, 420, 423, 425, 439; 2.18, 172, 261, 263–4, 279 Lathyrus japonicus (pea, beach), 2.270, 275 Lathyrus ochroleucus (pea, cream), 1.178 Ledum glandulosum (trapper’s tea). See Rhododendron neoglandulosum Ledum groenlandicum (Labrador tea). See Rhododendron groenlandicum Letharia vulpina and related spp. (lichen, wolf, and related species), 1.128, 175, 386; 2.121 Lewisia rediviva (bitterroot), 1.271, 318; 2.123, 126–7, 169, 188, 242, 306 Leymus cinereus (wildrye, basin), 1.178, 368; 2.188, 270 Leymus mollis (dunegrass, American), 1.71; 2.270, 275–6 Ligusticum calderi (lovage, Calder’s), 1.71 Ligusticum canbyi (lovage, Canby’s), 1.422, 424, 455–6; 2.123, 188, 306 Ligusticum hultenii (lovage), 1.65 Ligusticum scoticum (lovage, Scottish), 1.53, 65, 276, 277 Lilium columbianum (lily, tiger), 1.132, 159, 179, 271, 318; 2.123, 188, 306 Lithospermum ruderale (stoneseed, western), 1.325; 2.306, 317, 318

Lomatium canbyi (biscuitroot, Canby’s), 1.271; 2.188 Lomatium cous (biscuitroot), 1.271; 2.123, 169, 174 Lomatium dissectum (chocolate tips), 1.400, 422, 424, 425, 427, 447 Lomatium geyeri (biscuitroot, Geyer’s), 2.306 Lomatium macrocarpum (desert parsley), 1.271; 2.38, 123, 188, 261, 306, 312, 313, 344 Lomatium nudicaule (“wild celery”), 1.179, 186, 276, 278, 308–9, 424; 2.123, 132, 132–3, 188, 205, 242, 250–1, 271, 306, 324, 334, 364, 401 Lomatium spp. (biscuitroots, general), 1.271; 2.123 Lonicera ciliosa (honeysuckle, orange), 1.368, 369 Lonicera involucrata (twinberry, black), 1.109, 132, 176, 420, 422; 2.271 Lupinus latifolius (lupine, blue), 1.65 Lupinus littoralis (lupine, seaside), 2.242, 271 Lupinus nootkatensis (lupine, Nootka), 1.65, 271; 2.170, 188 Lupinus sericeus (lupine, blue), 2.19 Lycoperdon spp. (puffballs, general), 1.131, 339; 2.301 Lycopodium clavatum (clubmoss, running), 1.137, 170; 2.301, 319, 320 Lysichiton americanus (skunk-cabbage, American, or western), 1.65, 123, 143, 144–5, 144–5, 147, 153, 186, 266, 268, 271, 318, 326–7, 344, 423; 2.188, 242, 258–9, 261, 306, 364, 383 Maclura pomifera (osage orange), 1.341 Macrocystis pyrifera (M. integrifolia) (kelp, giant), 1.61, 72–4; 2.34, 183, 268, 280 Mahonia aquifolium (Oregon-grape, tall), 1.129, 159, 179, 344, 386, 420, 421; 2.306 Mahonia nervosa (Oregon-grape, dull-leaved), 1.159 Maianthemum dilatatum (lily-of-the-valley, wild), 1.27, 159, 423; 2.189, 271 Maianthemum racemosum ssp. amplexicaule (Solomon’s-seal, false), 1.126, 424, 425, 426, 427 Malus fusca (crabapple, Pacific), 1.65, 71, 102, 109, 141, 151, 166, 228, 273, 302, 338, 341, 364, 365, 366, 367, 424; 2.123, 170, 174, 189, 211, 212–14, 242, 262, 271, 280, 281, 306

Matricaria matricarioides (M. discoidea) (pineappleweed), 1.206; 2.306 Mentha arvensis (mint, field), 1.129, 151, 176, 246, 278, 424, 428, 456–7 Menyanthes trifoliata (buckbean, marsh), 1.71 Menziesia ferruginea (false azalea), 1.109; 2.306, 319 Monarda fistulosa (beebalm), 1.345, 457 Monardella odoratissima (monardella), 2.307 Moneses uniflora (single delight), 2.242, 271, 307 Monotropa uniflora (Indian-pipe), 2.307 Nereocystis luetkeana (kelp, bull), 1.70, 72–4, 73, 157, 342, 358, 359, 369, 370–1, 383, 398–9; 2.183, 238, 260, 268, 280, 291, 301, 367, 370 Nicotiana attenuata (tobacco, wild), 1.213, 451, 536n11; 2.88–9, 123, 189, 242, 262, 335 Nicotiana quadrivalvis close relative (tobacco, Haida), 1.451, 536n11; 2.106, 123, 189, 193–4, 271 Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco, cultivated), 1.211–14; 2.88–9 Nuphar lutea ssp. polysepala (pond-lily, yellow), 1.65–6, 71, 106, 151, 420, 424, 427; 2.307 Oemleria cerasiformis (plum, bird), 1.109 Oenanthe sarmentosa (water-parsley), 1.421, 426, 446; 2.271, 307 Oplopanax horridus (devil’s-club), 1.133, 153, 166, 214, 248, 387, 420, 424, 425, 426, 427, 439, 466, 495–8; 2.189, 226, 242, 262, 271, 307, 321–3, 322, 369 Opuntia fragilis (prickly pear cactus, brittle), 1.179; 2.19, 271 Opuntia spp. (prickly pear cactus), 1.96, 276, 330; 2.174 Osmorhiza berteroi (sweet cicely), 1.106 Osmorhiza occidentalis (sweet cicely, western), 2.123, 307 Oxyria digyna (sorrel, mountain), 1.66, 102, 276 Paeonia brownii (peony, Brown’s), 1.428 Papaver alaskanum (P. alboroseum, P. nudicaule) (poppy, wild), 2.307, 317 Paxistima myrsinites (box, false), 1.424 Pedicularis lanata and related spp. (lousewort, woolly), 1.66

Index of Plant Species  |  507

Pentaphylloides floribunda (cinquefoil, shrubby), 1.64 Perideridia gairdneri (wild caraway), 1.252, 283, 329; 2.189 Petasites frigidus (coltsfoot, arrowleaf sweet), 1.66, 133, 382 Petasites hyperboreus (coltsfoot), 1.71 Phalaris arundinacea (reed canarygrass), 1.233, 368, 369, 386; 2.124, 189 Philadelphus lewisii (mock-orange), 1.341, 345, 364, 365, 366; 2.19, 124, 189, 272 Phragmites australis (reed grass, common and related species), 1.179, 369, 376; 2.124, 189 Picea engelmannii (spruce, Engelmann), 1.158, 175, 342, 368; 2.184, 302 Picea glauca (spruce, white), 1.111, 175, 277, 340, 342, 368, 420; 2.121, 184 Picea mariana (spruce, black), 1.277, 339, 340, 342, 344 Picea sitchensis (spruce, Sitka), 1.58, 62, 102, 105, 105, 109, 128, 158, 197, 214, 340, 342, 347, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 381, 409; 2.59, 121, 184, 239, 261, 269, 302 Picea spp. (spruces, general), 1.48, 62, 70, 99–100, 111, 344, 351, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369, 381–2, 405, 409-10, 421, 428; 2.59, 60 Pinus albicaulis (pine, whitebark), 1.62, 135, 151, 177, 215, 275, 306, 307, 317, 449; 2.43, 121, 172 Pinus contorta (pine, lodgepole), 1.17, 48, 62, 71, 102, 151, 152, 175, 215, 276, 312, 339, 344, 364, 365, 366, 369, 420, 421; 2.184 Pinus monticola (pine, western white), 1.158, 177, 342, 365, 368; 2.172, 184 Pinus ponderosa (pine, ponderosa), 1.95, 177, 324, 339, 340, 365, 368, 422; 2.121, 184, 261, 303 Pinus spp. (pines, general), 1.71, 215, 315, 317, 325, 366 Plantago major (plantain, broad-leaved), 1.423, 445 Plantago maritima (plantain, seaside), 1.66, 133, 276 Platanthera dilatata (bog orchid, scented), 2.307 Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom), 1.128 Pleurozium schreberi (moss, feather), 1.343 Poa spp. and Poaceae (grasses, general), 1.58, 71, 176, 368; 2.241, 299–300 Polygonum alaskanum (knotweed, Alaska), 1.66

508  |  Index of Plant Species

Polygonum bistortum (bistort), 1.271 Polygonum viviparum and related spp. (bistort, alpine and related species), 1.66 Polypodium glycyrrhiza (fern, licorice), 1.48, 61, 70, 142–3, 158, 277, 423; 2.183 Polyporus spp. (fungi, tree). See Fomes spp. and Laricifomes spp. Polystichum munitum (fern, sword), 1.131, 185, 318; 2.67, 183, 260–1, 268, 292, 301 Populus balsamifera ssp. balsamifera (poplar, balsam), 1.153, 160, 277, 341, 345; 2.124 Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa (cottonwood, black), 1.95, 153, 160, 186, 277, 339, 341, 349, 365, 368, 369, 392, 394–5, 423; 2.124, 189, 242, 262, 307 Populus tremuloides (aspen, trembling), 1.129, 341, 345, 365; 2.262 Populus spp. (poplars, general), 1.66 Porphyra abbottiae and related Porphyra spp. (laver, red). See Pyropia abbottiae and related Pyropia spp. Postelsia palmiformis (sea palm), 2.62–3 Potamogeton spp. (pondweeds, general), 1.58 Potentilla anserina (silverweed, common). See Argentina anserina Potentilla egedii (silverweed, Pacific). See Argentina egedii Potentilla fruticosa (cinquefoil, shrubby), 1.64 Prunus domestica (plums), 1.206 Prunus emarginata (cherry, bitter), 1.99, 101, 109, 151, 343, 368, 386; 2.124, 189, 272 Prunus pensylvanica (cherry, pin), 1.151, 343, 354, 368, 386; 2.189 Prunus virginiana (chokecherry), 1.27, 80, 96, 166–7, 176, 273, 324, 325, 345, 366, 420, 424; 2.19, 124, 189 Prunus spp. (cherries, general), 1.79 Pseudoroegneria spicata (wheatgrass, bluebunch), 1.233, 290–1, 339 Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas-fir), 1.60, 95, 102, 109, 151, 152, 175, 215, 277, 290, 324, 339, 340, 344, 351, 364, 365, 366, 399, 428; 2.8–9, 18, 184, 239, 303, 312, 340 Pteridium aquilinum (fern, bracken), 1.61–2, 70, 100, 139, 151, 215, 270, 288, 318, 339, 369; 2.18, 168, 172, 239, 292, 301, 319, 321 Pteridophytes, general, 1.128 Purshia tridentata (antelope-brush), 1.339 Pyropia abbottiae and related Pyropia spp. (laver, red), 1.61, 140, 145–6, 269, 275, 315, 427, 438–9, 475–6; 2.14, 36, 74–6, 75, 121, 168, 172, 183, 268, 364

Quercus garryana (oak, Garry), 1.80, 151, 215, 306, 317, 342; 2.124, 189–90 Ranunculus acris (buttercup), 1.448 Ranunculus glaberrimus (buttercup, sagebrush), 2.19, 242 Ranunculus spp. (buttercups, general), 1.448 Rhamnus purshiana (cascara). See Frangula purshiana Rhodiola integrifolia (roseroot), 1.68, 68 Rhododendron groenlandicum (Labrador tea), 1.66, 72, 139, 153, 217–18, 278, 420, 424; 2.124, 170, 190 Rhododendron neoglandulosum (trapper’s tea), 1.72, 153, 217–18; 2.124, 190 Rhus glabra (sumac, smooth), 1.151, 425; 2.308, 319 Ribes bracteosum (currant, gray), 1.67, 139, 179, 273, 428; 2.170, 190, 308 Ribes cereum (currant, desert), 2.19 Ribes divaricatum (gooseberry, coastal black), 1.154, 186, 273, 343, 498–501; 2.19, 170 Ribes hudsonianum (currant, northern black), 1.133, 420; 2.190, 308 Ribes inerme (gooseberry, whitestem), 1.364, 498–501 Ribes lacustre (gooseberry, swamp), 2.308, 317, 323 Ribes laxiflorum (currant, trailing), 2.190, 308 Ribes lobbii (gooseberry, gummy), 1.498–501 Ribes oxyacanthoides ssp. irriguum (gooseberry, northern), 1.426, 498–501 Ribes sanguineum (currant, red-flowering), 2.308, 317 Ribes triste (currant, northern red), 1.67, 426 Ribes spp. (currants, general), 1.273, 317; 2.124, 242 Ribes spp. (gooseberries, general), 1.154, 186, 273, 318, 369, 498–501; 2.190 Rosa acicularis (rose, prickly), 1.273, 278; 2.21, 308 Rosa gymnocarpa (rose, dwarf wild), 1.278; 2.308. See also Rosa woodsii Rosa nutkana (rose, Nootka), 1.67, 110, 273, 369; 2.19, 170, 308 Rosa woodsii (rose, Wood’s), 2.308. See also Rosa gymnocarpa Rosa spp. (roses, wild, general), 1.58, 67, 72, 154, 160, 176, 273, 318, 364, 368, 457–9; 2.17, 19, 20, 242, 272 Rubus arcticus ssp. acaulis (nagoonberry), 1.67, 273; 2.190

Rubus chamaemorus (cloudberry), 1.67, 107, 273; 2.124 Rubus idaeus (raspberry, wild), 1.67, 154, 179, 273, 324, 325, 426, 428; 2.170, 190 Rubus leucodermis (blackcap), 1.27, 179, 186, 317; 2.170, 190, 247, 272 Rubus parviflorus (thimbleberry), 1.67, 110, 133, 154, 161, 274, 276, 309, 317, 324, 345, 370; 2.5, 19, 124, 170, 174, 190, 262, 308, 332, 325 Rubus spectabilis (salmonberry), 1.27, 67, 102, 109, 110, 154, 166, 274, 276, 318, 364, 366, 423; 2.17, 19, 124, 170, 174, 190, 242, 272, 276–7, 277, 298, 308, 332 Rubus ursinus (blackberry, trailing), 1.27, 67, 151, 274, 317; 2.170, 190, 204, 247, 272, 308 Rubus spp. (blackberries, general), 1.58 Rubus spp. (raspberries, dwarf), 1.273; 2.262 Rumex aquaticus (R. occidentalis) (dock, western), 1.67–8, 151, 276, 318 Rumex arcticus and related spp. (dock, Arctic), 1.68 Sagittaria latifolia (wapato), 1.43–6, 44, 68, 146, 151, 202, 219, 258, 271, 285, 285–6, 338, 378; 2.124, 175, 190 Salicornia perennis (glasswort), 1.106, 107 Salix bebbiana (willow, Bebb), 1.342, 343 Salix exigua (willow, sandbar), cover, 1.87, 369, 370, 374, 374; 2.190, 197 Salix lucida ssp. lasiandra (willow, Pacific), 1.140–1, 339, 399; 2.175, 191 Salix sitchensis (willow, Sitka), 1.342, 343, 368, 370 Salix spp. (S. alaxensis, S. pulchra) (willows), 1.58, 68, 72, 102, 109, 131, 154, 161, 177, 342, 343, 349, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369, 370, 423, 425, 429; 2.124, 160, 175, 191, 243, 309 Salvia dorrii (sage, gray ball), 2.309 Sambucus nigra ssp. cerulea (elderberry, blue), 1.317, 423 Sambucus racemosa (elderberry, red), 1.68, 102, 109, 110, 118–19, 154, 161, 187, 274, 302–3, 317, 318, 345, 421, 426, 443; 2.20, 170, 191, 243, 262, 272, 309 Sambucus spp. (elderberries, general), 1.27, 79, 318, 451–2 Saxifraga punctata (S. spicata) (salad greens), 1.68 Schoenoplectus acutus (tule), 1.80, 86, 99, 151, 343, 346, 368, 369, 375–7, 397–8, 522n27; 2.124, 175, 191, 309, 333, 340

Index of Plant Species  |  509

Schoenoplectus americanus (bulrush, Olney’s three-square), 1.101, 368; 2.124, 191 Schoenoplectus olneyi (“three-square”), 1.101, 242. See also Schoenoplectus americanus Scirpus microcarpus (bulrush, small-flowered), 2.272 Sedum divergens (stonecrop, Pacific), 1.68 Shepherdia canadensis (soapberry), 1.48, 49, 58, 68, 72, 118–19, 142, 151, 154, 161, 165–6, 177, 187, 241, 274, 298–9, 304, 305, 317, 320, 420, 421, 426, 427, 429, 449; 2.20, 101–2, 103, 125, 133, 140–2, 191, 243, 272, 275, 359 Sium suave (water-parsnip), 1.151, 272, 331 Smilacina racemosa (Solomon’s-seal, false). See Maianthemum racemosum ssp. amplexicaule Solanum tuberosum (potato, Haida), 1.199, 199–200, 244 Solanum tuberosum (potato, Irish), 1.198–200, 244, 438, 509–13 Solidago canadensis (goldenrod, Canada), 1.423 Sphagnum sect. Acutifolia (bogmoss, red), 1.106 Sphagnum spp. and S. fuscum (sphagnum moss), 1.70, 339, 343 Spiraea douglasii (hardhack), 1.131, 364, 365, 366; 2.110 Spiraea spp. (spiraea), 1.72 Spirogyra spp. and related spp. (green pond slime), 1.128; 2.18 Streptopus amplexifolius (twistedstalk, clasping), 1.133 Symphoricarpos albus (snowberry, common), 1.133, 179, 345, 366, 425, 429; 2.272, 280, 309 Tanacetum vulgare (tansy, common), 2.309 Taraxacum officinale (dandelion, common), 1.206, 243–4 Taxus brevifolia (yew, Pacific), 1.108–9, 130, 340, 347, 348, 348, 356, 357, 362, 362, 364, 365, 366, 367, 450, 479–82; 2.121, 184, 195, 239, 272, 303, 395 Thuja plicata (redcedar, western), 1.15, 32, 33, 34, 81, 90, 99, 102–3, 108–9, 130, 151, 152, 160, 166, 177, 185, 247, 289, 326, 337, 339, 340, 342, 347, 349, 355, 356, 358, 359–61, 360, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 373–4, 379–80, 389–90, 392, 393, 394, 404–5, 407, 408–10, 412, 423, 464; 2.10–11,

510  |  Index of Plant Species

37, 109–10, 121, 128, 129–31, 130, 152, 172, 184–5, 231–2, 239–40, 247, 261, 264, 269, 280–1, 303, 327–9, 365, 367. See also cedars, general Tricholoma magnivelare (pine mushroom), 2.183, 395–6 Tricholoma populinum (cottonwood mushroom), 1.151, 277; 2.183, 301 Trifolium wormskioldii (clover, springbank), 1.151, 229, 230, 272; 2.125, 145–7, 171, 175, 191, 243, 246, 272 Triglochin maritima (arrow-grass, seaside), 1.68; 2.364 Trillium ovatum (trillium, western), 2.309, 316, 316 Triteleia spp. (onion, false), 1.272 Tsuga heterophylla (hemlock, western), 1.27, 62, 101, 102, 109, 130, 197, 266, 267, 276, 310, 311, 340, 344, 351, 364, 365, 366, 367, 369, 370, 423, 425; 2.5–6, 34, 76, 121, 168, 173, 185, 240, 269, 303, 335 Tsuga mertensiana (hemlock, mountain), 1.62 Typha latifolia (cattail), 1.69, 72, 80, 86, 141, 151, 154, 162, 179, 215, 272, 317, 340, 343, 346, 368, 369, 375–7, 378; 2.125, 171, 191, 309, 333, 364 Urtica dioica (stinging nettle), 1.72, 151, 155, 162, 197, 343, 359, 369, 371–3, 427, 429, 448; 2.20, 125, 175, 191, 243, 251–2, 262, 309 Usnea longissima and related spp. (lichens, “old man’s beard”), 1.128, 131, 421 Vaccinium alaskaense (blueberry, Alaska), 1.69, 364; 2.171, 191, 243, 262, 309 Vaccinium caespitosum (bilberry, dwarf), 1.69, 179; 2.191 Vaccinium deliciosum (bilberry, Cascade), 1.97; 2.102, 171, 175 Vaccinium membranaceum (huckleberry, black mountain), 1.69, 97, 179, 251, 274, 364, 502–5; 2.41, 101–2, 102, 125, 129, 171, 175, 191, 309, 314 Vaccinium myrtilloides (blueberry, velvetleaf), 1.69, 187; 2.192 Vaccinium ovalifolium (blueberry, ovalleaved), 1.69, 151, 155, 162, 274, 364; 2.171, 192, 243, 262, 264–5, 265, 309 Vaccinium ovatum (huckleberry, evergreen), 1.110; 2.20, 192, 395

Vaccinium oxycoccos (cranberry, bog), 1.45, 46, 69, 202, 274; 2.125, 192 Vaccinium parvifolium (huckleberry, red), 1.28, 69, 274, 318, 364; 2.171, 192 Vaccinium scoparium (grouseberry), 1.318 Vaccinium uliginosum (blueberry, bog), 1.69, 187, 429; 2.192 Vaccinium vitis-idaea (lingonberry), 1.69, 421, 426; 2.125 Vaccinium spp. (blueberries, general), 1.27, 28, 69, 106, 251, 318, 366; 2.125, 243 Vaccinium spp. (huckleberries, general), 1.27, 97–8, 366; 2.125 Valeriana edulis (tobacco root), 1.181–3, 272; 2.262 Valeriana sitchensis (valerian, mountain), 1.48, 151, 181–3, 423, 425, 426; 2.192, 309, 334 Veratrum viride (hellebore, false), 1.177, 331, 420, 421, 427, 448–9, 465; 2.192, 243, 272, 309, 334–5, 369 Verbascum thapsus (mullein, common), 1.233

Viburnum edule (cranberry, highbush), 1.69, 117–20, 118, 121, 179, 187, 275, 317, 318, 421, 425, 527n8; 2.125, 171, 176, 192, 243, 273, 344, 142 Viburnum opulus (cranberry, highbush), 1.317, 318 Vicea gigantea (pea, beach), 2.270, 275 Vicia nigricans ssp. gigantea (vetch, giant), 2.275 Viola spp. (violets, wild), 2.309 Xerophyllum tenax (beargrass, common), 1.235, 241–2, 343, 368, 369; 2.125, 127–8, 192 Zigadenus venenosus (camas, death), 1.129, 179, 331 Zizania aquatica (wild-rice), 1.203, 536n14; 2.125, 133 Zostera marina (eelgrass), 1.69, 272, 310, 320; 2.36–7, 192, 243, 273

Index of Plant Species  |  511

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general index

Italicized page numbers indicate figures and tables. Plants are also listed by taxonomical name in the Index of Plant Species. Aboriginal rights and title, 2.400–2 access rights, 2.114–15 acorns and acorn processing, 1.101–2, 215, 306–7 added value to plant products, 2.120, 126, 141–2 adolescents, 2.68–9, 336, 337–41 Adolph, Chief Arthur, 2.101–2 adzes and blades, 1.357–8 affinal ties, 2.79–82, 101–3, 388–9 agriculture: colonial and settler period, 1.229–35; European views of land, 1.200–1; expansion, 1.231; Haida tobacco, 2.193–4; hunter-gatherer paradigm vs, 1.265; Indigenous peoples’ work, 1.234; ownership of land, 1.224, 229; 2.150; trading posts, 1.202, 229–31; traditional plant resources, 1.265; 2.146–7; traditional resource-harvesting lands, 1.229–33; and wetlands, 1.231–2. See also gardens alcoholic beverages, 1.218 alder, green: as dye, 1.385–6; as fuel, 1.339; as healing plant, 1.425, 428; management methods, 2.185; in technology, 1.341, 344, 365 alder, mountain, 1.366, 368, 385–6; 2.185

alder, red: in “actor” role, 2.261; archaeological record, 1.108; in belief systems, 2.303; cooking and smoking, 1.351; as dye, 1.385–6; as early plant food, 1.62; as healing plant, 1.420, 422, 424, 425; management methods, 2.185; in narratives, 2.261; in technology, 1.341, 365, 366, 370 alder, Sitka, 1.58; 2.18 alders, general, 1.62, 71, 102, 176, 365 Alfred, Agnes (ʔAxuu), 2.231 alga, marine, “raven’s mustache,” 2.239 alga, sac, 1.128 algae, marine (in general): in belief systems, 2.315; as early material/healing plants, 1.70; as early plant foods, 1.61; food preparation, 2.40, 74–6, 75, 81, 82; games with, 1.384; harvest, 2.35–6, 62, 176–7; in narratives, 2.238; processing, 2.40, 176–7 Allen, Christine, 2.326 alliances (intergroup), 2.93–7, 117–19 alumroot, meadow and related species, 1.132 alumroot, roundleaf, 1.178, 422, 425; 2.188 ancestral languages, loss, 1.219–20 anemone, Pacific, 1.157, 422, 448 angelica, kneeling, 1.157 angelica, seacoast, 1.63, 157 animals: encounters and rituals, 2.340–1; in food narratives, 2.246–9; phenological indicators, 2.18–20, 20–1; plant dissemination, 1.136; and plant names, 1.131–3,

136; remains in pithouses, 1.92; as source of plant knowledge and management, 1.75–6, 324, 432; 2.159, 161–3; spiritual connection, 2.347; variability of resources, 2.15 annual species, management, 2.193–4 antelope-brush, 1.339 arbutus, 1.109, 129; 2.185, 269 archaeobotany, 1.21–9, 102–3 archaeological record. See individual archaeological sites; specific topics archaeological sites: destruction and salvage recovery of, 1.45, 255; 2.401; high-elevation, 1.98; in variety of environments, 1.112–13. See also individual sites archaeology: Heritage Conservation Act of British Columbia (HCA ), 2.401; underrepresentation of plants, 1.22, 28–9, 345–6, 517n10; 2.354 aromatic plants: as healing plants, 1.452–9, 453, 463–4; 2.369; material uses, 1.383; spiritual protection, 2.323–4, 333–4, 336 arrival of humans. See human migration and early occupations arrow-grass, seaside, 1.68; 2.364 arrowhead, broadleaf. See wapato arrows and bows, 1.400–1; 2.236 art, as source of evidence, 1.83 arthritis and rheumatism, 1.427, 446–8; 2.369 ash, Oregon, 1.108–9; 2.123 aspen, trembling, 1.129, 341, 345, 365; 2.262 assimilation practices, 1.237–9; 2.392 aster, western showy, 1.427 Athabaskan people. See Dene (Athabaskans) Atlágimma (Spirits of the Forest) dance, 2.397, 398 Atleo, Dr E. Richard (Umeek): on cycles, 2.27; education and grooming, 2.64; on narratives, 2.232; plants as spiritual entities, 2.314–15; respect as worldview, 2.298, 313–14 August, Aimee, 1.456 Austin, Hilda, 1.415–16 autumn, seasonal rounds and resources, 2.42–4 Ayer Pond site, 1.58 azalea, false, 1.109; 2.306, 319 bailers, for canoes, 1.397 bakeapple, 1.67, 107, 273; 2.124

514 | General Index

balsamroot, arrowleaf, 1.430; analyzability of name, 1.138–9; in belief systems, 2.304, 320–1; digging and cooking, 2.320–1; edible parts, 1.266; as food plant, 1.270, 275; as healing plant, 1.422, 430–1, 433; management methods, 2.186; medicine-food congruence, 1.430–1, 433; name reflecting properties, 1.433; names in Indigenous languages, 1.178, 317; poisonous nature, 1.433; root size at harvest, 2.199; trade and exchange, 2.122 baneberry, red, 1.130, 132, 156, 421 Baranof Island, 1.55 bark (inner): characteristics, 1.352–3, 354; cooking and processing, 1.311–12; 2.76; doll, 2.66; equipment used in harvesting and processing, 1.320, 321–2; as food, 1.276–7, 310–13; harvest, 1.310–11; 2.76, 194–5; for healing, 1.459–60; regional variation, 1.282; “ten-barks” mixture, 1.461, 462. See also cambium bark (outer and/or whole): for canoes, 1.396; characteristics, 1.352–3, 354; to cover lodges, 1.390–1; for dyes, 1.385–6; in food narratives, 2.247; harvesting and processing, 1.409; 2.37, 153, 177, 194–5, 348; for healing, 1.459–60; as material, 1.379–81; “ten-barks” mixture, 1.461, 462. See also birch bark Barnett site, 1.27 baskets and basketry, 1.284; archaeological record, 1.28, 96, 99, 101, 404–8, 410–11; 2.131; for berries, 1.97, 298, 299; birch bark, 1.354, 405, 406, 408; 2.12; cattail, 1.378; coiled, 1.407–8; dyeing, 1.386; in economy, 1.241–3; equipment, 2.130; first examples, 1.522n27; functions, 1.404; harvest of materials, 2.11–13, 58, 366–7; importance, 2.367; materials used, 1.408–10; 2.366–7; in narrative, 2.284–5; production, 1.243; respect for, 2.346; roots for, 1.408; 2.152; for root vegetables, 1.287; storage features, 1.406–7, 410; styles and techniques, 1.407–8; 2.366; as technology, 1.404–11; 2.366–7; trade and exchange, 1.241–3; 2.131 beach asparagus, 1.106, 107 beach greens, 1.65 bearberry. See kinnikinnick bearberry, alpine, 1.63 bearberry, red, 1.63

beargrass, common: dyeing of, 1.235; management methods, 2.192; in technology, 1.343, 368, 369; trade and exchange, 1.241–2; 2.125, 127–8 bears: encounters and rituals, 2.340–1; in food narratives, 2.247–8; as source of plant knowledge, 1.76; 2.159, 161–2; spiritual connection, 2.347 bedstraw, sweet-scented, 2.305 beebalm, 1.345, 457 belief systems: aromatic plants, 2.323–4, 333–4; ceremonial recognition (See ceremonies); as conservation ethic, 2.347–50; good luck plants, 2.321; as line of evidence, 1.34; and plant resource management strategies, 2.218, 225–6, 227, 376; plants as entities, 2.314–15; plants featured in, 2.301–9; protocols and transgressions, 2.378–9; and resource use, 2.341; respect for all things created, 2.297–300, 325–6, 383–4; “sharp” plants, 2.321–3, 333; taboos, 2.315–21; transformation of plants, 2.311–12, 342–6; view of other life forms and entities, 2.300, 310–14, 324–6, 378–9; women and plant resources, 2.225. See also kincentric ecology; spirituality; supernatural aspects; worldviews Bella Coola Valley, 2.117–18, 275 Bell site, 2.84 bending wood, 1.358–61 bentwood boxes, 1.360; origins, 1.389–90; preservative qualities, 1.326; technology and making, 1.359–61; for trade, 2.120; uses, 1.359–61 bereavement, 2.341–2 Beringia: archaeological record, 1.52; human migration, 1.50, 51–3; landscape and species, 1.51–2; plant food resources, 1.52, 59–60, 61–70, 72–5; plant material/ healing plant resources, 1.52, 70–2, 72–4; underwater sites, 1.57 Bering Land Bridge, 1.50 berries and berry seeds: acidic nature of, 1.302–3; and altitude, 2.13–14; archaeological record, 1.27, 28, 97–8, 295–6; 2.158–9; baskets and basketry, 1.97, 298, 299; and bears, 2.162; burning practices, 1.97; 2.197–8; burying, 1.303; cakes, 1.300–2, 301; drying, 1.97–8, 296, 300–1, 376; equipment used in harvesting and processing, 1.298, 300, 320; as food,

1.272–5; harvest, 1.298–9; 2.13–14, 17, 39–40, 41; management example, 2.209; mat for berry drying, 1.376; in narratives, 2.236, 247–8, 264–6, 268; nutrition, 1.296; overview, 1.294–5; ownership of patches, 2.224–5; phenological indicators, 2.15–17; picking camps, 1.97–8; processing and cooking, 1.295–6, 299–305; productivity and availability, 2.8, 158–9, 207; propagation, 2.200; pruning, 2.196; quality variation, 2.166–7; Raven stories, 2.276–8; regional variation, 1.282, 296–8; respect for, 2.218, 314; in rites of passage, 2.339; seasonal rounds, 2.39–40, 41; social status of owners, 2.224–5; storage, 1.296, 302, 303; supernatural qualities, 2.268; in Tlingit territory, 2.217–18; trade and exchange, 2.101–3, 114; transformational properties, 2.344–5; and women, 1.97 bilberry, Cascade, 1.97; 2.102, 171, 175 bilberry, dwarf, 1.69, 179; 2.191 biocultural conservation, 2.390–1, 402–3, 409–11; strategies for positive change, 2.403–9 bioeconomy, 2.393–6 biogeoclimatic vegetation zones, 1.7–8, 9 bioproducts and bioeconomy, 2.393–6 birch, bog, 1.277, 344 birch, paper, 1.25; baskets, 2.12; in belief systems, 2.304; as fuel, 1.339; harvest, 2.11–13; as healing plant, 1.428; management methods, 2.186; names in Indigenous languages, 1.176, 185; in narratives, 2.241, 270; supernatural qualities, 2.270; in technology, 1.341, 342, 364, 365, 366, 368; trade and exchange, 2.122 birch, scrub, 1.277, 344 birch, water, 1.368 birch, western, 1.368 birch bark: archaeological record, 1.26, 405, 406, 408; baskets, 1.354, 405, 406, 408; 2.12; canoes, 1.396; 2.365–6; for fire making, 1.350; harvest and use, 1.335, 380; 2.11–13; healing properties, 1.450; in pithouses, hearths of, 1.96, 324–5; preservative qualities, 1.326; roll, 1.26 birches, general, 1.26; canoes, 1.111; for fire making, 1.350; as healing plants, 1.71; 1.422, 424, 426, 450; preservative qualities, 1.326; in technology, 1.71, 335, 341, 364, 366

General Index | 515

biscuitroot, 1.271; 2.123, 169, 174 biscuitroot, barestem. See “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule) biscuitroot, bigseed. See desert parsley biscuitroot, Canby’s, 1.271; 2.188 biscuitroot, fernleaf. See chocolate tips biscuitroot, Geyer’s, 2.306 biscuitroots, general, 1.271; 2.123 bistort, 1.271 bistort, Alaska, 1.66 bistort, alpine and related species, 1.66 bitterroot: in belief systems, 2.306; as food plant, 1.271; harvest rates, 2.169; management methods, 2.188; in narratives, 2.242; Proto-Salish terms, 1.318; trade and exchange, 2.123, 126–7 blackberries, general, 1.58 blackberry, trailing: in belief systems, 2.308; as food plant, 1.67, 274; harvest rates, 2.170; in hearth remains, 1.27; management methods, 2.190; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 317; in narratives, 2.247, 272; supernatural qualities, 2.272; transplanting, 2.204 “blackberry” (Empetrum nigrum), 1.64, 272, 425 blackcap: harvest rates, 2.170; in hearth remains, 1.27; management methods, 2.190; names in Indigenous languages, 1.179, 186, 317; in narratives, 2.247, 272; supernatural qualities, 2.272. See also raspberry, wild “black moss.” See lichen, black tree bladderwrack, 1.128, 275, 421 blades and adzes, 1.357–8 blueberries, general: burning, 1.251; as early food plants, 1.69; in hearth remains, 1.27, 28; in human remains, 1.106; in narratives, 2.243; Proto-Salish terms, 1.318; in technology, 1.366; trade and exchange, 2.125; and urbanization, 1.251. See also huckleberries, general blueberry, Alaska: in “actor” role, 2.262; in belief systems, 2.309; as early food plant, 1.69; harvest rates, 2.171; management methods, 2.191; in narratives, 2.243, 262; in technology, 1.364 blueberry, bog, 1.69, 187, 429; 2.192 blueberry, Canada, 1.69, 187; 2.192 blueberry, dwarf mountain, 1.69, 179; 2.191 blueberry, oval-leaved, 2.265; in “actor” role, 2.262, 264–5; in belief systems, 2.309; distribution, 1.155; as food plant, 1.69,

516 | General Index

274; harvest rates, 2.171; management methods, 2.192; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 155; naming frequency, 1.162; in narratives, 2.243, 262, 264–5; in technology, 1.364 blueberry, velvetleaf, 1.69, 187; 2.192 Boas, Franz, 2.235, 286–8 boats. See canoes; watercraft bogmoss, red, 1.106 bog orchid, scented, 2.307 bog orchid, white, 2.307 borrowed plant names: across language families, 1.134–5; 2.359; adaptation, 1.136–7; alteration in new language, 1.137; analyzability and unanalyzability, 1.137–9; bilingualism and multilingualism, 1.137, 189; complexity of name, 1.141; congruence across families, 1.169; dissemination, 1.134–6; distribution’s relationship to plant name, 1.140; evidence of intergroup interaction, 1.134; 2.359–60, 381; language of origin, 1.134–7; original meaning, 1.137– 8; origins causing confusion, 1.142–7; phonological structure, 1.141–2; principles for tracing pathways, 1.138–42; in related languages, 1.534n79–80; skunk-cabbage, 1.144–5; and trade and exchange, 1.147; ubiquity within a language family, 1.139; use and cultural role’s relationship to plant name, 1.140–1; into Wakashan from Salishan, 1.185–7 Botanie Valley, 1.253; 2.24, 25, 111–12 boughs, 1.266, 267, 290 bows and arrows, 1.400–1; 2.236 box, false, 1.424 boys: games and contests, 2.67–8; learning, 2.67, 68–9, 339–40; as newborns and babies, 2.62–3; puberty, 2.68–9, 339–40. See also children bracken. See fern, bracken branches of trees, 1.353–4 “bride’s feathers,” 1.129, 421 Brundtland Report (Our Common Future), 1.36 buckbean, marsh, 1.71 buffaloberry, russet. See soapberry bulbs. See root vegetables bulrush, hardstem. See tule bulrush, Olney’s three-square, 1.101, 368; 2.124, 191. See also “three-square” bulrush, roundstem. See tule bulrush, small-flowered, 2.272 bulrushes, general, 1.61, 317, 343

bumblebee plant, 1.66 bunchberry, Canada, 1.64; 2.169, 247, 248, 270 burdock, lesser, 1.206, 233 burials, 2.61, 83–4 burning: berry patches, 1.97; 2.197–8; evidence, 2.155–6; individual plants, 2.180, 197–8; as management practice, 1.88, 250–2; 2.147, 155–6, 181, 214–17; outcomes, 2.406; process description and timing, 2.214–16; productivity of resources, 2.216– 17; seasonal rounds, 2.40, 42; suppression, 2.214 buttercup, 1.448 buttercup, sagebrush, 2.19, 242 buttercups, general, 1.448 cache pits, 1.323–6 cactus, prickly pear. See prickly pear cactus Calispell Valley sites, 1.279 calypso, 2.304 camas, common: archaeological record, 1.278, 279; 2.362; in belief systems, 2.304; “bread” from, 1.215; consumption, 1.285; decline in use, 1.257; destruction by cattle, 1.221; as food plant, 1.270; harvest and storage, 1.87, 285; management methods, 2.186; pit-cooking, 1.86–7, 279, 281, 292; 2.362; and term qwlawl, 1.xix–xxi, 150; 2.360; trade and exchange, 1.241; 2.122 camas, death, 1.129, 179, 331 camas, edible. See camas, common; camas, giant camas, general: archaeological record, 1.80; clearing of prairies, 2.200; food ceremonies, 2.331; harvest, 2.37, 40, 167, 168–9, 173; landscape burning, 2.215–16; names in Indigenous languages, 1.123–4, 317; in narratives, 2.163, 241, 283–4; roasting tradition, 1.80; 2.362; root size at harvest, 2.199; trade and exchange, 2.127; and urbanization, 1.251 camas, giant (also camas, great, and camas, Leichtlin’s), 1.xx; as food plant, 1.270; management methods, 2.186; and term qwlawl, 1.xix–xxi, 150; 2.360; trade and exchange, 2.122 camas, meadow death. See camas, death cambium (edible tree): cooking and processing, 1.311–12, 313; equipment used in harvesting and processing, 1.320, 321–2; as food, 1.276–7, 310–13; harvest, 1.17,

310–13, 353; 2.37, 38, 76, 153; in narrative, 2.279; nutrition, 1.312; as source of sugar, 1.215; supernatural properties, 2.279. See also bark (inner) Canadian Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Northwest Coast Indians, 1.228 cancer, 1.450 “candy,” 1.215 canneries, work at, 1.236 canoes: bark, 1.396–7; 2.365–6; construction, 1.111, 336–7, 392–5; dugout, 1.111, 247, 392, 394; 2.365, 394; equipment and tools, 1.392, 397–8; European technology, 1.246– 7; fur trade era, 1.395; in narratives, 2.236; paddles, 1.397; 2.236, 345; plants and wood used, 1.111, 336–7, 392; for resource access and trade, 1.111; revival, 1.336–7; 2.399; steaming and moulding, 1.358, 392; as technology, 1.392–7; uses and styles, 1.395, 397; 2.365–6 Cape Addington Rockshelter, 1.102–4 carbohydrates, 1.86–7, 214–16; 2.158, 362–3 “caribou leaves.” See wormwood, Tilesius’ Carpenter, Cyril, 2.209 carving: rock, 2.108–9; wood, 1.545n33; 2.238 cascara: archaeological record, 1.109; in belief systems, 2.305; as healing plant, 1.248, 420, 421; management methods, 2.187; name reflecting use, 1.130; Proto-Salish/Wakashan name, 1.185; in technology, 1.366 cattail: baskets, 1.378; in belief systems, 2.309; borrowed name, 1.141; ceremony, 2.333; distribution, 1.154; as food plant, 1.69, 272; 2.364; as fuel, 1.340; harvest, 1.346; 2.171; as healing plant, 1.72; management methods, 2.191; mat houses, 1.86; for mats, 1.346, 375–7; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 154, 179, 317; naming frequency, 1.162; as source of sugar, 1.215; in technology, 1.72; 1.343, 368, 369; trade and exchange, 2.125; use and importance, 1.80 cattle, impact, 1.221, 233–4, 253 Cattle Point site, 2.47 caves and rockshelters, 1.24, 57, 102–3, 541n42 cedars, general: archaeological record, 1.98, 101, 109; bark, 2.177, 283, 284, 348; baskets, 1.98, 101; CMT s, 1.97; depletion, 2.393–4; in narratives, 2.283, 284. See also redcedar, western; yellow-cedar

General Index | 517

celery, Indian. See “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule) ceremonies: bereavement, 2.341–2; to communicate sustainability, 2.349–50; First Foods ceremonies, 2.329–31, 407–8; food harvesting and preparation, 2.90, 329–33; foods for, 1.327; guardian spirit power, 2.336–7; learning by children, 2.387–8; and origin stories, 2.330–1; plant resource management, 2.225–6; plants of importance, 1.148; for protection, 2.333–4; puberty and other ritual states, 2.337–41; recognition of plants, 2.324–7; rites of passage, 2.338–9; scrubbing, sweat bathing, cleansing, 2.335–6; seeds scattering, 2.205, 349; smudging and decontamination, 1.214; 2.334–5; western redcedar, 2.231–2, 327–9; and women’s work, 2.25, 62 Cesaholis, Chief, 1.191, 193 chaga, 1.130, 339, 350, 447 change: archaeological lessons from, 2.356; cultural keystone places, 2.25–6; ecosystems and traditional territories, 1.37–8, 193–4, 252–6; and European contact, overview, 1.191–6; food and food systems, 1.256–9; Indigenous peoples’ acceptance in colonial and settler period, 1.221–2, 239; in languages and terminology, 1.249; 2.360–1; in management strategies, 1.114, 249; and oral history, 1.223; in plant resources, 2.356; social systems, 1.37–8, 111–12; strategies for positive change, 2.402–9. See also colonial and settler period (from around 1840s); early contact period (to around 1840s) charcoal, for pigment, 1.387 Charleyboy, Minnie, 2.201 Charlie, Dr Arvid (Luschiim), 2.70, 82, 114, 116, 197 Charlie, Simon, 2.116 charred plants, in archaeological record, 1.23, 24–7, 80 Chehalis (Chilliwack), 2.330 chenopods, 1.306, 325; 2.194 cherries, general, 1.79 cherry, bird, 1.109 cherry, bitter: archaeological record, 1.101, 109; baskets, 1.386; languages using taxon name, 1.151; management methods, 2.189; in narratives, 2.272; supernatural

518 | General Index

qualities, 2.272; in technology, 1.99, 343, 368; trade and exchange, 2.124 cherry, choke. See chokecherry cherry, pin: baskets, 1.354, 386; harvest, 1.354; languages using taxon name, 1.151; management methods, 2.189; in technology, 1.343, 368 chiefs and nobility: archaeological record, 2.54–5, 84; control of plant resources, 2.86–9, 91–2, 94, 99–100, 222–4, 382; crests, 2.85–6; education and grooming for, 2.63–4, 386; labour division, 2.55–6; potlatch, 1.238–9; 2.83; resource use role, 2.83; in social stratification, 2.82–3, 86–92; stewardship of resources, 2.224–5; storage and distribution of resources, 2.87–9; and supernatural beings, 2.83; technologies using plants, 1.413; in trade and exchange, 2.137, 142; trade routes control, 2.89; women as, 2.89–91. See also leaders and leadership childbirth, healing plants, 1.446 children: archaeological record, 1.113; ceremonies and spirituality, 2.387–8; discipline, 2.63; disease epidemics, 1.192; elders and grandparents, 2.63–4, 69–70; games, 1.384–5; 2.67–8; intergenerational continuity, 2.403–4; knowledge transmission to, 1.254–5; 2.80; learning and training, 2.63–9, 364, 386–8, 403–4; from out-marriages, 2.80; social roles, 2.55, 62–8. See also boys; girls Chilliwack people, 2.294 Chinookan, narratives, 2.287–8 Chinook Jargon, 1.120, 219 chives, wild, 1.62, 156, 275 chocolate tips: fish poisoning, 1.400; as healing plant, 1.422, 424, 425, 427, 447 chokecherry: archaeological record, 1.27, 80, 96, 324, 325; as food plant, 1.273; as healing plant, 1.420, 424; management methods, 2.189; phenological indicator, 2.19; specialized terminology, 1.166–7; in technology, 1.345, 366; trade and exchange, 2.124; Tsilhqot’in/Dene name, 1.176 cinquefoil, shrubby, 1.64 clans and lineages, 2.78, 80, 85–6 classification of plants, 1.122–33, 170 Claxton, Dr Earl, Sr, 1.255–6 Claxton, Elsie, 1.378–9, 461, 461–2; 2.276–7

cleansing (physical), 1.382–3 cleansing (spiritual), 1.440, 449; 2.335–6. See also smudging clematis, western white, 1.129, 368, 369 Clifton, Heber, 2.291 Clifton, Helen: group work, 2.74–6; on harvesting, 1.462–3; 2.70; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.388; seaweed preparation, 2.40, 82; weather beliefs, 2.315; women’s work, 2.62 Clifton, Lucille, 1.293, 302; 2.89–90, 91–2, 388 climate (premodern): leading to social and cultural changes, 1.88, 111–12; 2.357; warming, 1.77–8 climate change (modern period), 1.254; 2.318–19 clothing, 1.411 cloudberry, 1.67, 107, 273; 2.124 clover, springbank, 1.230; colonial period, 1.229; cultivation, 2.145–7; as food plant, 1.272; harvest, 2.145–7, 171, 175; languages using taxon name, 1.151; management methods, 2.191; in narratives, 2.243, 246, 272; supernatural qualities, 2.272; trade and exchange, 2.125 Clovis people and points, 1.53, 58 clubmoss, running, 1.137, 170; 2.301, 319, 320 CMTs (culturally modified trees). See culturally modified trees (CMTs) Coastal Migration Route. See “kelp highway” Coast Salish: affinity in plant names, 1.169; licorice fern name, 1.142–3; migration and plant names, 1.184, 187–8; ownership of resource areas, 2.222; skunk-cabbage name, 1.144, 144–5 coffee, 1.217 cognates: concept, 1.133–4; healing plants, 1.440, 464–5; plant names, 1.133–4, 164–5; 2.358; Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux, 1.181, 183 coiled baskets, 1.407–8 colds, 1.423–5, 444 colonial and settler period (from around 1840s): acceptance of change by Indigenous peoples, 1.221–2, 239; agricultural development, 1.229–35; appropriation of land and resources, 1.191, 193, 220–2; assimilation practices, 1.237–9; 2.392; burning practices and bans, 1.250–2; exchange of knowledge and technologies, 1.239, 240, 243–4, 245–9; legal regime impositions, 1.220; missionaries and

residential schools, 1.235–7; misunderstanding of Indigenous management practices, 1.224–5, 227, 249–50, 254; 2.164–5, 227, 409; overview, 1.220–3; plant use and knowledge, 1.221, 222–3; potlatch ban, 1.237–9; relationships with Indigenous peoples, 1.220–2; treaties and reserve systems, 1.223–9. See also early contact period (to around 1840s); European contact and globalization coltsfoot, 1.71 coltsfoot, arrowleaf sweet, 1.66, 133, 382 Columbia River: archaeological sites, 1.58, 79–80, 85, 100–2; control of resources, 2.89; root vegetables, 1.285; in study area, 1.6 columbine, western (columbine, red), 1.132; 2.304, 315–16 commercialization of plant resources and products, 2.393–6 common names of plants. See folk plant names and classification community-mediated controls, for resource use, 2.379 Comox, 2.235, 287 compression wood, 1.353–4 conflict, 2.95–7, 115–17 conifers, as healing and aromatic plants, 1.453–4 conservation, biocultural, 2.390–1, 402–3, 409–11; strategies for positive change, 2.403–9 construction, wood applications, 1.340–2 contests, children and young men, 2.67–8 continuity of knowledge, 1.38–9; 2.403–4 controlled burning. See burning convergence nodes. See resource nodes Cook, James, 1.197 cooking pits. See pit-cooking coppicing, 2.180, 196–7 coprolites, 1.22 cordage, 1.367, 370–4 Cordilleran Ice Sheet, 1.47 corms. See root vegetables cosmetics, 1.382–3 cottongrass species, 1.64, 71, 129 cottonwood, black: in “actor” role, 2.262; in belief systems, 2.307; distribution, 1.153; dugout canoes, 1.392, 394–5; as food plant, 1.277; as fuel, 1.339, 349; as healing plant, 1.423; management methods, 2.189; names in Indigenous languages, 1.153, 186;

General Index | 519

naming frequency, 1.160; in narratives, 2.242, 262; in technology, 1.95, 341, 365, 368, 369; trade and exchange, 2.124 cottonwood, general, 1.66 cottonwood mushroom, 1.151, 277; 2.183, 301 couchgrass, 1.233 cow-parsnip, common, 1.124; in “actor” role, 2.261; as cognate, 1.183; different names for parts, 1.124–5; distribution, 1.153; as food plant, 1.65, 276; harvest, 2.10, 174; management methods, 2.188; names in Indigenous languages, 1.153, 178, 318, 491–5; in narratives, 2.261; phenological indicator, 2.18; in technology, 1.344 Coyote stories, 2.263–4, 278–80 crabapple, Pacific, 2.211; in “actor” role, 2.262; archaeological record, 1.102, 109; in belief systems, 2.306; borrowed name, 1.141; cooking and processing, 1.302; as food plant, 1.65, 273; in Haisla territory, 1.228; harvest, 2.170, 174; as healing plant, 1.71; 1.424; languages using taxon name, 1.151; management, 2.189, 212–14; in narratives, 2.242, 262, 271, 280, 281; specialized terminology, 1.166; supernatural qualities, 2.271, 280; in technology, 1.71, 341, 364, 365, 366, 367; trade and exchange, 2.123; uses, 1.338 cranberry, bog: as food plant, 1.69, 274; in Fraser Valley, 1.45, 46; management methods, 2.192; trade and exchange, 1.202; 2.125 cranberry, highbush (Viburnum edule), 1.118; distribution and abundance, 1.119–20; as food plant, 1.69, 275; harvest, 2.171, 176; as healing plant, 1.421, 425; management methods, 2.192; names in Indigenous languages, 1.117–20, 121, 142, 179, 187, 317, 318, 527n8; in narratives, 1.119–20; 2.243, 273, 344; origin of name, 1.117–20, 121, 142; origin stories, 1.117, 120; supernatural qualities, 2.273; trade and exchange, 2.125 cranberry, highbush (Viburnum opulus), 1.317, 318 cranberry, lowbush, 1.69, 421, 426; 2.125 cranberry, small. See cranberry, bog creation stories. See origin stories Creator, 2.298–300 Cree, 1.202–3 crests, plants as, 2.85–6 crowberry, black, 1.64, 272, 425

520 | General Index

cucumber, wild, 1.68 cultivation. See agriculture cultural areas in study area, 1.6. See also Interior Plateau; northern coastal and Subarctic North America; Northwest Coast cultural keystone places: archaeological record, 2.24–5; changes to, 2.25–6; creation and description, 2.382–3; development, 2.166; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.382–3; management, 2.48, 166; resource productivity, 2.23–5, 371; routes and trails, 2.26. See also resource nodes “cultural keystone species,” 1.149–50 culturally modified trees (CMT s): for berry baskets, 1.97; Douglas-fir, 1.351; as evidence of occupation, 1.27, 310–11; 2.156; plank production, 1.357 cultural renewal: application of biocultural conservation, 2.402–9; and distinctiveness of knowledge, 1.259–60; efforts and interest in, 2.392–3; of food systems, 1.258–9; 2.407–8; importance, 1.410; natural resource products, 2.393–6; plants and plant resources, 2.397–9; plant technologies, 1.336–7; traditions and protocols, 2.396–8, 398; treaties and legislative aspects, 2.400–2 cultural salience: archaeological record, 2.355; and plant names, 1.30, 147–50, 166, 169, 352; 2.358–9, 381 culture and cultural traits: application to biocultural conservation, 2.390–1; definition, 2.52; development, 1.87; distinctiveness, 1.259–60, 410; foretelling by archaeology, 1.110–11; frequency of plant names, 1.164; and habitats, 2.21–6, 48–9; Holocene, 1.82–3, 87; and intergroup interactions, 1.111, 211; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.385–90; maintenance and revitalization, 2.392–3; in management strategies, 2.154, 219–26; relationship with food and resources, 2.46–7; role in plant’s relationship to borrowed name, 1.140–1; social systems, 2.51–2 currant, black, and related species, 1.133, 420; 2.190, 308 currant, desert, 2.19 currant, gray: in belief systems, 2.308; as food plant, 1.67, 273; harvest, 2.170;

as healing plant, 1.428; management methods, 2.190; names in Indigenous languages, 1.139, 179 currant, northern black, and related species, 1.133, 420; 2.190, 308 currant, northern red (currant, red), 1.67, 426 currant, prickly, 2.308, 317, 323 currant, red-flowering, 2.308, 317 currant, stink. See currant, gray currant, trailing, 2.190, 308 currant, wax, 2.19 currants, general, 1.273, 317; 2.124, 242 Curtis, Edward S., 1.311 “cutgrass,” 2.272 Dakelh (Carrier), 1.172, 255; 2.317 The Dalles site, 1.79 dandelion, common, 1.206, 243–4 dandelion, mountain, 1.156 Davidson, Florence, 1.409–10, 442; 2.59 decontamination, ceremonies, 2.334–5 “deer’s belt,” 1.137, 170 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, oral history in, 1.223 Delgamuuxw, 2.325 Dena’ina (Tanaina), 1.219 dendrochronology, 1.21 Dene (Athabaskans): adaptation to resources and environment, 1.173–4; affinity in plant names, 1.169; archaeology, 1.171; cultural foretelling by archaeology, 1.110–11; highbush cranberry name, 1.120; human migration, 1.89; languages, 1.171–2; link to Yeniseian language group of Asia, 1.51; migration and expansion, 1.86, 168, 171–2, 173–4; plant use and names, 1.173–9; red laver seaweed name, 1.140; shelter, 1.86, 389; Tsilhqot’in plant names, 1.174, 175–9 dental health, 1.418–19 dentalium shells, 1.94, 399–400; 2.106, 110 depletion of resources, 1.114, 393–5 desert parsley, 2.313; in “actor” role, 2.261, 312; in belief systems, 2.306; as food plant, 1.271; harvest, 2.38; management methods, 2.188; in narratives, 2.261, 344; trade and exchange, 2.123 devil’s-club: in “actor” role, 2.262; animals in name, 1.133; in belief systems, 2.307, 321–3, 322; for charcoal, 1.387; distribution, 1.153; as healing plant, 1.248,

420, 424, 425, 426, 427, 439, 466; 2.369; management methods, 2.189; names in Indigenous languages, 1.153, 466, 495–8; in narratives, 2.242, 262, 271; protective powers, 2.323; ritual practices, 2.226; smudging, 1.214; specialized terminology, 1.166; supernatural qualities, 2.271 Dick, Clan Chief Adam (Kwaxsistalla): bentwood boxes, making of, 1.359–61, 360; canoe making, 1.393–4; children’s games, 1.385; cooking techniques for roots, 1.289; cultural renewal, 2.397, 398; education and grooming, 2.63–4, 67; eelgrass harvest, 2.37; estuarine root garden, 2.146, 211–12; fishing nets, 1.399; narrative, 2.282; oulachen harvest, 2.28, 33; pruning, 2.196; red laver name, 1.145; replanting propagules, 2.201; rocks for pit-cooking, 1.293; seasonal rounds, 2.27; soapberries, 2.421n39; springbank clover cultivation, 2.146–7; transplanting plants, 1.245; tree pitch, 1.381–2; yew wedges, 1.357 diet. See food and food systems digging: by bears, 2.159, 161–2; as management, 2.180, 198–201; in narratives, 2.282–4 digging sticks, 1.348; archaeological record, 1.43, 338, 402; 2.58, 61; as evidence of management, 2.157; handles, 1.91, 402; 2.58; Late Holocene, 1.91; in narratives, 2.237; rite of passage, 2.339; for root vegetables, 1.287, 402, 403–4; as technology, 1.402–4; for wapato, 1.43; women, 2.57–8; wood materials, 1.347, 364, 402–3 dip nets, 1.399 disc mayweed. See pineappleweed disease epidemics, 1.192, 419; 2.95, 167 disrespect, 2.315, 317–19 distribution of plants: geological history, 2.6–7; and naming frequency, 1.150, 155, 164; patterns, 2.6; relationship with borrowed name, 1.140; and seasonal rounds, 2.7–8; “top 25” species named in Indigenous languages, 1.150, 152–5, 155; and trade and exchange, 2.127–8; variation within species, 2.7 Ditidaht: belief system, 2.319; canoe making, 1.394; gifting and exchange, 2.114; hunting materials, 1.401; licorice fern name, 1.142–3; narratives, 2.72–3, 289–90; rocks for pit-cooking, 1.292–3; slaves and

General Index | 521

knowledge transfer, 2.72–3; trade and exchange, 1.241; weather beliefs, 2.316; woodworking tools, 1.356 diversification, as management strategy, 2.181, 206–7 diversity, social importance, 1.259–60; 2.404–5 division of labour: archaeological record, 2.61; in narratives, 1.287; 2.56, 57; roles cross-over, 2.61–2; social organization, 2.55–6, 372; and technologies using plants, 1.413; 2.367–8 DNA analysis, 1.35, 56; 2.310 dock, Arctic, 1.68 dock, western, 1.67–8, 151, 276, 318 dogbane, spreading, 1.369, 371 dogwood, dwarf, 1.64; 2.169, 247, 248, 270 dogwood, Pacific flowering: archaeological record, 1.109; in technology, 1.341, 364, 365, 366, 367 dogwood, red-osier: animals in name, 1.132; archaeological record, 1.96, 325; in belief systems, 2.305; canoes, 1.396; as descriptive name, 1.129; harvest, 1.442; as healing plant, 1.426, 441; kincentricity, 2.314; management methods, 2.186; in technology, 1.341, 344, 365, 366 Douglas, James, 1.198–9, 201, 223–5, 228, 229–31 Douglas-fir: archaeological record, 1.102, 109, 324; in belief systems, 2.303; as boss of trees, 2.312; in cooking, 1.290; distribution, 1.152; as food plant, 1.277; as fuel, 1.60, 95, 339, 351; as healing plant, 1.428; management methods, 2.184; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 152, 175; in narratives, 2.239, 312; phenological indicator, 2.18; in ritual, 2.340; as source of sugar, 1.215; 2.8–9; in technology, 1.340, 344, 364, 365, 366, 399 Douglas treaties, 1.224–6; 2.165 Downey, Vickie, 2.298–9 driftwood, 1.60, 351–2 drying: berries, 1.97–8, 296, 300–1, 376; food plants in general, 1.322; huckleberries trenches, 1.97–8 dry sites, archaeological record, 1.22–3, 24 D-Space list of plant species, 1.30, 122, 473 dugout canoes, 1.111, 247, 392, 394; 2.365, 394 dunegrass, American, 1.71; 2.270, 275–6 dyes, pigments, stains, 1.385–7

522 | General Index

early contact period (to around 1840s): alcoholic beverages, 1.218; canoes, 1.395; European views of land, 1.200–1; gardens and orchards, 1.203–6; horses, introduction of, 1.207–9; impact on languages and plant names, 1.219–20; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 1.202–3; plant and food products, 1.196–8; potato, 1.198–200; salt, 1.218–19; sugar and flour, 1.214–17; tea, coffee, Labrador tea, 1.217–18; tobacco (cultivated), 1.211–14; trade between Indigenous peoples, 1.202–3; trade routes, 1.209–11; trading posts, 1.201–2; women, 1.202. See also colonial and settler period (from around 1840s); European contact and globalization Early Holocene: environmental change, 1.76–8; implements and tools, 1.78; plant food resources, 1.59–60, 61–70; plant remains evidence, 1.79–80; resource availability, 1.78; spread of species, 1.76, 77–8; technologies from plants, 1.74 early human arrival. See human migration and early occupations earth, “hair” as vegetation, 2.299–300 earth ovens. See pit-cooking Ebey’s Prairie, 1.88 economy: baskets and basketry, 1.241–3; commercialization of Indigenous knowledge, 2.393–6; depletion of resources, 2.393–5; equivalencies in value, 2.126; medicines, 1.248; moditional economy, 1.241; participation of Indigenous peoples, 1.194–5, 221–2, 537n23; 2.393–6; plants and plant products, 1.203, 241–2, 247; 2.393–6; system on Northwest Coast, 2.112–13; tobacco as currency, 1.212; trading posts, 1.201–2, 535n7. See also trade and exchange Edenshaw, Charlie, 2.266 Edenshaw, Isabella, 1.409–10; 2.59 Edenshaw-Yeltatzie-Jones, Agnes, 2.60 edges, cultural and ecological, 1.140, 169, 188; 2.22 “edible seaweed.” See laver, red education. See learning and training eelgrass: as food plant, 1.69, 272, 310; harvesting and processing, 1.310, 320; 2.36–7; management methods, 2.192; in narratives, 2.243, 273; supernatural qualities, 2.273

EeRb 140 site, 1.324–5 elderberries, general, 1.27, 79, 318, 451–2 elderberry, blue, 1.317, 423 elderberry, red: in “actor” role, 2.262; archaeological record, 1.102, 109, 110; in belief systems, 2.309; cooking and processing, 1.302–3; distribution, 1.154; eating protocol, 1.303; as food plant, 1.68, 274; harvest rates, 2.170; as healing plant, 1.421, 426, 443; management methods, 2.191; names in Indigenous languages, 1.118–19, 154, 187, 317, 318; naming frequency, 1.161; in narratives, 2.243, 262, 272; phenological indicator, 2.20; supernatural qualities, 2.272; in technology, 1.345 elders: and children, 2.63–4, 69–70; and commercialization of knowledge, 2.396–7; on degradation of lands and territories, 1.255–6; harvesting, 2.70, 196; intergenerational continuity, 2.403–4; knowledge acquisition and transmission, 2.70–1; roles, 2.69–71; as teachers and mentors, 2.69, 387 Elliott, Dave, Sr, 1.225–6; 2.345 emetics and purgatives, 1.420–1, 445, 449 employment, 1.234, 240–1 English language, 1.219, 235; 2.391 environment: adaptive management, 2.408–9; application of knowledge for positive change, 2.390–1, 402–9; changes to, 1.37–8; conservation ethic, 2.348–50; European impact, 1.193–4, 252–6; importance of Indigenous knowledge, 1.410–11; mutual dependency, 2.351–3; scales of interaction, 2.406; and spirituality and sacredness, 2.347–9 equipment and tools: archaeological record, 1.78, 84, 279; 2.158, 355; baskets and basketry, 2.130; berries, 1.298, 300, 320; cambium and inner bark, 1.320, 321–2; canoes, 1.392, 397–8; consistency in use over time, 2.354–5; development and diversity, 2.366; as evidence of management, 2.158; food harvesting and processing, 1.319–22, 320–1; 2.195; Late Holocene, 1.355; respect for, 2.345–6; root vegetables, 1.279, 287–8, 321; specialization and sophistication, 2.354–5; wooden, 1.361–3, 364–7; woodworking, 1.355–8; 2.366. See also individual tools and implements

“Eskimo potato,” 1.65, 271; 2.159, 199–200 estuarine gardens, 1.286; 2.34, 146, 210–12 ethnoarchaeology, as line of evidence, 1.39 ethnobotany, definition, 1.3 ethnoecology, definition, 1.3 ethnographic record, 1.28–9, 195, 264, 265; as line of evidence, 1.32–5 ethnosphere, definition, 1.4 eulachon. See oulachen European contact and globalization: colonial and settler period (See colonial and settler period [from around 1840s]); early contact period (See early contact period [to around 1840s]); effect on trade routes, 2.136; environmental degradation and industrial land use, 1.193–4, 252–6; equipment for harvesting and processing, 1.320–1; ethnobotanical and ethnoecological impacts, 1.192, 195; impact on Indigenous peoples and loss of knowledge, 1.4–5, 31, 191–6; 2.360–1, 391–2; impact on languages, 1.219–20, 249; 2.360–1; Indigenous land and resource management, 2.149–50, 164–5, 227, 409; observation of traditional lifeways, 1.195–6; participation of Indigenous peoples in new economy, 1.194–5, 221–2, 537n23; precontact influence, 1.196; and traditional resource-harvesting lands (See traditional resource-harvesting lands) evidence, lines. See lines of evidence exchange and trade. See trade and exchange exchange of knowledge. See knowledge transfer and dissemination experimental archaeology, as line of evidence, 1.28–9 fairy slipper, 2.304 fall, seasonal rounds and resources, 2.42–4 family, 2.53–6, 231–2 famine and famine food, 1.328–30; 2.45, 253–4, 364 farming. See agriculture feasts. See ceremonies; potlatch fermented foods and drinks, 1.218, 303, 451–2 fern, bracken: archaeological record, 1.100; in belief systems, 2.301, 319, 321; bread from, 1.215, 288; as food plant, 1.61–2, 270; as fuel, 1.339; harvest, 2.168, 172; as healing plant, 1.70; names in Indigenous

General Index | 523

languages, 1.139, 151, 318; in narratives, 2.239, 292; phenological indicator, 2.18; in technology, 1.70; 1.369 fern, licorice: borrowed name, 1.142–3; as early species, 1.48; as food plant, 1.61, 277; as healing plant, 1.70; 1.423; management methods, 2.183; as material, 1.70; naming frequency, 1.158 fern, northern maidenhair (fern, maidenhair), 1.128, 368 fern, spiny wood. See wood fern, spiny fern, sword: in “actor” role, 2.260; animals in name, 1.131; in belief systems, 2.301; in children’s education, 2.67; management methods, 2.183; names in Indigenous languages, 1.185, 318; in narratives, 2.260–1, 268, 292; supernatural qualities, 2.268 ferns, general, 1.128 fibrous plant materials: bark sheets, 1.379– 81; biological aspects, 1.363; clothing, 1.411; cordage, twine, rope, 1.367, 370–4; examples, 1.342–3; importance, 1.363, 367; materials and objects made from, 1.342–3, 367, 368–70; 2.366–7; mats and matting, 1.375–9; in narratives, 2.252–3 fir, amabilis: archaeological record, 1.109; in belief systems, 2.301; edible cambium, 2.76; for fires, 1.351; harvest, 2.76, 168; management methods, 2.183; in technology, 1.343, 364, 365 fir, Douglas. See Douglas-fir fir, grand: in belief systems, 2.301; as healing plant, 1.420; management methods, 2.183; in technology, 1.343, 365, 368, 370 fir, Pacific silver. See fir, amabilis fir, subalpine: in belief systems, 2.301–2; harvest quantities, 2.172; as healing plant, 1.420, 422, 423, 425, 428; management methods, 2.184; name reflecting use, 1.130; in technology, 1.343, 368; Tsilhqot’in/ Dene name, 1.175 fir, true, 1.102 fire, in narratives, 2.235, 244–6 firedrill, 1.349; 2.237 fire making: driftwood, 1.351–2; early occupants, 1.349; European technology, 1.246; firewood, 1.352; 2.237, 245; materials, 1.349–52, 543–4n16; method, 1.349–51; in narrative, 2.294; plant terms related to, 1.351, 543n12–13 fires (human-made). See burning

524 | General Index

fires (natural), 1.77, 88 fireweed: distribution, 1.153; as famine food, 2.254; Fireweed clan, 2.86; as food plant, 1.64, 276; as healing plant, 1.71; 1.420, 449; management methods, 2.187; names in Indigenous languages, 1.153, 176, 185; in narratives, 2.254, 270, 291; phenological indicator, 2.18; supernatural qualities, 2.270; in technology, 1.71, 343, 344, 368, 369, 371 Fireweed (Gisk’aast) clan, 2.85–6 firewood, 1.352; 2.237, 245 fir mushroom. See pine mushroom First Foods ceremonies, 2.329–31, 407–8 First Fruits ceremony, 2.329–30 First Peoples or First Nations. See Indigenous peoples First Salmon ceremony, 2.329 First Shoots ceremony, 2.330 fish, phenological indicators, 2.17, 18–20, 20–1 fishhooks and barbs, 1.99–100, 358–9, 365 fishing: archaeological record, 1.79, 84, 98– 100, 398; 2.356; bait from stalks, 1.384; dip nets, 1.399; fish processing, 2.76–7; in food narratives, 2.249–52; lines from bull kelp, 1.367, 370; nets, 1.99, 399; 2.237, 251–2, 253; reefnet fishery (See reefnet fishery); salt use, 1.218–19; strategies, 1.103–4; technologies using plants, 1.98–100, 398–400; 2.356; treaties and reserves, 1.226–7, 229; wood materials, 1.365. See also salmon fish spear, 1.356; 2.237 fleshy fruits. See berries and berry seeds flotation technique, 1.22 flour, 1.215–16 flowers and nectars, use as food, 1.315–16 Fluted Point Tradition, 2.108 Fog Woman (Volcano Woman), 2.249, 290 folklore studies. See oral history folk plant names and classification: collective names for species, 1.125; complex and compound terms, 1.125; descriptive nature of, 1.127, 128–33; different names for parts of same plant, 1.124–5; etymology, 1.137; for higher-order categories, 1.126–7; “look-alike” plants, 1.126; modifiers in, 1.126–7; primary and secondary names, 1.123; reflecting uses and animal associations, 1.130–3; scientific names vs, 1.122–3; single name to different species, 1.123–4; transfer and synonyms, 1.123–4

food and food systems: for biocultural renewal, 2.407–8; and cultural development, 2.46; cultural renewal initiatives, 1.258–9, 407–8; health and nutrition (See nutrition and nutrients); impact of change and environmental loss, 1.256–9; in narratives, 2.246–53; trade and exchange, 1.242, 243–4; 2.128–9; traditional components, 1.257–8 food combinations, 1.327–8 food gathering, European view, 1.224 food-medicine congruence, 1.417–18, 429–32, 439 food-medicine-poison triangle, 1.433–4, 435–7, 438 food plants: berries and fleshy fruits (See berries and berry seeds); cambium and inner bark, 1.310–13; categories, 1.266–9; commonalities and differences, 2.364–5; drying, 1.322; equipment for harvesting and processing, 1.319–22, 320–1; in ethnographic record, 1.264; examples, 1.270–8; famine foods, 1.328–30; 2.45, 253–4, 364; food combinations for eating, 1.327–8; green vegetables, 1.275–6, 282, 308–10, 320; human migration and early occupations, 1.52, 61–70, 72–5; importance, 1.332; 2.361–2; as medicine, 1.331–2; mushrooms and black lichen, 1.313–15; 2.332–3, 364; new foods acquisition, 2.362; nutrition (See nutrition and nutrients); other food plants, 1.315–16; pit-cooking, 1.322–3; poisonous plants, 1.331; preservative plants, 1.326–7; processing (See food processing); proportion in diet, 1.264; Proto-Salishan terms, 1.317–18, 319; quantities consumed, 1.331–2; root vegetables (See root vegetables); seeds and nuts, 1.275, 305–8; and social organization, 1.325, 333; storage (See food storage); uses, origins of, 1.332–3; 2.364; from wet sites, 1.24; and women, 1.265, 333. See also plant resources food preparation: ceremonies and feasts, 2.329–33; seaweed, 2.40, 74–6, 75, 81, 82 food processing: berries, 1.295–6, 299–305; equipment, 1.319–22, 320–1; 2.195; food plants in general, 1.319–23; importance, 1.265; seasonal rounds, 2.46–7; woods used, 1.355 food production technologies: baskets, 1.404–11; digging sticks, 1.402–3; fishing,

1.398–400; Holocene, 2.363; hunting, 1.400–2 food scarcity, 1.328–30; 2.96. See also famine and famine food food security, 1.258 food storage: archaeological record, 1.324–5; autumn resources, 2.42–3; baskets, 1.406–7, 410; berries, 1.296, 302, 303; cache pits, 1.323–6; in caves, 1.541n42; changes to, 1.256; conflicts and warfare, 2.96; evolution, 1.74; food plants in general, 1.323–4; preservative plants, 1.326–7; seasonal rounds, 2.46–7; social stratification, 2.87–8; technologies, 1.245–6; 2.363; as wealth and prestige, 2.88; winter, 2.45 forests, 1.77, 81; 2.209–10 Fort Kamloops, 1.210 Fort Langley, 1.202, 210 forts and trading posts, 1.201–2, 205, 535n7 Fort Victoria, 1.224–5, 229–31. See also Victoria “The Fountain” (Xaxl’ep), 1.180; 2.94, 101 Fraser, Simon, 1.213 frasera, white, 1.424 Fraser River Halkomelem, 2.244, 245 Fraser Valley, 1.43–5, 85, 88; 2.24 Fraser Valley Fire Period, 1.88 frequency of plant names: botanical and environmental factors, 1.155, 156–63, 164; and cognates, 1.164–5; and cultural use, 1.164; and distribution of plants, 1.150, 155, 164; evidence of intergroup interactions, 2.359–60; factors of comparison and contrast, 1.64, 155, 156–63; and size and prominence of plants, 1.164; taxa in Indigenous languages of study area, 1.150, 151–2; “top 25” species in Indigenous languages, 1.150, 152–5, 155; and “use” frequency, 1.156–63, 164–7 fritillaria, Kamchatka. See riceroot, northern frozen contexts, archaeological record, 1.23, 24, 518n18 fruit, 1.205, 206; 2.180–1, 205–6 fuel, 1.60, 70–2, 339–40, 349–52; 2.207 funerals, tobacco use, 1.214 fungi, tree (also fungi, bracket, and fungi, shelf): in “actor” role, 2.260, 263; in belief systems, 2.301; as early material/healing product, 1.70; in narratives, 2.260, 263; and pilot biscuits, 1.216; spiritual protection, 2.324

General Index | 525

fungus, cinder conk, 1.130, 339, 350, 447 fungus, dog ears, 1.277 fungus, Indian paint, 1.387; 2.121 fungus, tinder, 1.339, 343 fur-trading posts, 1.201–2 games, children, 1.384–5; 2.67–8 gardens: early contact period, 1.203–6; estuarine, 1.286; 2.34, 146, 210–12; European-style by Indigenous peoples, 1.205, 256; management strategies, 2.210–14; sale and trade of produce, 1.244–5; transplanting to, 1.245 Garry oak savannahs, 1.252; 2.149 gathering of food, European view, 1.224 gender, 1.113, 413; 2.61; in social organization, 2.57–62. See also division of labour; men; women generosity, 1.385; 2.69–70, 88, 113 genetic analysis, 1.35, 56; 2.310 George, Chief Earl Maquinna, 1.309; 2.64, 71, 332 George, Josephine, 1.329–30 giant California mussel shells, 1.356 gifting, 2.112–15, 129 Gigeenix. See Gitxsan girls: games and contests, 2.68; learning, 2.65–7, 68–9, 91; lodges, 1.391; puberty and menstruation, 2.68–9, 337–8; rites of passage and digging stick, 2.338–9. See also children Gitga’at: cambium eating, 1.313; cedar harvesting and processing, 2.177; cultural keystone place, 2.24–5; feasts, 2.90; highbush cranberry name, 1.117–18; leadership of Lucille Clifton, 2.90; narrative, 2.91–2; ownership responsibilities, 2.224; pilot biscuits, 1.216; plant resource rituals, 2.226; red laver seaweed, 1.315; resource productivity, 2.24–5; seasonal round patterns, 2.35–6, 36, 40; seaweed harvest and preparation, 2.14, 35–6, 36, 40, 62, 74–6, 75, 81, 82, 176–7; ties with Haida, 1.117–18; weather beliefs, 2.315; women’s work, 2.62 Gitxon Eagle family, 2.293 Gitxsan: “houses” and plant crests, 2.85–6; landscape burning, 2.216; narratives, 2.85–6, 251–2, 291; ownership of resource areas, 2.222; seasonal rounds, 2.29–33 glaciation, 1.47–8, 51, 53; 2.6–7 Glacier Bay (Alaska), 1.53–4; 2.217–18

526 | General Index

glasswort, 1.106, 107 Glenrose Cannery site, 1.23, 114, 405 goatsbeard, 1.129, 421 Goenette, Paddy (Guneit’), 2.135–6 goldenrod, Canada, 1.423 good luck plants, 2.321 gooseberries, general: distribution, 1.154; as food plants, 1.273; management methods, 2.190; names in Indigenous languages, 1.154, 186, 318, 498–501; in technology, 1.369 gooseberry, coastal black: distribution, 1.154; as food plant, 1.273; harvest, 2.170; names in Indigenous languages, 1.154, 186, 498–501; phenological indicator, 2.19; in technology, 1.343 gooseberry, gummy, 1.498–501 gooseberry, northern, 1.426, 498–501 gooseberry, swamp, 2.308, 317, 323 gooseberry, whitestem, 1.364, 498–501 “goosegrass,” 1.65 goosetongue, 1.66, 133, 276 Gore Creek Man, 1.79 grains. See seeds, nuts, and grains grandparents, 2.63–4, 69–70, 388 Grant, Captain W.C., 2.147 grasses, general: archaeological record, 1.58; “hair” of the earth, 2.299–300; as healing plants, 1.71; in narratives, 2.241; in technology, 1.71; 1.368; Tsilhqot’in/Dene name, 1.176 grave goods, 2.61, 83–4 grazing, impact, 1.221, 233–4, 253 “grease trails,” 1.210–11; 2.26, 109, 133 Great Langley Prairie, 1.202 Great Spirit, 2.298–300 green pond slime, 1.128; 2.18 green vegetables, 1.275–6, 282, 308–10, 320 grizzly bears, 1.76; 2.161–2, 247 groundcone, 2.304 group work, harvesting and processing, 2.73–7 grouseberry, 1.318 guardian spirit power, 2.336–7 gum, use as food, 1.315 gynaecological medicines, 1.426, 446 habitats: cultural significance, 2.21–6, 48–9; domestication and TEK, 1.116; management, 2.166, 181–2, 207–17; resource diversity and productivity, 2.22–5; in vocabulary, 2.22

Haida and Haida Gwaii: basketry, 1.409–10; belief system, 2.322; canoes, 1.392–3; 2.365, 394; early plant species, 1.48; gardening practices, 2.193–4; guardian spirit power, 2.337; hats, 1.337, 409–10; highbush cranberry name, 1.117–20, 142; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.143; marine resources and technologies, 1.103–4; month names, 2.28, 34–5; names of plants with cultural value, 1.169; narratives, 1.117; 2.246–7, 249, 254, 258, 266, 273, 275–6, 280, 290, 291, 344; origin of women story, 2.263; participation in colonial economy, 1.194–5; potato growing, 1.200; seasonal round patterns, 2.29–33; settlements, 1.103; single name for different species, 1.123; skunk-cabbage, 2.258; soapberry name, 1.118–19; supernatural properties of plants, 2.266, 273, 275–6, 280; ties with Gitga’at, 1.117–18; tobacco cultivation, 2.193–4; weather beliefs, 2.315–16; western redcedar, 1.379–80; 2.109–10; women’s work, 2.57 “hair” of the earth, as vegetation, 2.299–300 Haiyupis, Roy, 2.220–1, 224 Halkomelem (Hul’qumi’num): alliance with Secwepemc, 2.116; guardian spirit power, 2.337; highbush cranberry name, 1.120; kinship ties and resource use, 2.79–80; narratives, 2.244, 245, 283–4; weather beliefs, 2.317 hallucinogenic plants, 1.450–2 Hanaksiala, 1.438–9; 2.331 Hannavan Creek site, 1.80 hardhack, 1.131, 364, 365, 366; 2.110 harebell, blue, 2.304, 315–16 harmful plants, 2.319–21 harpoon shafts, 1.356; 2.237 Harris, Ken, 2.86 Hartley Bay. See Gitga’at harvesting: access rights, 2.114–15; and altitude, 2.13–14; archaeological record, 1.91; for basketry, 2.11–13, 58, 366–7; ceremonial foods, 2.90, 329–33; changes in, 1.113; commercialization, 2.393–6; by elders, 2.70, 196; equipment, 1.319–22, 320–1; food plants in general, 1.319–22; gifting and exchange, 2.113–14; group work, 2.73–7; horses for, 1.207–8; importance, 1.265; intensification, 1.113–14; matriarchs’ rights, 2.90–1; narratives, 2.9; partial harvesting, 2.179, 194–6; quality of plant

products, 2.10–11; quantities by Indigenous peoples, 2.167, 172–6, 176; rates for specific indigenous plants, 2.167, 168–71, 176; and regeneration of plants, 2.151–3; resources and time required, 2.167, 176–8; seasonal (See seasonal rounds); by slaves, 2.72; spiritual aspect and protocols, 2.13, 329–33, 378–9, 396; supervision by leader, 2.90–2; timing, 2.198–9; tobacco use, 1.214; variations in plant resources, 2.13–14; by women, 1.263–4, 333; 2.58–9, 62, 90–1, 363–4, 367. See also individual plant resources hats: archaeological record, 1.105, 110; 2.85; Haida, 1.337, 409–10 hawthorn, black: in belief systems, 2.305; for charcoal, 1.387; as food plant, 1.272; harvest, 2.169; management methods, 2.187; names in Indigenous languages, 1.178, 185, 317; phenological indicator, 2.18; pounding, 1.293; in technology, 1.341, 364, 365, 366 hazelnut, beaked, 1.136; archaeological record, 1.79, 80, 110; as food plant, 1.215, 275; management, 2.157, 186–7, 198, 212; name applied to new species, 1.219; name dissemination, 1.135–6; names in Indigenous languages, 1.317, 488–91; in technology, 1.364, 365, 366, 369, 373–4; trade and exchange, 2.122–3, 129; use, 1.307 healing plants: aromatic plants, 1.452–9, 453, 463–4; 2.369; bark medicines, 1.459–60; categories of applications, 1.420–9, 443–50, 453, 463; 2.369; commercialization, 2.394–5; for counter-irritation, 1.448; ethnographic accounts, 1.418; gynaecological medicines, 1.426, 446; hallucinogenic and narcotic plants, 1.450–2; harvest, 1.443, 462–3; 2.37; and health, 1.418–19; herbal healing, 1.440–3; 2.369–70; human migration and early occupations, 1.70–2, 72–4; internal ailments, 1.425–6, 445; knowledge and experimentation, 1.418, 431–2, 464–6; 2.132, 368–9, 370; medicine-food congruence, 1.417–18, 429–33, 439; medicine-food-poison triangle, 1.433–4, 435–7, 438; miscellaneous medicines, 1.427–9, 449–50; mixtures and combinations, 1.460–2; in modern treaties, 2.400–1; in narratives, 1.438–40; 2.237; origin and historical development, 1.419, 429–34, 438–40; 2.370; and plant

General Index | 527

names, 1.433, 439–40, 464–5; 2.369; plants used, 1.70–2, 419, 420–9, 429–30; poisonous plants, 1.432–4, 435–7, 438; preparation, 1.465–6; as private knowledge, 1.465–6; 2.327, 335–6; purgatives, laxatives, emetics, 1.420–1, 445, 449; quality of plants, 2.11; recipes, 1.460–2, 461; 2.132; respiratory afflictions, 1.423–5, 444; rheumatism and arthritis, 1.427, 446–8; 2.369; shamanic healing, 1.440, 443; 2.370; skin ailments, 1.421–3, 444–5; spiritual aspects, 1.443, 462; 2.326–7, 370; tonics, general, 1.420, 445–6; trade and exchange, 2.131–3, 369; travel of healers, 2.133. See also plant resources health, 1.418–19, 440. See also nutrition and nutrients hearths, for fire making, 1.349 hearths and roasting pits: archaeological record, 1.23, 24–7, 80, 96, 324–5; berries and seeds, remains of, 1.27, 28; as evidence of plant use, 1.57; Keatley Creek Village site, 1.95. See also pit-cooking heartwood, 1.353 Hecata, 1.48 Heiltsuk, 2.118–19, 209, 281 hellebore, false (also hellebore, green, and hellebore, Indian): in belief systems, 2.309; cognate name, 1.465; as healing plant, 1.420, 421, 427, 448–9; 2.369; management methods, 2.192; in narratives, 2.243, 272; poisonous plant, 1.331, 449; for smudging, 2.334–5; supernatural qualities, 2.272; Tsilhqot’in/Dene name, 1.177 hemlock, mountain, 1.62 hemlock, western: archaeological record, 1.27, 101, 102, 109; in belief systems, 2.303; cambium harvesting, 1.311; 2.76; contact period, 1.197; eelgrass collection, 1.310; for fires, 1.351; as food plant, 1.62, 276; harvest, 2.168, 173; as healing plant, 1.423, 425; herring spawn collection, 1.266, 267; 2.34; management methods, 2.185; name reflecting use, 1.130; in narratives, 2.240, 269; resources from, 2.5–6; for ritual, 2.335; supernatural qualities, 2.269; in technology, 1.340, 344, 364, 365, 366, 367, 369, 370; trade and exchange, 2.121 hemlockparsley, Pacific, 1.64; 2.186 herbal healing, 1.440–3

528 | General Index

Heritage Conservation Act of British Columbia (HCA ), 2.401 herring spawn, 1.266, 267; 2.34 Hesquiaht, 1.211–13; 2.259 Hesquiat Harbour caves site, 1.24 Hess, Dr Thom, 1.138, 143 hides, tanning, 1.387 highbush cranberry. See cranberry, highbush (Viburnum edule); cranberry, highbush (Viburnum opulus) Hill, Chief Ernie, Jr, 2.113 Hill, Marjorie, 1.293 hog-fennel. See desert parsley Hoko River site, 1.23, 98–100, 406; 2.93 hollowed stems, 1.383–4 Holocene. See Early Holocene; Mid Holocene; Late Holocene honeysuckle, orange, 1.368, 369 honeysuckle, twinflower. See twinberry, black hops, common, 1.234, 241 horse racing and rodeos, 1.209 horses, 1.207–9 horsetail, branchless. See scouringrush horsetail, common (horsetail, field), 1.61, 131 horsetail, giant, 1.275; 2.260, 266, 267 horsetails, general, 1.61, 317, 343 hostilities, 2.95–7, 115–17 household unit, 2.53–6, 231–2 houses and shelters (physical buildings): archaeological record, 1.28, 85–6, 109–10, 387–90; Dene (Athabaskan), 1.86, 389; European influence, 1.246; evolution and sophistication, 2.356–7; Interior Plateau, 1.387–9; miscellaneous structures, 1.391; Northwest Coast, 1.389–90; plank and post houses, 1.389–90; 2.54–5; size and configuration, 1.85; sweat lodges, 1.391; woodframe lodges, 1.390–1; wood technologies, 1.85, 365, 387–91. See also pithouses housing (social aspect), 1.90; 2.53–5 huckleberries, general, 1.27, 97–8, 366; 2.125. See also blueberries, general huckleberry, black mountain, 2.102; in belief systems, 2.309; as food plant, 1.69, 274; harvest, 2.41, 171, 175; kincentricity, 2.314; management methods, 1.251; 2.191; names in Indigenous languages, 1.179, 502–5; seasonal rounds, 2.41; in technology, 1.364; trade and exchange, 2.101–2, 125; value, 1.97; 2.129

huckleberry, evergreen, 1.110; 2.20, 192, 395 huckleberry, fool’s. See azalea, false huckleberry, red: as food plant, 1.69, 274; harvest rates, 2.171; in hearth remains, 1.28; management methods, 2.192; Proto-Salish terms, 1.318; in technology, 1.364 huckleberry, thinleaf. See huckleberry, black mountain Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC ), 1.202, 205, 231 Hul’qumi’num. See Halkomelem (Hul’qumi’num) human migration and early occupations: Beringia, 1.50, 51–3; coastal route vs east of Rockies, 1.50, 59–60; evidence through plant use, 1.57–60, 72–5; fuel in, 1.60; Holocene, 1.89; interior resources, 1.55; “kelp highway,” 1.53, 54–6; lineages and genetic evidence, 1.56; migration routes, 1.50–1, 54–6, 59–60; Monte Verde site, 1.53; in origin stories, 1.47, 50; plant food resources, 1.52, 61–70, 72–5; plant material/healing plant resources, 1.70–2, 72–4; Pleistocene, 1.48–9; scientific view vs origin stories, 1.47, 50; sea crossings and watercraft, 1.55–6, 392 human odour, masking, 1.383, 453–4; 2.336 human remains, 1.57, 78–9, 104–7 hunger suppressants, 1.329 hunter-gatherer paradigm, 1.265 hunting, 1.58–9, 224–5, 400–2; 2.356 ice cover, 1.47–8, 51, 53; 2.6–7 Ignace, Dr Ron, 2.22, 48–9 implements. See equipment and tools “index of cultural significance,” 1.148 Indian Act of 1876, and women, 1.239 Indian Heaven site, 1.97–8, 296, 297–8 Indian-hemp, 1.372; 2.127; harvest, 1.371; 2.168, 173; management methods, 2.185; name reflecting use, 1.130; in narratives, 2.241, 252–3, 269, 284; supernatural qualities, 2.269; in technology, 1.87, 342, 364, 368, 369, 371–3, 399; trade and exchange, 2.122, 126, 127; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.178 Indian-pipe, 2.307 “Indian potato,” 1.65, 271; 2.159, 199–200 Indigenous knowledge. See knowledge Indigenous peoples: contribution against biocultural loss, 1.410–11; importance of distinctiveness, 1.259–60; in study area,

1.5–6, 10–18. See also individual nations and groups industrial land use, 1.252–6 insect control, 2.181 insect repellents, 1.383 interconnectedness of all things. See kincentric ecology interior environments, plant use, 1.112 Interior Plateau: archaeological record, 1.18, 25, 84–5, 280; 2.156; autumn resources, 2.43–4; bark use, 1.380–1; basketry, 1.407, 410; berries, 1.298; cache pits, 1.325–6; cambium eating, 1.312–13; clothing, 1.411; connections with other interior sites, 1.80; as cultural area, 1.6; cultural foretelling by archaeology, 1.110–11; cultural keystone places, 2.24; description, 1.6–7; destruction of traditional species, 1.233; fibrous materials for objects, 1.368–70; fishing, 1.399, 400; food plants proportion in diet, 1.264; Holocene, 1.78, 84–5, 87; and horses, 1.208–9; houses and shelters, 1.387–9; human migration and settlement, 1.89; internal migrations, 1.168–9; languages and families, 1.12–14; marine shells, 2.106–7; mushrooms as food plants, 1.313; pithouses, 1.84–6, 388–9; potatoes, 1.199; puberty and ritual, 2.68–9, 338; root vegetables, 1.280, 281–3; seasonal rounds by season, 2.29–33, 37–9, 41–2, 43–5; smoking, 1.451; social organization, 1.180; species spread after glaciation, 1.77; spring resources, 2.37–9; summer resources, 2.41–2; trade and exchange, 1.94; 2.106–7; traditional lifeways and use of plants and resources, 1.16–17, 18; vegetation and forests spread, 1.81; winter resources, 2.44–5; wooden materials preferred, 1.364–7; woodworking tools, 1.355, 357 Interior Salish, 1.145, 169 internal ailments, 1.425–6, 445 internal migration and mixing of peoples, 1.169, 172–4, 180–90; 2.360, 390 international agreements, protection of traditional resources, 2.401–2 intertidal resources. See estuarine gardens; marine resources; individual resources introduced plants, 1.233, 253; Indigenous names, 1.507–13 inulin, 1.87, 215, 281 inundated sites, 1.57 iron, for tools and implements, 1.363

General Index | 529

James, Betty, 2.387 Japan, 1.101 Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1.223 Joe, Mabel, 1.376, 448; 2.339 John, Mary, 1.255 Johnson, Lena, 2.266 Jones, Chief Charlie (Queesto), 2.72 Jones, Ida: group work, 2.73; healing plants and pregnancy, 1.446; pearly everlasting, 1.382; pit- and stovetop cooking, 1.291–3; silverweed harvest, 1.263; transplanting plants, 1.245 junegrass, 2.305 juniper, common: animals in name, 1.132; in belief systems, 2.302; as descriptive name, 1.128; as early plant food, 1.62; as healing plant, 1.420, 421, 423, 426, 427, 428; in technology, 1.343; Tsilhqot’in/Dene name, 1.175 juniper, Pacific. See juniper, seaside juniper, Rocky Mountain: in belief systems, 2.302; as healing plant, 1.421, 423, 426, 427, 428, 454–5; management methods, 2.184; in narratives, 2.269; for smudging, 1.248; supernatural qualities, 2.269; in technology, 1.340, 364, 366, 368; uses, 1.454–5 juniper, seaside: in belief systems, 2.302; as descriptive name, 1.128; as healing plant, 1.421, 423, 427, 428, 454–5; uses, 1.454–5 junipers, general: as early material, 1.70; as early plant foods, 1.62; as healing plants, 1.70; 1.421, 423, 427, 428; as protective plants, 2.333–4 Kamchatka, early plant resources, 1.61–72 Kamloops archaeological site, 1.26 Kathlamet (Chinookan), 2.258–9 Katzie territory, 1.43–6, 44, 286 Keatley Creek Village site: animals and shell remains, 1.92–4; archaeological findings, 1.84–5, 92–7; description, 1.24, 92; earth ovens, 1.95; economy and trade, 1.92–4; harvest season, 1.96; occupation, 1.92, 96–7; pithouse depressions, 1.93; pithouses, 1.85, 92–3, 93; plant resource evidence, 1.94–6; seasonal rounds, 2.46; social organization, 1.94, 96; vegetation, 1.94–5; winter life, 1.95–6 “keeping it living” philosophy, 2.151, 194–6, 226, 375

530 | General Index

kelp, bull, 1.73; in “actor” role, 2.260; in belief systems, 2.301; as fishing material, 1.358, 359, 367, 370, 398–9; as healing plant, 1.70; importance, 1.72–4; management methods, 2.183; naming frequency, 1.157; in narratives, 2.238, 260, 268, 280, 291; stipes and tubes, 1.370–1, 383; supernatural qualities, 2.268, 280; in technology, 1.70; 1.342, 369; uses, 1.370–1, 383 kelp, giant: as early plant food, 1.61; and herring spawn, 2.34; importance, 1.72–4; management methods, 2.183; in narratives, 2.268, 280; supernatural qualities, 2.268, 280 “kelp highway,” 1.50–1, 53–6, 59–60, 72–4 Kennewick Man, 1.79 Kenpesq’et, Chief, 2.117 kerfed boxes. See bentwood boxes Kilgii Gwaay site (Ellen Island, Haida Gwaii), 1.23, 39, 55, 111 Kilroy, Julia (Shuli), 1.415–16, 441, 457 kincentric ecology: as belief system, 2.300, 310–14; definition, 2.144, 383; importance for the future, 2.383–4, 404; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.386; in management, 2.182, 227, 376; narratives, 2.233, 311–12, 377; and potlatch, 2.325 Kingcome Inlet and Kingcome River, 2.146; appropriation of resources and land by settlers, 1.191, 193; coastal root vegetables, 1.267; cultural keystone places, 2.24; cultural renewal, 2.397, 398; dyking by newcomers, 1.231; estuarine root garden, 2.211–12; oulachen harvest, 2.33; rocks for pit-cooking, 1.293; springbank clover cultivation, 2.146–7. See also Dick, Clan Chief Adam (Kwaxsistalla) Kinkade, Dr Dale, 1.141 kinnikinnick, 1.212; archaeological record, 1.96, 102; distribution, 1.153; as food plant, 1.63, 272, 277; harvest rates, 2.168; as healing plant, 1.417–18, 420, 422, 425; management methods, 2.186; names in Indigenous languages, 1.153, 176, 185, 318; in narratives, 2.269; processing and storage, 1.304; for smoking, 1.212–14; for smudging, 2.335; supernatural qualities, 2.269; trade and exchange, 2.122 kinship ties, 2.79–82, 101–3, 388–9 Kitasoo language, 1.119 Kitsumkalum reserves, 2.164–5

Klallam (Clallam), 2.314 knots in trees, 1.354 knotweed, Alaska, 1.66 knowledge: accumulation, 1.4; acquisition and development (See knowledge acquisition and development); adaption and reproduction, 2.388–9; application to biocultural conservation, 2.390–1, 402–9; from archaeological record, 2.379–82; commercialization, 2.393–6; confidentiality about healing plants, 1.465–6; 2.327, 335–6; cultural distinctiveness, 1.410; cultural renewal, 2.397–9; from ethnographic record, 1.195–6, 264, 265; healing plants, experimentation with, 1.418, 431–2, 464–6; 2.132, 368–9, 370; interdisciplinary approach, 1.19–20, 32; legacy and revitalization, 1.259–60; 2.392–3; loss and decline (See knowledge loss); maintenance and expansion, 1.34–5; 2.392–3; path and continuity, 1.38–9; 2.403–4; patterns, 2.381; and place, 2.48–9; postcontact transformation, 1.31; projection into the past, 1.31–2, 39; roots and evolution, 1.4; 2.379; scales of interaction, 2.406; and social-ecological processes, 2.384–5; and social organization, 2.98–9; transfer and dissemination (See knowledge transfer and dissemination); unacquired, 2.140; of women, 2.59. See also lines of evidence; Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK ) knowledge acquisition and development: from animals, 1.75–6, 324, 432; 2.159, 161–3; in conflicts, 2.115–17; elders’ role, 2.70–1; importance, 1.38; of management, 2.159–64, 375–6; plant names, 1.168–9; and social-ecological processes, 2.384–5; stone tool traditions, 2.107. See also learning and training knowledge loss, 1.4–6, 39–40, 254–5; from European contact, 1.4–5, 31, 191–6; 2.360–1, 391–2 knowledge transfer and dissemination: and alliances, 2.117–19; from archaeological record, 2.379–80; colonial and settler period, 1.239–40, 243–4, 245–9; complexity in, 2.139–40; and conflict, 2.97, 116–17; of cultural knowledge, 2.385–90; cycle and process, 1.3–4; 2.97–8; early contact period, 1.192–3, 202–3; elders’ role, 2.70–1; into the future, 1.34–5; 2.402–9;

generally in study area, 1.19; importance, 1.38; by interpersonal relationships, 2.386–90; kincentricity, 2.386; means of transmission, 2.385–6, 388–9; narratives and origin stories, 2.81, 232–4, 289, 292–5, 376–8; and out-marriage, 2.80–2, 388–9; potlatch, 2.136–7, 388–9; resource nodes, 2.107, 111–12, 355–6, 382–3, 388–9; slaves’ role, 2.72–3; soapberries, 2.140–2; and social-ecological processes, 2.384–5; and TEK, 2.384–5; trade and exchange, 2.103–4, 108–10, 136–44, 374–5, 382–3, 388–90; trade routes, 1.209, 211; trading posts, 1.202–3; women, 2.80–2, 388–9 kous (Lomatium cous), 1.271; 2.123, 169, 174 kous roots (Lomatium spp.), 1.271; 2.123 Ktunaxa, 1.144–5, 145, 231–2, 242; 2.117 Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį (Long Ago Person Found) site, 1.104–7, 105; 2.134 Kwakwaka’wakw: alternative food sources, 2.206; appropriation of resources and land by settlers, 1.191, 193; cambium processing, 2.76; forms of learning, 2.386; kincentricity, 2.313; narratives, 2.231, 277, 282, 287, 288, 327–8; origin of plants, 2.299; origin story, 2.231–2, 327–8; western redcedar, 2.327–9; “words of praise” for resource species, 2.298, 327–8 Kwaxsistalla (grandfather of Clan Chief Adam Dick), 1.357, 393; 2.70 Kwaxsistalla. See Dick, Clan Chief Adam (Kwaxsistalla) K’yel (Princess Royal Island), harvest, 2.35–6, 36 Labrador tea: analyzability of name, 1.139; as beverage and medicine, 1.217; distribution, 1.153; as early material, 1.72; as food plant, 1.66, 278; harvest rates, 2.170; as healing plant, 1.72; 1.420, 424; languages recording its name, 1.153; management methods, 2.190; origin and names for, 1.217–18; trade and exchange, 2.124 Labrador tea, western. See trapper’s tea ladyslipper, false, 2.304 lambsquarters, 1.206, 209 landforms, diversity, 2.22–3 landscape burning. See burning landscape development, anthropogenic, 2.165–7, 217–19 land settlement claims, 1.221

General Index | 531

land use and occupancy: and agriculture, 1.150, 224, 229; and early treaties, 1.223–6; reserves, 1.228, 229; 2.164–5. See also traditional resource-harvesting lands language development, 1.170, 188–9; 2.380–1 languages and language families: affinity in plant names, 1.169; analyzability of plant names, 1.137–9; borrowed plant names, 1.134–7, 139, 534n79–80; 2.359; changes and loss from contact to modern period, 1.219–20, 249; 2.360–1, 391–2, 407; cognates for plant names, 1.133–4; comparison and contrast in naming frequency, 1.155, 156–63, 164; culturally useful habitats and landforms, 2.22–3; development and application of plant names, 1.167–70, 189–90; 2.358–9; divergence, 1.168, 169; diversity and diversification, 1.168; 2.360; as line of evidence, 1.29–31; maintenance and revitalization, 2.392–3, 407; and origin of plant names, 1.120, 133–8; 2.358–9; regional variation in food plant species, 1.282; in study area, 1.10, 11–14; taxon names, frequency for species, 1.150, 151–2; “top 25” plant species named, 1.150, 152–5, 155 larch, alpine, 1.339, 340, 342 larch, western, 2.279; in “actor” role, 2.261, 263–4; harvest quantities, 2.172; as healing plant, 1.420, 423, 425, 439; in narratives, 2.261, 263–4; phenological indicator, 2.18; in technology, 1.340 larkspur, wild, 1.428 Late Holocene: archaeological sites, 1.91–110; baskets, 1.405–7; cultural development, 1.87; ecological changes, 1.88; human settlement and migration, 1.87–8, 89; plant use and knowledge, 1.89–91; seasonal rounds, 1.88–9; social change and organization, 1.113, 114; vegetation and climate, 1.87–8; wetlands, 1.112; woodworking, 1.90–1, 355 laver, red: borrowed name, 1.140, 145–6; as food plant, 1.61, 275, 315; 2.364; harvest and processing, 1.146; 2.14, 36, 74–6, 75, 168, 172; as healing plant, 1.427, 438–9; management methods, 2.183; names in Indigenous languages, 1.475–6; in narratives, 2.268; nutrition, 1.269; supernatural qualities, 2.268; trade and exchange, 2.121 laws and legislation, 1.220, 223; 2.401–2 laxatives and purgatives, 1.420–1, 445, 449

532 | General Index

leaders and leadership: designation and role, 2.52, 98–9; development, 2.77, 78; hosting group’s relationship with visiting group, 2.79; and occupational specialization, 2.92–3; supervision of harvest, 2.90–2; territorial resources, 2.79; women, 2.89–91. See also chiefs and nobility learning and training: children, 2.63–9, 91, 339–40, 364, 386–8, 403–4; forms of learning, 2.385–6, 388–9, 405–6; institutions, 2.406; intergenerational continuity, 2.403–4; of management strategies, 2.159–64, 375–6; by narratives, 2.387; respect for protocols, 2.396–7; for specialized roles, 2.64, 92–3, 386. See also knowledge acquisition and development; knowledge transfer and dissemination leaves (greens), as food, 1.308–10 Leeson, Constance, 1.293 legal regime, 1.220, 223; 2.401–2 Lepofsky, Dr Dana, 1.43 Lester, Margaret: root digging, 2.152 lichen, black tree, 2.279; in belief systems, 2.301; equipment used in harvesting and processing, 1.320; as food, 1.277, 313–15; management methods, 2.183; in narratives, 2.268, 278; Proto-Salish terms, 1.317; supernatural qualities, 2.268, 278; in technology, 1.369; trade and exchange, 2.121 lichen, wolf and related species, 1.128, 175, 386; 2.121 lichens, “old man’s beard,” 1.128, 131, 421 licorice root, 1.65, 271; 2.159, 199–200 licorice-root, Canby’s. See lovage, Canby’s licorice-root, Scottish. See lovage, Scottish lifecycle of plants, 2.15 Ligeex, Chief, 2.89 Lillooet (St’át’imcets) language, 1.142 Lil’wat, 2.101–2 lily, chocolate, 1.318; 2.123, 187 lily, Columbia. See lily, tiger lily, pink fawn, 2.305, 316 lily, sarana (lily, sarane). See riceroot, northern lily, tiger: animals in name, 1.132; in belief systems, 2.306; as food plant, 1.271; management methods, 2.188; names in Indigenous languages, 1.179, 318; naming frequency, 1.159; trade and exchange, 2.123 lily, yellow glacier (lily, yellow avalanche), 1.284; borrowed name, 1.140, 141; as food

plant, 1.271; harvest, 2.14, 161–2, 169, 174; management methods, 2.187; in narratives, 2.241, 270, 282; replanting propagules, 2.201–2; supernatural qualities, 2.270; trade and exchange, 2.123; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.178 lily-of-the-valley, wild (lily-of-the-valley, false), 1.27, 159, 423; 2.189, 271 Lind Coulee tradition, 2.107, 108 lineages and clans, 2.78, 80, 85–6 lines of evidence: archaeobotany and palaeoethnobotany, 1.21–9; and belief systems, 1.34; borrowed plant names, 1.134; 2.359–60, 381; complexities within, 1.116; for divergence of languages, 1.168; ethnographic and oral history, 1.32–5; European observers, 1.195–6; experimental archaeology, 1.28–9; future prospects, 1.35; Indigenous worldviews, 1.33–5; interdisciplinary approach, 1.19–20, 115–16; languages and plant terms, 1.29–31; palaeobotany and palaeoecology, 1.20–1; from postcontact impacts, 1.31; and projection into the past, 1.31–2 lingonberry, 1.69, 421, 426; 2.125 linguistics, 1.29–31, 119 liverwort, cone-headed, 1.128, 427 livestock, impact, 1.221, 233–4, 253 loanwords. See borrowed plant names locoweed, 2.18 log houses, 1.246 lomatium, barestem. See “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule) loss: in food and food systems, 1.256–9; languages, 1.219–20, 391–2, 407; prevention through Indigenous perspectives, 1.410–11; strategies for positive change, 2.402–9; from urbanization, 1.251–2 loss of knowledge, 1.4–6, 39–40, 254–5; from European contact, 1.4–5, 31, 191–6; 2.360–1, 391–2 lousewort, woolly, 1.66 lovage, 1.65 lovage, beach, 1.53, 65, 276, 277 lovage, Calder’s, 1.71 lovage, Canby’s: in belief systems, 2.306; as healing plant, 1.422, 424, 455–6; management methods, 2.188; trade and exchange, 2.123; uses, 1.455–6 lovage, Scottish, 1.53, 65, 276, 277 lupine, beach, 2.242, 271 lupine, blue (Lupinus latifolius), 1.65

lupine, blue (Lupinus sericeus), 2.19 lupine, Nootka, 1.65, 271; 2.170, 188 lupine, seaside, 2.242, 271 Lushootseed languages, 1.141 lymegrass, 1.343 Macreet (Marguerite Andrew), 1.441, 463 madrone, Pacific, 1.109, 129; 2.185, 269 magical aspects. See supernatural aspects mahogany, mountain (Cercocarpus intercedens), 2.122 mahogany, mountain (Cercocarpus ledifolius), 1.364; 2.122 mahogany, mountain (Cercocarpus spp.), 1.364 Makah, 1.23, 110 Makah potato, 1.199, 199–200, 244 management strategies: animals as source of knowledge, 2.159, 161–3; annual species, 2.193–4; archaeological record, 1.114–15, 228; 2.155–9; and belief systems, 2.218, 225–6, 227, 376; berries, 2.162, 209; burning individual plants, 2.180, 197–8; burning of landscape (See burning); changes in, 1.114, 249; as conservation ethic, 2.347–9; cultural approaches and aspects, 2.154, 219–26; definition, 2.148–50, 227; development of practices, 2.153–4, 159– 64; digging, tilling, and weeding, 2.180, 181, 198–201, 208–9; diversification as strategy, 2.181, 206–7; estuarine gardens, 2.210–12; European impacts, 1.224–5, 227, 249–50, 254; 2.149–50, 164–5, 227, 409; by fire (See burning); forests, 2.209–10; habitat or plant-community level, 2.166, 181–2, 207–17; harvest quantities, 2.167, 172–6, 176; harvest rates, 2.167, 168–71, 176; importance, 2.178; Indigenous practices in historical record, 2.147–8, 149–50; insect control, 2.181; intensification to create surplus, 2.120, 363; “keeping it living” philosophy, 2.151, 194–6, 226, 375; kincentric belief system, 2.182, 227, 376; landscape development, 2.165–7, 217–19; landscape level, 2.182; learning and acquisition, 2.159–64, 375–6; methods and techniques, 2.165–6, 178, 179–92, 193–4, 206, 227, 228, 375, 381–2; orchard gardens, 2.212–14; and ownership, 2.157, 182, 221–5; partial harvesting, 2.179, 194–6; by physical alterations, 2.208–9; prime locations, 2.209; pruning and

General Index | 533

coppicing, 2.180, 196–7; reefnet fishery, 2.154–5; regeneration of plants, 2.150–3, 159–61, 375; replanting propagules, 2.180, 200, 201–3; and resource nodes, 2.48, 166, 208, 217–19; resources and time required, 2.167, 176–8; respect for resources, 2.218, 220–1; responsibilities for, 2.219–21, 223–5; rights, privileges, and control, 2.87, 221–3; root vegetables, 2.158, 198–200; and seasonal rounds, 2.47–8; selection by size, age, reproductive stage, 2.180, 198–200; site selection, 2.181; social aspects, 2.157–9, 165–6, 220, 223–5, 227; species or population level, 2.166, 179–81, 193–207; and supernatural beings, 2.376; and TEK , 2.159; trade and exchange, 2.157–8; transplanting and scattering seeds, fruits, propagules, 2.157, 180–1, 203–6; of women, 2.90–1. See also Traditional Land and Resource Management (TLRM ) practices Manis site, 1.57–8 manufacturing, wood applications, 1.340–2 maple, bigleaf: archaeological record, 1.108; management methods, 2.185; name reflecting use, 1.130, 347; phenological indicator, 2.18; in technology, 1.341, 364, 365, 366, 368, 370 maple, Rocky Mountain: management methods, 2.185; name reflecting use, 1.130; in narratives, 2.240; in technology, 1.341, 342, 364, 365, 366, 368, 370; trade and exchange, 2.122; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.178. See also maple, vine maple, vine: management methods, 2.185; in technology, 1.364, 365, 366, 368, 370; trade and exchange, 2.122. See also maple, Rocky Mountain marestail, 1.65 marine environment, 1.8–10, 112, 252–3 marine resources: archaeological record, 1.83–4; and climatic stability, 2.357; Haida and Tlingit, 1.102–4; management, 1.114–15; technologies using plants, 2.356; use, 1.88–9, 112, 524n42. See also individual resources mariposa lily, sagebrush, 1.288–9 Marmes Rockshelter site, 1.58 Marpole Tradition, 1.184 marriage and marriage connections, 2.79– 82, 101–3; out-marriages, 2.80–2, 388–9 marsh marigold, 1.63

534 | General Index

mat creaser, 1.99, 377; 2.93 materials. See technologies using plants mat lodges, 1.85–6 matriarchs, 2.89–91 mats and mat making: applications, 1.377–8; archaeological record, 1.375; for berry drying, 1.376; materials, 1.346, 375–9; 2.366; process, 1.377–8; sewing and needle, 1.377; vegetative style, 1.375; in woodframe lodges, 1.390–1 matsutake, American, 2.183, 395–6 Matthews, Willie (Chief Weah), 1.380 McCallum site, 1.517n9 McKenna-McBride Commission (Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Columbia), 1.191, 193, 229 medicine, 1.247–8, 331–2. See also healing plants medicine-food congruence, 1.417–18, 429–32, 439 medicine-food-poison triangle, 1.433–4, 435–7, 438 men, 2.56–7, 61–2, 367–8, 372 Menzies, Archibald, 2.145–6 meristems, regeneration, 2.150–1 Microblade Tradition, 2.107–8 middens, 1.83, 88–9, 113; 2.54 Mid Holocene: archaeological record, 1.81, 84–6; cultural and artistic traits, 1.82–3; food resources and seasonal rounds, 1.81–2; housing, 1.85–6; marine resources, 1.83–4; pit-cooking, 1.86–7; plant resources, 1.82–4; spread of vegetation and forests, 1.80–1 migration, patterned. See seasonal rounds migration (internal) and mixing of peoples, 1.169, 172–4, 180–90; 2.360, 390 migration of plant species, 1.53–4, 76, 77–8, 80–1 migration to North America. See human migration and early occupations milkweed, common, 1.369 milkwort, sea, 2.187, 241 Milliken site, 1.27 mint, field (mint, Canada): for cleaning, 1.246; in cooking, 1.457; as descriptive name, 1.129; as food plant, 1.278; as healing plant, 1.424, 428, 456–7; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 176; uses, 1.456–7 missions and missionaries, 1.235–7 mission schools, 1.235–6

Mitchell, Rose, 2.49 Mitchell, Sam, 1.374; 2.101–2, 197 Mitchell, Susan, 2.101–2 mock-orange: management methods, 2.189; in narratives, 2.272; phenological indicator, 2.19; supernatural qualities, 2.272; in technology, 1.341, 345, 364, 365, 366; trade and exchange, 2.124 moditional economy, 1.241 monardella, 2.307 money shells, 1.94, 399–400; 2.106, 110 monkshood, 1.71 Monte Verde site (Chile), 1.53; 2.379 month names, 2.28, 34–5, 37, 44 Moody, Mrs Joshua, 2.145 moon cycle, 2.15 Morven, Amelia (Niikw’iltlkw), 2.113–14 moss, feather, 1.343 moss, sphagnum, 1.70, 339, 343 moss and moss-like plants, general, 1.175; 2.239 Mother Earth, “hair” as vegetation, 2.299–300 moulding wood, 1.358–61 “mountain potato.” See spring beauty mountains, 1.98, 112; 2.13–14, 310–11 moxibustion, 1.447 Moziño, José Mariano, 1.203, 216–17, 218 mugwort, western, 1.248, 422, 424, 428; 2.304 mullein, common, 1.233 mushrooms, general: animals in name, 1.131; in belief systems, 2.301; for children’s strength, 2.63; equipment used in harvesting and processing, 1.320; as food plants, 1.277, 313, 332–3; 2.364; names in Indigenous languages, 1.175, 317; nutrition, 1.313; regional variation, 1.282 Musqueam Northeast site, 1.405, 406–7 mutual dependency with environment, 2.351–3 mutual exchange. See reciprocity Myers, Helena (Ìnkél), 1.17; 2.396 nagoonberry, 1.67, 273; 2.190 ’Nakwaxda’xw (Nahwitti), 2.249 names of plants: affinity and commonalities, 1.169; and animals, 1.131–3, 136; borrowed (See borrowed plant names); and characteristics of plants, 2.381; cognates, 1.133–4, 164–5; 2.358; collective names, 1.125; concepts of naming and classifying,

1.122–33; and conflicts, 2.116–17; and cultural salience, 1.30, 147–50, 166, 169, 352; 2.358–9, 381; development and application, 1.167–70, 189–90; 2.358–9; dissemination, 1.134–6, 168–9; 2.358–9; D-Space list of plant species, 1.30, 122, 473; early contact period, 1.219–20; fire making, 1.351, 543n12–13; folk names (See folk plant names and classification); frequency (See frequency of plant names); as “hair” of the earth, 2.299; healing plants, 1.433, 439–40, 464–5; 2.369; and internal human migrations, 1.169, 172–4, 180–90; 2.360; introduced plants, 1.507–13; inventory in North America, 1.121–2; as line of evidence, 1.29–31; and linguistics, 1.29–30; long-distance relationships, 1.167; Northwest Coast, 2.138–9; and oral history, 1.170; original meaning, 1.137–8; origins, determination of, 1.120, 133–8; 2.358–9; patterns of similarities and differences, 1.35–6; in proto-languages, 1.82, 133–4; 2.358–9; scientific vs folk names, 1.122–3; selectiveness, 1.147; single name to different species, 1.123–4; specialized terminology, 1.166–7; and technologies, 1.347–8; and trade and exchange, 2.103–4, 129, 138–42; unknown meanings, 1.137–8; 2.359 Namu site, 1.84 narcotic plants, 1.450–2 narratives: “actor” and personae role of plants, 2.257–9, 260–2, 263–6, 312; animals as source of knowledge, 2.163; baskets and basketry, 2.284–5; berries, 2.236, 247–8, 264–6, 268; commonalities in, 2.281–5; contact between early people, 2.285; Coyote stories, 2.263–4, 278–80; Creator characterization, 2.299; division of labour, 1.287; 2.56, 57; everyday use of plants, 2.235, 236–43; famine as theme, 2.253–4; fire as theme, 2.235, 244–6, 294; Fog Woman (Volcano Woman), 2.249, 290; food as theme, 2.246–53; and harvesting, 2.9; healing plants, 1.438–40; 2.237; as integrated messages, 2.233–4; inversion of charateristics and roles, 2.280–1; kincentricity and humans’ place, 2.233, 311–12, 377; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.232–4, 289, 292–5, 376–8; and learning, 2.387; marriages in, 2.81; Mink, 2.286; natural world and

General Index | 535

resources, 2.289–95; “Old-One” (See “OldOne” narratives); origin stories (See origin stories); ownership of, 2.233; plants as supernatural actors and magical substances, 2.257–9, 260–2, 263–6, 312; plants with supernatural and magical properties, 2.266, 268–73, 273–85, 343–5; purpose and importance, 2.232–3, 289–95, 376–7; Raven stories, 2.256, 259, 263, 273–8, 286, 288; respect for life forms, 2.318; role of plants in, 2.234, 257–8, 291–2, 377; shared elements and influences, 2.285–9, 378; social organization in, 2.52; spirituality in, 2.232–3; spreading of plants, 2.205–6; for sustainability, 2.349–50; transformation of plants, 2.343–5, 377; Transformer legends, 2.273, 278, 286; as translations, 2.233; tree pitch, 1.439; 2.237–8, 260, 268; trees, 2.260, 312. See also individual nations and groups Nass River, 2.23–4, 34 nectars, use as food, 1.315–16 needle and sewing, 1.377 nets (fishing), 1.99, 399; 2.237, 251–2, 253 nets (hunting), 1.401–2 Nez Perce, 2.329–30 Nez Perce War of 1877, 1.221 Nisga’a: cultural keystone place, 2.23; guardian spirit power, 2.337; harvest of berries, 2.14; management practices, 2.220; narrative, 2.290; pine mushrooms, 2.395–6; spiny wood fern, 2.34 Nixlúidix (Trading Place), 2.95 Nlaka’pamux: baskets, 1.287, 406; and change, 1.239; dissemination of goods and knowledge, 2.142–3; division of labour, 2.56, 57; European-style gardening, 1.205; false Solomon’s-seal, name for, 1.126; famine foods, 1.330; First Food ceremony, 2.330; “hair” of the earth as vegetation, 2.299; healing plants, 1.439; herbal healing, 1.441; highbush cranberry name, 1.527n8; internal trade, 2.134; link with Secwepemc, 1.180–1; narratives, 2.142–3, 245, 247–8, 252–3, 263, 292–3, 294, 300, 343–4; origin story, 2.255–6; plant names, 1.127, 181, 183; 2.299; respect for all things, 2.300; root vegetables, 1.283, 287; spiritual protection, 2.334; spreading of plants, 2.205–6; woodworking tools, 1.355; yarrow, 1.415–16

536 | General Index

nobility. See chiefs and nobility nodes of convergence. See resource nodes nontimber forest products (NTFP s), 2.393–6 Nootka Sound, 1.203–5, 216 Northern Archaic Tradition, 1.171 northern coastal and Subarctic North America: basketry, 1.408; cultural foretelling by archaeology, 1.110–11; early plant food resources, 1.61–70; housing and shelter, 1.86; human migration, 1.89; plant material/healing plant resources, 1.70–2; spread of species after glaciation, 1.77 northern interior, 1.6–7, 12, 17–18 northern Northwest Coast, 2.137–9 Northwest Coast: archaeological record, 1.18, 24–5; 2.137–8; autumn resources, 2.42–3; basketry, 1.405, 407; berries, 1.298; biological productivity, 1.168; clothing, 1.411; as cultural area, 1.5–6; cultural development, 1.87; cultural foretelling by archaeology, 1.110–11; description, 1.6–7; 2.137; economic system, 2.112–13; fibrous materials for objects, 1.368–70; food plants proportion in diet, 1.264; Holocene, 1.78, 83–4; houses and shelters, 1.389–90; internal migrations, 1.168; languages and families, 1.12–14, 168; marine resources, 1.88–9, 524n42; 2.83–4; middens, 1.88–9; plant names, 2.138–9; root vegetables, 1.283–6; seasonal rounds by season, 2.28, 29–33, 33–7, 39–41, 42–3, 44; spread of vegetation and forests, 1.81; spring resources, 2.28, 33–7; summer resources, 2.39–41; trade and exchange, 2.137–9; traditional lifeways and use of plants and resources, 1.10–16, 18; winter resources, 2.44; wooden materials preferred, 1.364–7; woodworking tools, 1.355–8 North West Company, workers’ gardens, 1.205 Norwegian words, 1.219 NTFP s. See nontimber forest products (NTFP s) nutrition and nutrients: berries, 1.296; black tree lichen, 1.314; cambium, 1.312; food plants generally, 1.269, 334; green vegetables, 1.308; mushrooms, 1.313; and pit-cooking, 1.86–7; 2.362; root vegetables, 1.281 nutrition transition, 1.257, 258, 334

nuts. See seeds, nuts, and grains Nuu-chah-nulth: early contact and foods, 1.197, 216–17; food shortages and conflict, 2.96; harvest ceremonies, 2.331–2; leaders’ responsibilities, 2.224; narrative and supernatural properties, 2.277–8; respect for plant resources, 2.220–1, 313, 349; social system, 2.52; springbank clover cultivation, 2.145–6; thimbleberry shoots, 1.309 Nuxalk (Bella Coola): borrowing of plant names, 1.139; narratives, 2.246, 264–5, 275, 287, 321; ownership of resource areas, 2.222; trade and exchange, 2.117–19 Nyce, Emma, 2.70 Nyce, Harry, Sr, 2.70 oak, Garry (oak, Oregon white): acorns, consumption of, 1.215, 306; archaeological record, 1.80; management methods, 2.189–90; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 317; in technology, 1.342; trade and exchange, 2.124 objects, respect for, 2.346 obsidian, 2.105–6, 374 occupational specialization, 2.64, 92–3, 386 oceanspray: as healing plant, 1.248; languages using taxon name, 1.151; management methods, 2.188; name reflecting use, 1.130–1, 347–8; naming frequency, 1.159; phenological indicator, 2.18; pruning, 2.197; in technology, 1.341, 364, 365, 366 O’Donaghey, Edith, 1.299; 2.3, 38, 41, 43, 59 Okanagan Nation: narratives, 2.263–4, 278, 312; origin of plants, 2.299; protective plants, 2.333; supernatural properties of plants, 2.278; weather beliefs, 2.317 Olcott sites, 1.80 “Old-One” narratives: as Creator, 2.299; division of labour, 1.287; 2.56, 57; healing plants, 1.439; origin of plants, 2.299; origin story, 2.255–6; respect for all things created, 2.300; roots and baskets, 1.287, 406 oleoresin. See pitch Olympic Peninsula, 1.54–5, 57–8 onion, false, 1.272 onion, Geyer’s, 1.156 onion, nodding, 1.xxi; archaeological record, 1.278, 324; contact period, 1.197; as descriptive name, 1.128; digging sticks, 1.287; as food plant, 1.270; management

methods, 2.185; names in Indigenous languages, 1.175, 482–4; in narratives, 2.240; processing after cooking, 1.293; and term qwlawl, 1.xix–xxi, 124, 150; 2.360; trade and exchange, 2.122 onions, general, 1.86–7, 281, 317; 2.122 On Your Knees Cave site, 1.57 ooligan. See oulachen Oowekeeno, 2.256–7, 274–5, 280–1 oral cultures, 1.20; 2.385–90 oral history: of conflicts, 2.95–6; as integrated messages, 2.233–4; internal migrations and mixing of peoples, 1.168–9; as line of evidence, 1.33–5; as record of colonial and settler change, 1.223; reflected in plant names, 1.170; value in courts, 1.223 oral traditions and stories, 1.147; 2.289–95. See also narratives orchards, 1.205, 206; 2.212–14 Oregon-grape, dull-leaved, 1.159 Oregon-grape, tall: in belief systems, 2.306; as descriptive name, 1.129; as dye, 1.386; as healing plant, 1.420, 421; naming frequency, 1.159; in technology, 1.344; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.179 Oregon state, archaeological sites, 1.79–80 Oregon Treaty, 1.227 origin stories: for families, 2.231–2; and food ceremonies, 2.330–1; “hair” of the earth as vegetation, 2.299; highbush cranberry, 1.117, 120; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.377–8; as line of evidence, 1.33–4; origin of ancestors, 1.47, 50; and plant knowledge, 2.254–7, 380; plants and plant species, 1.117; 2.9, 275, 285, 299; scientific view of ancestors vs, 1.47, 50; spirituality in, 2.232–3; trueness of, 2.232; women, 2.263. See also narratives osage orange, 1.341 Ötzi, 1.105, 518n18 oulachen: control of fishery, 2.89, 115; “grease trails,” 1.210–11; 2.26, 109, 133; harvest, 2.28, 33–4; mixed with plants, 1.327; and plant knowledge, 2.110 Our Common Future (Brundtland Report), 1.36 out-marriages, 2.80–2, 388–9 ownership: and agriculture, 1.224, 229; 2.150; berry patches, 2.224–5; as management practice, 2.157, 182, 221–5; of narratives, 2.233; overview, 1.33; plant resources and structures, 2.86–92; of resource areas,

General Index | 537

2.221–3, 382; responsibilities, 2.223–4; spiritual aspects, 2.325 oyster mushroom, 1.128 Ozette potato, 1.199, 199–200, 244 Ozette site: baskets, 1.406, 410; berries and berry seeds, 1.295–6; hats, 1.110; 2.85; houses and food remains, 1.109–10; plant remains, 1.108–10; wood types, 1.347; woodworking, 1.108–9 paddles (canoes), 1.397; 2.236, 345 paintbrush, 1.384; 2.305 paintbrush, red, 2.317 paintbrushes, 1.129; 2.317 palaeobotany and palaeoecology, as lines of evidence, 1.20–1 palaeoethnobotany, as line of evidence, 1.21–9 patterned migration. See seasonal rounds pattern of living, 2.28, 29–33, 45–6, 53–4 Paul, Alice, 2.247, 259 pea, beach, 2.270, 275 pea, cream (pea, wild), 1.178 pearly everlasting, 1.129, 157, 382 peat mosses, 1.70, 339, 343 Pebble Tool Tradition, 2.107 pecten shells, 1.94 peony, Brown’s, 1.428 perennial plant species, 2.150–1 Peters, Alec, 1.361–3, 362; 2.161 Peters, Nellie Wallace, 1.362 petroglyphs and pictographs, 2.24–5 phenological indicators: berries, 2.15–17; fish and animals, 2.17, 18–20, 20–1; and seasons, 2.15–21; spring, 2.28, 35–6, 38; in study area, 2.15–17, 18–20; traditional plants, 2.18–20; wild roses, 2.17, 20 phenology, definition, 2.15 Phillips, Louie, 2.112 philosophies of Indigenous peoples. See worldviews phloem, 1.353 phytogeography, definition, 2.6 pigments, 1.387 pilaa-pilaa contest, 2.67–8 pilot biscuits, 1.216 pine, lodgepole, 1.17; archaeological record, 1.102; cambium nutrition, 1.312; distribution, 1.152; as early species, 1.48; as food plant, 1.62, 276; as fuel, 1.339; as healing plant, 1.71; 1.420, 421; management methods, 2.184; names in Indigenous

538 | General Index

languages, 1.151, 152, 175; as source of sugar, 1.215; in technology, 1.71, 344, 364, 365, 366, 369 pine, ponderosa: in “actor” role, 2.261; archaeological record, 1.95, 324; in belief systems, 2.303; as fuel, 1.95, 339; as healing plant, 1.422; management methods, 2.184; in narratives, 2.261; in technology, 1.95, 340, 365, 368; trade and exchange, 2.121; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.177 pine, western white (pine white): harvest quantities, 2.172; management methods, 2.184; naming frequency, 1.158; in technology, 1.342, 365, 368; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.177 pine, whitebark: as food plant, 1.62, 275; harvest, 2.43, 172; as healing plant, 1.449; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 177, 317; seeds and cones, 1.135, 215, 306, 307; trade and exchange, 2.121 pines, general: archaeological record, 1.325; gum use, 1.315; as healing plants, 1.71; Proto-Salish terms, 1.317; seed consumption, 1.215; in technology, 1.71, 366 pineappleweed, 1.206; 2.306 pinegrass, 1.130, 369; 2.241 pine mushroom, 2.183, 395–6 pipe, stone, 1.96 pipe ceremonies, 1.248 pitch: in “actor” role, 2.260; balsamroot, 1.430–1, 433; for fires, 1.350; in narratives, 1.439; 2.237–8, 260, 268; supernatural qualities, 2.268; as technology, 1.381–2; uses, 2.195 pit-cooking: archaeological record, 2.156, 362; camas, 1.86–7, 279–81, 292; 2.362; carbohydrates, 1.86–7; 2.362–3; division of labour, 2.61–2; as evidence of management, 2.156; food plants in general, 1.322–3; inner bark, 2.76; and inulin, 1.281; origins, 1.86; ovens, description of, 1.87; procedure, 1.291–2, 293, 323; 2.362; rocks in, 1.292–3; root vegetables, 1.279–81, 289–93; size and number of pits and ovens, 1.280–1; taboos, 2.320–1; temperatures obtained, 1.292; terms for, 1.289; use of plants, 1.266–8. See also hearths and roasting pits pithouse depressions, 1.93, 389 pithouses: archaeological record, 1.92, 96, 324–5, 389; description and materials, 1.85, 95, 388–9; entrances, 1.388;

evolution, 2.356–7; Interior Plateau, 1.84–6, 388–9; Keatley Creek site, 1.85, 92–3, 93; Northwest Coast, 1.389 Pitt Polder site, 1.44, 45–6; 2.157 Pitt River site, 1.27 place names, 2.9, 48–9, 221 places of convergence. See resource nodes plank and post houses, 1.389–90; 2.54–5 planks, production, 1.357 plantain, broad-leaved (plantain, common), 1.423, 445 plantain, seaside, 1.66, 133, 276 plant-community-level management, 2.166, 181–2, 207–17 plant resources (for food, healing, and technologies): and animal resources, 2.15; autumn resources, 2.42–4; belief systems and ceremonies, 2.225–6; and change, 2.356; commercialization, 2.393–6; consistency in species used, 2.354–5; control and ownership, 2.86–92, 94, 99–100, 222–4, 382; cultivation, 1.265; cultural keystone places, 2.23–5; culturally useful species and habitats, 2.21–6; definition, 2.5; depletion, 2.393–5; desirability of products, 2.128; distributions of species, 2.6–8; division of labour, 2.55–6; European impact (See traditional resource-harvesting lands); gifting and exchange, 2.113–14; harvest quantities, 2.167, 172–6, 176; harvest rates, 2.167, 168–71, 176; harvest variations, 2.13–14; Holocene, 1.83–4, 89–91; intensification to create surplus, 2.120, 363; “kelp highway,” 1.59–60, 72; land settlement claims, 1.221; and lifecycle of plants, 2.15; livestock impact, 1.221, 253; management methods for specific plants, 2.183–92; moon and sun cycles, 2.15; nodes (See resource nodes); productivity, 2.8–10, 23–5, 371; quality and selection, 2.10–12; resources and time required for processing and harvesting, 2.167, 176–8; respect for, 2.218, 220–1, 312–14, 349–50; seasons and phenological indicators, 2.15–21; single plant species versatility, 2.5–6; and social organization, 2.98–9, 373–4; specialization and sophistication over time, 2.354–5; spring resources, 2.28, 33–9; status from, 2.86–9; summer resources, 2.39–42; territorial claims and boundaries, 2.45–6; transfer through affinal ties, 2.81–2; in treaties and legislation, 2.223–8,

400–2; variability and predictability, 2.8–9; variation within species, 2.7, 9–13; winter resources, 2.44–5; and women, 2.225. See also food plants; healing plants; technologies using plants plant species. See species, plants as Plateau Pithouse Tradition, 1.180, 388 Pleistocene: ancient sites and plant use, 1.56–60, 72–5; animals and plant knowledge, 1.75–6; Beringia (See Beringia); early plant species, 1.48–9; human migration and routes, 1.50–1, 53–6; human-plant relationships, 1.49–50, 56–60, 72–5; 2.353–4; ice cover and sea level, 1.47–8, 51, 53; 2.6–7; “kelp highway,” 1.53–6; plant food resources, 1.59–60, 61–70; plant material/ healing plant resources, 1.72–5; refugia and species migration, 1.53–4 plum, bird, 1.109 plums, 1.206 poison-medicine-food triangle, 1.433–4, 435–7, 438 poisonous plants, 1.48, 331, 432–4, 435–7, 438, 449 pond-lily, yellow: archaeological record, 1.106; in belief systems, 2.307; as early plant food, 1.65–6; as healing plant, 1.71; 1.420, 424, 427; languages using taxon name, 1.151; in technology, 1.71 pondweeds, general, 1.58 poplar, balsam: distribution, 1.153; as food plant, 1.277; languages recording its name, 1.153; naming frequency, 1.160; in technology, 1.341, 345; trade and exchange, 2.124 poplars, general, 1.66 poppy, wild, 2.307, 317 population (human), precontact, 2.167 population-level plant management, 2.166, 179–81, 193–207 poque, 2.304 post and plank houses, 1.389–90; 2.54–5 potato, Haida, 1.199, 199–200, 244 potato, Irish, 1.198–200, 244, 438, 509–13 potato, swamp. See wapato Potato Mountain (Tsinuzchéd), 1.283; 2.9 potlatch: ban, 1.237–9; chiefs in, 1.238–9; 2.83; dissemination of goods and knowledge, 2.136–7, 388–9; gifts, 2.113; and kincentric ecology, 2.325; recognition of plants, 2.325; roles and functions, 1.237–9; 2.83, 325

General Index | 539

poverty, impact, 1.258 prairies, burning, 2.155–6 pregnancy, healing plants, 1.446 preservative plants, 1.326–7 prickly pear cactus, 1.96, 276, 330; 2.174 prickly pear cactus, brittle (or fragile), 1.179; 2.19, 271 productivity: berries, 2.8, 207; intensification, 2.120, 363; resource nodes, 2.23–5, 371; root vegetables, 2.8; and seasonal rounds, 2.8–10, 23–4, 371 projectile points, 1.58–9 propagules: replanting, 2.180, 200, 201–3; transplanting, 2.157, 180–1, 203–6 proprietorship. See ownership protective plants, 2.321–4, 333–4 proto-languages, 1.82, 133–4, 219–20; 2.358–9 Proto-Salish: cross-language borrowing, 1.134–5; expansion, 1.89; food plants, terms for, 1.317–18, 319; highbush cranberry names, 1.120, 121; plant names, 1.82; plant names in Wakashan languages, 1.185–7; skunk-cabbage name, 1.144–5 pruning, 2.180, 196–7 Psacelay site, 1.28; 2.159 puberty, 2.68–9, 336, 337–41 puffballs, general, 1.131, 339; 2.301 purgatives, 1.420–1, 445, 449 pussytoes, field, 1.157 pyrola, one-flowered, 2.242, 271, 307 queenscup, 1.132; 2.270 Quw’utsun’ (Cowichan), 2.114, 244 qwlawl (Salish), 1.xix–xxi, 123–4, 150, 181; 2.360 Qwu?gwes site, 1.406–7, 410–11 rabbitbrush, common, 1.339 railways, 1.247 rain, invocation, 2.317 “rain flowers,” 2.315–17 raspberries, dwarf, 1.273; 2.262 raspberry, American red. See raspberry, wild raspberry, black. See blackcap raspberry, dwarf (nagoonberry), 1.67, 273; 2.190 raspberry, wild: archaeological record, 1.324, 325; distribution, 1.154; as food plant, 1.67, 273; harvest rates, 2.170; as healing plant, 1.426, 428; management methods, 2.190;

540 | General Index

names in Indigenous languages, 1.154, 179. See also blackcap “raspberry bush.” See thimbleberry rat-root, 1.203, 204, 536n9; 2.185, 204 rattlesnake plantain, western, 1.129, 130, 422, 426; 2.187 “raven’s mustache,” 2.239 Raven stories, 2.256, 259, 263, 273–8, 286, 288 reaction wood, 1.353–4 Recalma-Clutesi, Kim, 2.205 reciprocity: definition in cultural terms, 2.110–11; with environment, 2.351–3; food products, 2.128–9; in management, 2.149; and respect for land and resources, 2.349, 384; trade and exchange, 2.79, 102–3, 110–19, 128–9, 149 redcedar, western, 1.15; in “actor” role, 2.261, 264; archaeological record, 1.102–3, 108–9, 347, 404–5; bark harvesting and use, 1.379–80, 409; 2.37; baskets, 1.405, 407, 408–10; in belief systems, 1.34; 2.231–2, 303, 327–9; bentwood boxes, 1.359–61, 360; canoes and boats, 1.247, 337, 392, 393, 394; for construction, 1.340, 380, 389–90; cooking, 1.289; distribution and expansion, 1.152, 390; as fibrous plant material, 1.342, 368, 369, 370, 373–4; 2.367; as fuel, 1.339, 349; harvest, 2.172, 367; as healing plant, 1.423, 464; importance, 1.32, 33, 34, 412; 2.365; malleability, 1.358; management methods, 2.184–5; name reflecting use, 1.130; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 152, 177, 185; naming frequency, 1.160; in narratives, 2.231–2, 239–40, 247, 261, 264, 269, 280–1, 327–9; origin stories, 2.231–2, 327–9; ownership and management, 1.33; in pollen record, 1.81; preservative qualities, 1.326; roots, 1.410; 2.10–11, 130, 152, 367; specialized terminology, 1.166; supernatural qualities, 2.269, 280–1; in technology, 1.99, 364, 365, 366, 367, 412; 2.10–11, 109–10, 128, 365; trade and exchange, 2.121, 129–31; uses, 1.355, 409; for woodworking, 1.90, 356. See also cedars, general “red willow.” See dogwood, red-osier reed canarygrass: as basket decoration, 1.386; introduction, 1.233; management methods, 2.189; in technology, 1.368, 369; trade and exchange, 2.124

reed grass, common and related species, 1.179, 369, 376; 2.124, 189 reefnet fishery (Straits Salish): description, 2.40, 74; in food narrative, 2.250–1; group work, 2.73–4; as management, 2.154–5; origins, 2.159; as seasonal round, 2.40; technologies, 1.399 refugia, 1.53–4, 59; 2.6–7 regeneration of plants, 2.150–3, 159–61, 375 religious events, 1.240 renewal. See cultural renewal replanting propagules, 2.180, 200, 201–3 research practices, 1.105, 110 reserve system, 1.228–9; 2.164–5, 409 residential schools, 1.219, 235–7, 239–40 resource nodes: as anthropogenic landscapes, 2.217–19; conflicts and warfare, 2.95–6; control, 2.94; examples, 2.111–12; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.107, 111–12, 355–6, 382–3, 388–9; linkages created, 2.383; management strategies, 2.208, 217–19; productivity, 2.23–5, 371; salmon, 2.93, 95; social and intergroup interaction, 2.93–5, 111–12, 355–6, 371, 382–3; TEK, 2.384–5. See also cultural keystone places resources from plants. See plant resources respect: as belief system, 2.297–300, 325–6, 383–4; for berries, 2.218, 314; in cultural renewal, 2.396–7; for equipment and objects, 2.345–6; lack of, 2.315, 317–19; in narratives, 2.318; plants and plant resources, 2.218, 220–1, 312–14, 349–50; reciprocity, 2.349, 384 respiratory afflictions, 1.423–5, 444 rheumatism and arthritis, 1.427, 446–8; 2.369 rhizomes, 2.151, 196, 319. See also root vegetables riceroot, 1.318; 2.123, 187 riceroot, northern, 1.76; 2.399; in belief systems, 2.305; as descriptive name, 1.129; as food plant, 1.64–5, 271; harvest by bear, 2.162; harvest rates, 2.169; languages using taxon name, 1.151; management methods, 2.187; in narratives, 2.241, 270; propagules and bulblets, 2.162, 201, 202; supernatural qualities, 2.270 Ritchie, Baptiste, 2.214 rites of passage, 2.338–9 rituals. See ceremonies

riverbeauty, 1.64 river slime, 1.128; 2.18 roasting pits. See hearths and roasting pits Robinson, Ambrose, 2.113 Robinson, Annetta, 2.81, 82 Robinson, Colleen, 2.75 Robintown, 2.83, 211, 212–13 rock carvings, 2.108–9 rockshelters and caves, 1.24, 57, 102–3, 541n42 rockweed, 1.128, 275, 421 rodeos and horse racing, 1.209 roofing, 1.380 roots: baskets and basketry, 1.408; 2.152; cooking techniques, 1.289; as famine food, 2.254; knowledge, 1.379; in narratives, 2.238; partial harvesting, 2.196; regeneration, 2.151; replanting propagules, 2.201–3; in rites of passage, 2.339; spruce, 1.105, 105, 405, 409–10; 2.59, 60; western redcedar, 1.410; 2.10–11, 130, 152, 367 root vegetables: archaeological record, 1.278–81, 289–93; 2.158; baskets, 1.287; cooking, 1.279, 281, 288–93; in cooking-pits, 1.278–81, 289–93; 2.158; digging sticks, 1.287, 402, 403–4; equipment used in harvesting and processing, 1.279, 287–8, 321; estuarine gardens, 1.286; 2.210; examples, 1.270–2; as famine food, 1.330; harvesting and planting, 1.283, 287–8; 2.8, 41, 42–3, 198–200; from Kingcome Inlet, 1.267; management, 2.158, 198–200; nutrition, 1.281; overview, 1.269, 278; productivity, 2.8; proportion in diet, 1.264; regional variation, 1.281–6, 282; seasonal rounds, 2.41, 42–3; stovetop cooking, 1.293; timing of harvest and size of roots, 2.198–200; weeding, 2.200–1 rope, 1.367, 370–4, 374 Roscoe Inlet berry garden, 2.209 rose, dwarf wild (rose, baldhip), 1.278; 2.308. See also rose, Wood’s rose, Nootka: archaeological record, 1.110; 2.19; in belief systems, 2.308; as food plant, 1.67, 273; harvest rates, 2.170; in technology, 1.369 rose, prickly, 1.273, 278; 2.21, 308 rose, Wood’s, 2.308. See also rose, dwarf wild rose hips, 1.96, 329 rose(s), wild, general: archaeological record, 1.58; distribution, 1.154; as food plants,

General Index | 541

1.67, 273; as healing plants, 1.72; 1.457–9; names in Indigenous languages, 1.154, 176, 318; naming frequency, 1.160; in narratives, 2.242, 272; phenological indicator, 2.17, 19, 20; supernatural qualities, 2.272; in technology, 1.72, 364, 368; uses, 1.457–9 roseroot, 1.68 rosewort, 1.68 routes and trails. See trade routes and networks Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Columbia (McKennaMcBride Commission), 1.191, 193, 229 Russian words, 1.219 Saanich people: camas, 2.40; cultural renewal, 2.397; Douglas treaties, 1.225–6; narratives, 2.249–50, 253–4, 276–7, 312; salmon, 2.40, 311; seasonal round patterns, 2.29–33, 40; supernatural properties of plants, 2.276–7 Sacred Cedar Bark ceremony, 2.231–2, 328 sage, gray ball, 2.309 sagebrush, big: in belief systems, 2.304; cognate name, 1.465; as fuel, 1.339; as healing plant, 1.424, 427, 428, 464; sandals, 1.522n27; in technology, 1.342, 368, 369; trade and exchange, 2.122; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.178 sagebrush, white, 1.248, 422, 424, 428; 2.304 sagebrush species, 1.71 sagewort, prairie, 1.178; 2.304 salad greens, 1.68 salal, 1.297; archaeological record, 1.27, 109, 110; borrowed name, 1.142; commercialization, 2.395; as food plant, 1.273, 277; harvest, 1.298; 2.169, 174; as healing plant, 1.422; importance, 1.298; management methods, 2.187; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 186, 317, 318; naming frequency, 1.159; in technology, 1.344, 370; trade and exchange, 2.123 salience, cultural. See cultural salience Salish: archaeological record, 1.180; in Interior Plateau, 1.16; migration and divergence, 1.89, 180–1, 184; 2.360; plant use and names, 1.180–8 Salishan languages: cognates of healing plants, 1.465; cross-language borrowing, 1.134–5; plant names, 1.181–4, 348; qwlawl, 1.xix–xxi, 150; 2.360; semantic shifts,

542 | General Index

1.181–2; wapato name, 1.146. See also Proto-Salish salmon: archaeological record, 1.84; canneries, 1.236; and cedar, 2.329; fishing and nets, 1.399; in food narratives, 2.249–52; harvest, 1.113–14; 2.40, 42, 43; importance, 1.526n64; Keatley Creek Village site, 1.96; management, 1.115; names, 2.311; and phenological indicators, 2.17, 18–20, 20; plant use with, 1.28; 2.356; reefnet fishery (See reefnet fishery); and resource nodes, 2.93, 95; trade and exchange, 2.114 Salmon Arm, 2.9, 22–3 salmonberry, 2.277, 332; archaeological record, 1.27, 102, 109, 110; in belief systems, 2.298, 308; distribution, 1.154; as food plant, 1.67, 274, 276; harvest, 2.170, 174; as healing plant, 1.423; management methods, 2.190; names in Indigenous languages, 1.154, 318; in narratives, 2.242, 272, 276–7; phenological indicator, 2.17, 19; specialized terminology, 1.166; supernatural qualities, 2.272, 276–7; in technology, 1.364, 366; trade and exchange, 2.124 Salmonberry bird, 2.17, 276, 276–7, 343 salt, 1.218–19 salvage recovery, 1.45 Sam, Stanley, 2.58–9 saskatoon berry: archaeological record, 1.96, 324, 325, 406; in belief systems, 2.303–4; coppicing, 2.197; as descriptive name, 1.129; distribution, 1.152; First Fruits ceremony, 2.329; as food plant, 1.63, 272; harvest, 2.91, 168, 173; as healing plant, 1.417; importance, 1.298; management methods, 2.185; names in Indigenous languages, 1.152, 176, 485–8; in narratives, 2.240, 269; phenological indicator, 2.18; processing, 1.300–1; specialized terminology, 1.166; supernatural qualities, 2.269; in technology, 1.341, 364, 365, 366, 367; trade and exchange, 1.244; 2.101–2, 122; uses, 1.417 scallop shells, 1.94 scent, hiding, 1.383, 453–4; 2.336 scented plants. See aromatic plants schools and schooling, 1.235–6 scientific plant names, vs folk names, 1.122–3 scouring rush: in “actor” role, 2.260; as healing plant, 1.422, 426, 428; in narratives, 2.260, 268; supernatural qualities, 2.268

scouring rushes, general, 1.61, 317, 343 Scowlitz site, 1.27; 2.94 scrubbing, 2.335–6 scurvy and spruce beer, 1.197 sea biscuits, 1.216 sea levels, 1.47–8, 51, 53, 83; 2.357 sea milkwort, 2.187, 241 sea palm, 2.62–3 seasonal rounds: as adaptive strategy, 1.32; and altitude, 2.14; and animal resources, 2.15; archaeological record, 2.46–7; berries, 2.39–40, 41; burning practices, 2.40, 42; concept and description, 2.3–5, 26–7, 370–1; cultural aspects, 2.46–7, 48–9; cultural keystone places, 2.23–4; distribution of plants, 2.7–8; feasts, 2.90; historical development, 2.45–8; Holocene, 1.81–2, 88–9; importance, 2.27, 46–7; indicators, 2.372; Interior Plateau by season, 2.29–33, 37–9, 41–2, 43–5; management of resources, 2.208; in modern period, 2.5; Northwest Coast by season, 2.27–8, 29–33, 33–7, 39–41, 42–3, 44; patterns, 2.28, 29–33, 45–6, 371–2; predictability and variability, 2.371, 372; productivity and quality of plants, 2.8–10, 23–4, 371; reminiscences, 2.3–4, 27; root vegetables, 2.41, 42–3; social outcomes, 2.372; storage and processing of resources, 2.46–7; territorial claims and boundaries, 2.45–8; trails and routes, 2.135–6 seasons: autumn resources, 2.42–4; moon and sun cycles, 2.15; named after plants, 2.16–17; and phenological indicators, 2.15–21; spring resources, 2.28, 33–9; summer resources, 2.39–42; winter resources, 2.44–5 Seattle site (Discovery Park), 2.47 seawatch, 1.63, 157 seaweeds, general. See algae, marine (in general) sea wrack, 1.128, 275, 421 Sechelt, 2.96 secondary phloem, 1.353 Secwepemc (Shuswap): affiliations of plant names, 1.182; alliance with Hul’qumi’num, 2.116; arrival of Salish people, 1.180; balsamroot, 1.430–1, 433; bark use, 1.380–1; baskets, 1.408; and change, 1.239; chiefs and nobility, 2.83; diversity of resources and landforms, 2.22–3; green vegetables,

1.309; harvest, 1.242; 2.9, 14, 23, 37–9; healing plants, 1.447; and Ktunaxa, 1.242; link with Nlaka’pamux, 1.180–1; migration, 1.181; 2.117, 286; month names, 2.37, 44; mountain harvest, 2.14; narratives, 2.244–5, 248–9, 279, 286, 287–8, 295, 311; ownership of resource areas, 2.222–3; plant names, 1.181–4; puberty and ritual, 2.69, 338; root vegetables, 1.283, 293; seasonal round patterns, 2.9, 14, 29–33, 37–9; sharing of resources, 1.242; 2.88–9; stars as life forms, 2.311; supernatural properties of plants, 2.279; tobacco use and smoking, 1.213–14; trade with Cree, 1.202–3; trails and water routes, 1.210; woodworking tools, 1.355 sedge, slough (sedge, basket): baskets, 1.410; dyeing of, 1.235; management methods, 2.186; in technology, 1.342, 368, 369; trade and exchange, 2.122 seeds (for plant reproduction), 2.180–1, 198–9, 205–6, 349 seeds, nuts, and grains (for eating): archaeological record, 1.306–7; equipment used in harvesting and processing, 1.321; as food plants, 1.215, 275, 305–8; regional variation, 1.282 semantic shifts, 1.181–2, 188–9 serviceberry. See saskatoon berry settlements, 1.87–8, 89, 90; 2.356, 380–2 Sewid-Smith, Dr Daisy (Mayanilth): appropriation of land and resources by settlers, 1.193; family’s origin story, 2.231–2; on forms of learning, 2.386; herbal healing, 1.442; on management, 2.149; red laver name, 1.145 sewing and needle, 1.377 shamanism and shamans, 1.440, 443, 450; 2.340 sharing of resources, 1.242; 2.79–80, 102–3, 111–12, 113–15. See also trade and exchange “sharp” plants, 2.321–3, 333 shellfish resources, 1.84; 2.15 shells, 1.94, 106–7, 356; dentalium, 1.94, 399–400; 2.106, 110; middens, 1.83, 88–9, 113; 2.54 shelters. See houses and shelters shootingstars, 1.102, 132; 2.305 shoots (greens), as food, 1.308–10 shoreline resources. See marine resources shrubby. See willows

General Index | 543

shrubs, 1.352 Shuká Kaa (His Spirit Is Looking Out From the Cave), 1.57 Siberia, 1.51, 61–72 silverberry: as early plant food, 1.64; management methods, 2.187; in technology, 1.342, 368, 369, 370; trade and exchange, 2.123; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.178 silverweed, common: as food plant, 1.63, 270; management methods, 2.186; in narratives, 2.241, 269; supernatural qualities, 2.269; trade and exchange, 2.122; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.178 silverweed, Pacific: as food plant, 1.63, 270; harvest, 1.263; 2.168; management methods, 2.186; in narratives, 2.246, 269; supernatural qualities, 2.269; trade and exchange, 2.122 single delight, 2.242, 271, 307 site selection, as management strategy, 2.181 Skeena River, seasonal rounds, 2.46 skin ailments, 1.421–3, 444–5 skunk-cabbage, American (also skunk-cabbage, western), 1.143; in “actor” role, 2.258–9, 261; in belief systems, 2.306; borrowed and cognate names, 1.144–5, 144–5, 147; distribution, 1.153; folk vs scientific names, 1.123; as food plant, 1.65, 271; 2.364; as healing plant, 1.423; management methods, 2.188; name dissemination, 2.383; names in Indigenous languages, 1.153, 186, 318; in narratives, 2.242, 258–9, 261; preservative qualities, 1.326–7; as supernatural being, 2.258–9; in technology, 1.344; uses, 1.266, 268 slaves, 2.72–3, 95, 115–16, 373 slow match, 2.428n7 smallpox, 1.450 Smith, Diana, 2.396, 399 Smith, Linda: on bereavement, 2.341–2; degradation of lands and territories, 1.255; on narratives, 2.233, 282, 289; plant resource rituals, 2.226; on recognition, 2.326; spring beauty cooking, 1.289 smoking, 1.96, 212–14, 451 smoking (of foods), 1.351 smudging, 1.214, 248; 2.334–5 snakes, and bracken fern, 2.319 snowberry, common: animals in name, 1.133; in belief systems, 2.309; as healing plant, 1.425, 429; in narratives, 2.272, 280; supernatural qualities, 2.272, 280; in

544 | General Index

technology, 1.345, 366; Tsilhqot’in name, 1.179 snowberry, creeping, 2.305 snowbrush, 1.129, 422, 424, 427 snowshoes, 1.361–3, 362 Snuneymuxw (Nanaimo), 2.244 soap, 1.382 soapberry, 1.49; 2.103; archaeological record, 1.58; berry production, 1.165–6; borrowed name, 1.142; distribution, 1.154; 2.141; as early material, 1.72; as early species, 1.48; equipment used in harvesting and processing, 1.320; as food plant, 1.68, 274; harvest, 1.298–9; as healing plant, 1.72; 1.420, 421, 426, 427, 429, 449; as highvalue item, 2.141–2; knowledge transmission, 2.140–2; management methods, 2.191; name analysis, 1.165–6; 2.140–2; names in Indigenous languages, 1.118–19, 151, 154, 177, 187, 317; naming frequency, 1.161, 165–6; in narratives, 2.243, 272, 275; origin of name, 2.359; phenological indicator, 2.20; supernatural qualities, 2.272, 275; trade and exchange, 1.241; 2.101–2, 125, 133, 141–2; whipping and processing, 1.304, 305 social life, and horses, 1.209 social organization: across communities and tribal boundaries, 2.93–5; archaeological record, 1.94, 96, 113, 114; 2.52–3, 94, 356–7; children’s roles, 2.55, 62–8; development and outcomes, 1.180; 2.356–7, 373–4; division of labour, 2.55–6, 372; elders’ roles, 2.69–71; food plants, 1.325, 333; household unit, 2.53–5; importance, 2.51–2; influence of plant resources, 2.98–9, 373–4; men’s roles, 2.56–7, 372; in narratives, 2.52; plant knowledge, 2.98–9; slaves, 2.72–3; task groups, 2.73–7; technologies using plants, 1.413; and trade and exchange, 2.100; in villages, 2.54–5; women’s roles, 2.55–6, 57–62, 372 social stratification: affinal ties, 2.79–82; archaeological record, 2.83–5; chiefs and nobility, 2.82–3, 86–92; development, 2.78, 84–5; as evidence of management, 2.158; and food storage, 2.87–8; as human trait, 2.52; occupational specialization, 2.92–3; plants as crests, 2.85–6 social systems and structures: as basis of human culture, 2.51–2; changes in Late Holocene, 1.113, 114; complexity, 2.78,

94–5, 382; in contact period, 1.192–3; leaders in, 2.52; in times of change, 1.37–8, 111–12 Solomon, Gilbert, 2.297, 349 Solomon, Mabel, 1.124, 385; 2.297, 349 Solomon’s-seal, false, 1.126, 424, 425, 426, 427 Songhees, 2.167, 331 soopolallie. See soapberry sorrel, mountain, 1.66, 102, 276 sourdock, 1.68 southern Northwest Coast, 2.137–9 Southern Ts’msyen, 1.119 southwestern Subarctic area, 1.6–7, 12, 17–18 Spanish explorers, gardens, 1.203–5 species, plants as: annuals, 2.193–4; collective names, 1.125; composition and change, 1.8; 2.356; dissemination by animals, 1.136; distribution, 2.6–8; diversity in study area, 1.7–8, 19; D-Space list, 1.30, 422, 473; early knowledge, 2.379–81; “kelp highway,” 1.53–5; lifecycle of plants, 2.15; migration and spread, 1.53–4, 76, 77–8, 80–1; origin stories, 1.117; 2.9, 275, 285; perennials, 2.150–1; Pleistocene, 1.48–9; productivity, 2.8–11; selection for study, 1.30; similarities in Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, 1.18–19; single name for different species, 1.123–4; species-level management, 2.166, 179–81, 193–207; variation within, 2.7, 9–13 sphagnum moss, 1.70, 339, 343 spiders and webs, in narratives, 2.252, 253 spindle whorls, 1.29, 365 spiraea, 1.72 Spirits of the Forest (Atlágimma) dance, 2.397, 398 spirituality: boys’ training, 2.68, 69; ceremonial recognition of plants, 2.324–7; and the environment and sustainability, 2.347–9; in harvesting and preparation, 2.13, 329–33, 378–9, 396; healing plants, 1.443, 462; 2.326–7, 370; humans-plants-animals connection, 2.347; importance and origins, 2.346–7, 378–9; learning by children, 2.387–8; in narratives and origin stories, 2.232–3; and occupational specialization, 2.93; place of plants in, 2.324; plants as entities, 2.314–15; protective plants, 2.321–4, 333–4; renewal of, 2.349. See also belief systems; supernatural aspects

Spokan, 2.204, 217, 226, 298, 333 spring, phenological indicators and seasonal rounds, 2.28, 33–9 spring beauty, 2.10; in belief systems, 2.305; in ceremonies and rituals, 2.205, 226, 342, 349; cooking, 1.288–9; as food plant, 1.63, 270; harvest, 2.9, 14, 167, 169, 173; management methods, 2.186; names in Indigenous languages, 1.178, 317; in narratives, 2.241, 270, 282; root size at harvest, 2.199; supernatural qualities, 2.270; trade and exchange, 2.122 spring sunflower. See balsamroot, arrowleaf spruce, black, 1.277, 339, 340, 342, 344 spruce, Engelmann: in belief systems, 2.302; management methods, 2.184; naming frequency, 1.158; in technology, 1.342, 368; Tsilhqot’in/Dene name, 1.175 spruce, Sitka: in “actor” role, 2.261; archaeological record, 1.58, 102, 109, 347; baskets, 1.409; in belief systems, 2.302; contact period, 1.197; as descriptive name, 1.128; as early plant food, 1.62; hats, of roots, 1.105, 105, 409; 2.59; management methods, 2.184; naming frequency, 1.158; in narratives, 2.239, 261, 269; pitch, 1.381; root harvesting, 1.409; smudging, 1.214; supernatural qualities, 2.269; in technology, 1.340, 342, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370; trade and exchange, 2.121 spruce, white: canoes, 1.111; as food plant, 1.277; as healing plant, 1.420; management methods, 2.184; in technology, 1.340, 342, 368; trade and exchange, 2.121; Tsilhqot’in/Dene name, 1.175 spruces, general: canoes, 1.111; cooking and smoking, 1.351; as early plant foods, 1.62; as early species, 1.48; as healing plants, 1.70; 1.421, 428; pitch, 1.381–2; roots, 1.405, 409–10; 2.59, 60; in technology, 1.70, 99–100, 344, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369 Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), 1.120 squashberry. See cranberry, highbush (Viburnum edule) stalks, 1.383–4 standardization of products, 2.120, 126 stars, 2.311 status, social, 1.28; 2.54–5, 86–9, 92–3, 224–5. See also wealth from resources steaming wood, 1.358–61 stems, 1.308–10, 383–4 stewardship. See management strategies

General Index | 545

stinging nettle: in “actor” role, 2.262; in belief systems, 2.309; contact period, 1.197; distribution, 1.155; harvest, 1.371; 2.175; as healing plant, 1.72; 1.427, 429, 448; management methods, 2.191; names in Indigenous languages, 1.151, 155; naming frequency, 1.162; in narratives, 2.243, 251–2, 262; phenological indicator, 2.20; in technology, 1.72, 343, 359, 369, 371–3; trade and exchange, 2.125 Stl’atl’imx/St’át’imc: alliances, 2.94; harvest, 2.114; landscape burning, 2.214; narrative, 2.280; phenological indicators, 2.20; seasonal rounds, 2.3; separation from other Salish, 1.180; social organization, 2.94; supernatural properties of plants, 2.280; trade and exchange, 2.101–2, 114; whitebark pine seeds, 1.307 Stó:lō, 1.309 stonecrop, Pacific, 1.68 stoneseed, western, 1.325; 2.306, 317, 318 stone tool traditions, 2.107–8 storage of food. See food storage stories. See narratives; origin stories Straits Salish: camas names, 1.123–4; group work, 2.73–4; reefnet fishery (See reefnet fishery); seasonal round patterns, 2.29–33; weeding, 2.208; willow tree names, 1.140–1 strand in universe, 2.351–2 strawberries, wild, 1.64, 153, 185, 318 strawberry, blueleaf or Virginia, 1.176, 251, 273; 2.187 strawberry, seaside (strawberry, beach), 1.54; as food plant, 1.64, 273; harvest quantities, 2.174; management methods, 2.187; weeding, 2.200 strawberry, woodland, 1.176, 251, 273; 2.169, 187 strawberry blite, 1.96 s-ts’ik’ or s-ts’ik, 1.134–5 study area: biogeoclimatic vegetation zones, 1.7–8, 9; cultural areas, 1.6, 10–18; description and boundaries, 1.5–10; Indigenous languages, 1.10, 11–14; marine environment, 1.8–10; plant diversity, 1.7–8; temperatures and climate, 1.6–8 Subarctic North America. See northern coastal and Subarctic North America successional stages, 1.8; 2.181 sugar, 1.215–17, 316 sumac, smooth, 1.151, 425; 2.308, 319

546 | General Index

summer, seasonal rounds and resources, 2.39–42 sun cycle, 2.15 sundew, roundleaf, 2.305 Sunken Village site, 1.100–2 supernatural aspects: and chiefs and nobility, 2.83; knowledge transfer through marriage narratives, 2.81; and management, 2.376; plants as supernatural actors in narratives, 2.257–9, 260–2, 263–6, 312; plants with supernatural and magical properties, 2.266, 268–73, 273–85, 343–5 supernatural healing, 1.440, 443; 2.340 survival. See famine and famine food sustainability, 2.347–50. See also environment; Traditional Land and Resource Management (TLRM ) practices Swainson’s thrush (Hylocichla ustulata), 2.17, 276, 276–7, 343 sweat bathing, 1.448; 2.335–6, 369 sweat lodges, 1.391 sweet cicely, 1.106 sweet cicely, western, 2.123, 307 sweetflag, 1.203, 204, 536n9; 2.185, 204 sweetgrass: in belief systems, 2.305; for smudging, 1.214, 248; 2.334; trade and exchange, 1.203; 2.123 “sweetroot,” 2.123, 307 sword fern, western. See fern, sword taboos: aromatic plants, 2.323–4, 333–4; good luck plants, 2.321; harmful plants, 2.319–21; rain and weather events, 2.315–19; resource use, 2.341; “sharp” plants, 2.321–3, 333 Tahltan, 1.211 tamarack (Larix laricina), 1.339, 340, 342 “tamarack” (Larix occidentalis). See larch, western tanning of hides, 1.387 tansy, common, 2.309 task groups, harvesting and processing, 2.73–7 Tate, Effie, 2.72–3 Taxol, 2.395 Taylor, Nellie, 1.460 tea, 1.217–18, 316 teamwork, harvesting and processing, 2.73–7 technologies using plants: archaeological record, 1.338, 345–6, 347; 2.356; aromatic plants, 1.383; baskets and basketry,

1.404–11; 2.366–7; best materials, 1.346–8; canoes, 1.392–7; changes to and elaboration, 1.111–14; for cleansing and as cosmetics, 1.382–3; clothing, 1.411; consistency in use over time, 2.354–5; for construction and manufacture, 1.340–2; digging sticks, 1.402–4; division of labour, 1.413; 2.367–8; dyes, pigments, stains, 1.385–7; examples, 1.70–2, 338, 339–45; experimentation and choice of materials, 1.346–7; fibrous plant materials (See fibrous plant materials); fire making and fuel, 1.70–2, 339–40, 349–52; fishing, 1.98–100, 398–400; 2.356; food production, 1.398–411; 2.363; Holocene, 1.74, 82, 90–1; houses and shelters, 1.85, 365, 387–91; human migration and early occupations, 1.70–2, 72–4; hunting, 1.400–2; 2.356; influence of Europeans, 1.245–6; knowledge associated with, 1.335, 411–12, 414; 2.366–7, 368; miscellaneous uses, 1.343–5, 382–4; origins and development, 1.336, 411–12; overview, 1.335–6; plant ceremonies, 2.333; plants used, 1.70–2, 339–45, 364–7, 368–70, 412; 2.365; reflection in plant names, 1.347–8; revival, 1.336–7; and social organization, 1.413; specialization and sophistication over time, 2.354–5, 368; trade and exchange, 2.129–31; tree pitch, 1.381–2; watercraft and boats, 1.395–6, 397–8; and women, 1.413; wooden materials preferred, 1.364–7; woodworking (See woodworking and woods). See also plant resources teenagers, 2.68–9, 336, 337–41 teeth, health, 1.418–19 Teit, James: berry drying, 1.300; cache pits, 1.325–6; cambium use, 1.312–13; canoes, 1.394, 396–7; on change and traditional lifeways, 1.239; chiefs and nobility, 2.83; equivalencies in value, 2.126–7; food narrative, 2.247; on harvesting supervision, 2.91; health of Indigenous peoples, 1.418, 440; on ownership of resource areas, 2.222–3; puberty and ritual, 2.338; root vegetables, 1.283, 288–90; on sharing of resources, 2.88–9; on tobacco use and smoking, 1.213; transformation narratives, 2.343–4 TEK . See Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK ) t’əls (Proto-Salish), highbush cranberry, 1.120, 121

“ten-barks” medicine mixture, 1.461, 462 territories: access rights to harvest, 2.114–15; development and domino effect, 2.78–9; resource areas, 2.221–2; resource reduction from new lifeways, 1.252–3; seasonal rounds, 2.45–8; sharing of resources, 1.242; 2.79–80, 102–3, 111–12, 113–15 The Dalles site, 1.79 thimbleberry: in “actor” role, 2.262; animals in name, 1.133; archaeological record, 1.110, 324, 325; in belief systems, 2.308; distribution, 1.154; food ceremonies, 2.332; as food plant, 1.67, 274, 276, 309; harvest, 2.170, 174; management methods, 2.190; names in Indigenous languages, 1.154, 317; naming frequency, 1.161; in narratives, 2.262; phenological indicator, 2.19; resources from, 2.5; shoot eating, 1.309; in technology, 1.345, 370; trade and exchange, 2.124 thistle, clustered (thistle, bull), 2.305 thistles, general, 1.206; 2.305 Thomas, Bessie, 1.256 Thomas, John: bull kelp, 1.358–9, 370; children’s games, 1.385; digging stick, 1.348; fishhooks, 1.358–9; games and contests, 2.67–8; licorice fern name, 1.143; mats and mat making, 1.378; skunk-cabbage name, 1.145; tree pitch, 1.381; woodworking tools, 1.356 Thomas, Dr Mary (Secwepemc): on alcoholism, 1.218; balsamroot, 1.430–1; baskets, 1.354, 378; 2.12; berry cakes, 1.301–2; birch use and harvest, 1.335, 380; 2.11–13; Canby’s lovage, 1.456; cedar roots trade, 2.131; childhood experiences, 2.65–7, 68; children’s games, 1.385; colonial and settler period impact, 1.221–2; coppicing, 2.197; discipline for children, 2.63; field mint, 1.457; on fire making, 1.350; fishing bait, 1.384; “hair” of the earth as vegetation, 2.299–300; harvest, 1.442, 463; 2.38; healing plants, 1.442, 447, 463; herbal healing, 1.441; humans’ place in universe, 2.351; insect repellents, 1.383; livestock impact, 1.233–4; mats and mat making, 1.378; nodding onions, 1.293; replanting propagules, 2.201–2; on residential schools, 1.236–7; respect for plants, 2.314; root vegetables, cooking of, 1.290–1; sanitary napkins, 1.382; seasonal rounds, 2.4, 38; on sharing food resources, 2.129;

General Index | 547

spring beauty harvest, 2.9; on traditional diet, 1.258; transplanting plants, 1.245; tule boats, 1.397; wapato name, 1.146; weather beliefs, 2.317; “wild celery” use, 1.308–9; willow-bark doll, 2.66 Thomas, Mary (Hul’qumi’num and Esquimalt), 2.317 “three-square,” 1.101, 242. See also bulrush, Olney’s three-square thrift, 1.102 tidal marshes. See estuarine gardens tilling, 2.180, 181, 200–1 timber, use by Europeans, 1.197 “timbergrass,” 1.130, 369; 2.241 time required to harvest and process, 2.176–8 timing of harvest, 2.198–9 tinder materials, 1.349–50; 2.238 Tlingit: “berried landscape,” 2.217–18; control of resources, 2.87; cultural exchange with Tahltan, 1.211; cultural keystone place, 2.23–4; European-style gardening, 1.205; marine resources, 1.102–3; narratives, 2.249, 284–5, 344–5; respect for life forms, 2.317; trade routes, 2.135–6 TLRM. See Traditional Land and Resource Management (TLRM ) practices Tl’uqtinus village, 2.80 tobacco, coyote. See tobacco, wild tobacco, cultivated, 1.211–14; 2.88–9 tobacco, Haida (tobacco, Northwest Coast): cultivation, 2.193–4; management methods, 2.189; in narratives, 2.271; origins, 2.106, 194; supernatural qualities, 2.271; trade and exchange, 2.106, 123, 194; use, 1.451, 536n11 tobacco, wild: in “actor” role, 2.262; management methods, 2.189; in narratives, 2.242, 262; for smudging, 2.335; trade and exchange, 2.88–9, 123; use, 1.213, 451, 536n11 tobacco root, 1.181–3, 272; 2.262. See also valerian, edible tobacco tree, in narratives, 2.263, 266, 273 tonics, general, 1.420, 445–6 tools. See equipment and tools totem poles, 1.90–1 toxic plants, 1.331, 432–4, 435–7, 438, 449 toys with plants, 1.384–5 trade (economic transaction). See economy trade and exchange: access to resources, 2.114–15; and alliances, 2.117–19;

548 | General Index

archaeological record, 1.92–4; 2.47, 105–6, 119–20, 355–6, 374; baskets and basketry, 1.241–3; 2.131; berries, 2.101–3, 114; borrowed plant names, 1.147; chiefs and nobility, 2.137, 142; coast-interior interface, 2.109, 133–5; conflicts and warfare, 2.115–17; control of and status from, 2.89; definition in cultural terms, 2.110–11; desirability and adaptability of products, 2.128; equivalencies in value, 2.126–7; as evidence of management, 2.157–8; food and food systems, 1.242, 243–4; 2.128–9; garden produce, 1.244–5; and gifting, 2.112–15; healing plants, 2.131–3, 369; historical development, 2.104–10; huckleberries, 1.98; importance, 1.241; 2.100; and knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.103–4, 108–10, 136–44, 374–5, 382–3, 388–90; marine shells, 2.106–7; medicines, 1.247–8; nonplant goods in first contacts, 1.196–7; Northwest Coast, 2.137–9; obsidian, 2.105–6; and plant names, 2.103–4, 129, 138–42; plants and plant products, 1.241–6; 2.106, 119–20, 121–5, 126–33, 374; precontact influence, 1.196; products of limited distribution, 2.127–8; and reciprocity, 2.79, 102–3, 110–19, 128–9, 149; for resilience, 2.102–3; and social organization, 2.100; technologies using plants, 2.129–31; trade routes (See trade routes and networks); trading posts, 1.201–2, 205, 535n7; transportation means, 2.106–7; value added to products, 2.120, 126, 141–2; water routes, 2.134–5; western redcedar, 2.129–31 trade routes and networks: archaeological record, 2.105–8, 134–5, 355–6; coastinterior, 2.109, 133–5; control, 2.89; cultural keystone places, 2.26; early contact period, 1.209–11; European impact, 2.136; “grease trails,” 1.210–11; 2.26, 109, 133; historical roots, 2.105–9, 111; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 1.209, 211; leading to other exchanges, 1.211; long-distance, 2.133–6; seasonal rounds, 1.135–6; within territories, 2.134–6; by water, 2.134–5 Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK): application to the environment and biocultural conservation, 2.402–9; cycles of life, 2.27; definition, 1.35; development, 1.35, 46–7, 116; and ethnobotany and

ethnoecology, 1.35–8; habitat domestication, 1.116; healing plants, 1.466; importance, 1.36–7; and knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.384–5; lifecycle of plants, 2.15; and loss from land and resource degradation, 1.254–5; and plant knowledge, 1.35–6; resource nodes, 2.384–5; in times of change, 1.37–8; and TLRM , 2.159, 226 Traditional Land and Resource Management (TLRM ) practices: definition, 2.148–9; disregard by Europeans, 1.224–5, 227, 249–50, 254; 2.164–5, 227, 409; outcomes, 2.149; practices, 1.178, 193, 227; 2.179–92; successional stages, 1.8; and TEK , 2.159, 226. See also management strategies “traditional phenological knowledge,” 2.15 traditional resource-harvesting lands: appropriation by settlers, 1.191, 193, 220–2; and colonial and settler agriculture, 1.229–33; European impacts, 1.224–5, 227, 249–50, 254; 2.149–50, 164–5, 227, 409; industrial impacts, 1.252–4; and reserve system, 1.229; 2.164–5; resource reduction from new lifeways, 1.249–50, 252–3, 254 trails, 1.26, 134, 135–6, 209–11; “grease trails,” 1.210–11; 2.26, 109, 133 training. See learning and training trains, 1.247 transformation of plants, 2.311–12, 342–6, 377; Transformer legends, 2.273, 278, 286 translation borrowing, 1.137–8 transplanting, 1.245; 2.157, 180–1, 203–6 transportation, 1.207–10, 247; 2.106–7 trapper’s tea: as beverage and medicine, 1.217; distribution, 1.153; as early material/healing plant, 1.72; management methods, 2.190; names in Indigenous languages, 1.153, 217–18; origin of name, 1.217; trade and exchange, 2.124 treaties: compensation, 1.225, 226–7; Douglas treaties, 1.224–6; 2.165; fishing, 1.226–7; modern period, 2.400–2; and reserves, 1.228; signatures, 1.225–6; wording and impositions, 1.224–5, 227–8; 2.165 tree pitch. See pitch tree ring analysis, 1.21 trees: in “actor” role, 2.259, 260, 263–4; biological aspects, 1.352–4; branches, 1.353–4; and depletion of resources, 2.393–4; as food plants, 1.310–13; knots, 1.354; naming, 1.352; in narratives, 2.260, 312; partial

harvesting, 2.195–6; respect for, 2.313–14; sacredness, 2.347; with supernatural properties, 2.266; usefulness and characteristics, 1.352. See also culturally modified trees (CMT s) Tribal Journeys, 1.337; 2.399 trillium, western, 2.309, 316, 316 Trutch, Joseph, 1.228 Tsilhqot’in: arrival and description, 1.172–3; ceremonies, 2.205, 326, 349; degradation of lands and territories, 1.255; harvest, 2.167, 201; and horses, 1.208–9; language, 1.172; mountains as life forms, 2.310–11, 311; narratives, 2.9, 248, 282, 289; origin story, 2.9; plant names in Dene languages, 1.174, 175–9; plant resource rituals, 2.226; plant use and names, 1.173, 174; Potato Mountain (Tsinuzchéd), 1.283; 2.9; respect for resources and traditions, 2.349, 396; ritual and nímính, 2.341–2; root vegetables, 2.201; twins, 2.340 Ts’ilʔos, 2.310, 311 Ts’msyen: clans, 2.85–6; harvest, 2.36; highbush cranberry name, 1.117–20, 142; kinship ties and resource use, 2.80; knowledge transfer and dissemination, 2.143; land and resource management, 1.249–50; 2.164–5, 219–20; narratives, 1.346–7; 2.85–6, 247, 252, 254, 274, 280, 288, 290–1, 293, 321–2; red elderberry name, 1.118–19; seasonal rounds, 2.36; supernatural properties of plants, 2.274, 280; technological experimentation, 1.346–7 Ts’msyenic languages, 1.135, 169 tubers. See root vegetables tule: in belief systems, 2.309; boats and rafts, 1.397–8; ceremony, 2.333; harvest, 1.346; 2.175; languages using taxon name, 1.151; management methods, 2.191; mat houses, 1.86; in ritual, 2.340; sandals, 1.522n27; in technology, 1.99, 343, 346, 368, 369, 375–7; trade and exchange, 2.124; use and importance, 1.80 turnip, garden, 1.507–9 Tushka, 2.71 twinberry, black: animals in name, 1.132; archaeological record, 1.109; as healing plant, 1.420, 422; in narratives, 2.271; supernatural qualities, 2.271; Tsilhqot’in/ Dene name, 1.176 twine, 1.367, 370–4 twining, 1.80, 404, 407, 409–10

General Index | 549

twins, 2.340 twistedstalk, clasping, 1.133 “The Two Girls up in the Sky Country,” 2.283–4 “two-spirited” people, 2.340 t’əls (Proto-Salish), highbush cranberry, 1.120, 121 Ulkatcho, 2.117–18, 310–11, 317 Umatilla tribes, 2.408 Umeek, Chief. See Atleo, Dr E. Richard (Umeek) underwater sites, 1.57 United States, treaties, 1.226–7 urbanization, 1.251–2 valerian, edible, 1.181–3, 272; 2.262 valerian, mountain (valerian, Sitka): in belief systems, 2.309; as healing plant, 1.423, 425, 426; languages using taxon name, 1.151; management methods, 2.192; as protective plant, 2.334; semantic shift, 1.181–3; as species, 1.48. See also tobacco root value added to plant products, 2.120, 126, 141–2 value equivalencies in trade, 2.126–7 Vancouver, Captain George, 2.149 Vancouver Island, 1.81, 232–3, 255–6, 285; treaties, 1.223–6 vanillaleaf, 1.128, 156 vegetation zones, 1.7–8, 9 verbena, sand, 1.53, 62 vetch, giant, 2.275 Victoria, 1.251–2; 2.149. See also Fort Victoria villages, social organization, 2.54–5 violets, wild, 2.309 volcanic eruptions, 1.89, 172; 2.290 Volcano Woman (Fog Woman), 2.249, 290 Wakashan languages, 1.144, 144–5, 145, 169, 185–7 wapato, 1.44, 285; archaeological record, 1.43–6, 44, 338; basket for, 1.378; borrowed names, 1.146; digging stick for, 1.338; as food plant, 1.68, 271; growing sites and range, 1.45; harvest, 1.286; 2.175; languages using taxon name, 1.151; management, 1.285–6; 2.190; name applied to new species, 1.219; trade and exchange, 1.202; 2.124; as treat, 1.258

550 | General Index

warfare, 2.95–7, 115–17 Washington State, 1.57–9 water and snow levels, 1.254 watercraft, 1.55–6, 246–7, 392, 395–8. See also canoes Waterfall, Pauline, 2.209 water-hemlock, Douglas, 1.434; 2.133 waterlogged sites, 1.22–4, 57, 113, 405–6 water moss, common, 1.106, 107; 2.18 water-parsley, 1.421, 426, 446; 2.271, 307 water-parsnip, 1.151, 272, 331 water routes, 1.209–10 waxberry. See snowberry, common Weah, Chief (Willie Matthews), 1.380 wealth from resources, 2.86–9, 91–2, 94, 99–100, 382 weather taboos, 2.315–19 weaving, 2.58, 131. See also baskets and basketry Wedge, Dora, 2.115 wedges, 1.356–7 weeding, 2.181, 200–1, 208–9 weeds, 1.206, 209, 233, 253 weir, for salmon, 2.238 Wenatchee site, 1.58 Wesley, Winnie, 2.166–7 wetlands, 1.81, 112, 231–2 wet sites, 1.22–4, 57, 113, 405–6; wapato archaeological discovery, 1.43 whaling, 1.110 wheatgrass, bluebunch, 1.233, 290–1, 339 widows, 2.205, 349 wíla. See lichen, black tree wild bergamot, 1.345, 457 wild caraway, 1.252, 283, 329; 2.189 “wild celery” (Angelica lucida), 1.63, 157 “wild celery” (Lomatium nudicaule): in belief systems, 2.306; destruction of, 2.401; as food plant, 1.276, 278; 2.364; as healing plant, 1.424; 2.132–3; management methods, 2.188; names in Indigenous languages, 1.179, 186; in narratives, 2.242, 250–1, 271; seeds, 2.132, 205; for smudging, 2.334; spiritual protection, 2.324; supernatural qualities, 2.271; trade and exchange, 2.123; use, 1.308–9 wild ginger, 1.248; 2.304 “wild rhubarb,” 1.67–8, 151, 276, 318 wild-rice, 1.203; 2.125 wildrye, basin. See wildrye, giant and related species

wildrye, dune grass, 1.71; 2.270, 275–6 wildrye, giant and related species, 1.178, 368; 2.188, 270 Willamette Valley sites, 1.79–80, 279 William, Ida, 2.280 William, Roger, 2.310 Williams, Violet, 1.443; 2.276–7, 283–4, 317 willow, Bebb, 1.342, 343 willow, Pacific, 1.140–1, 339, 399; 2.175, 191 willow, sandbar (willow, rope), cover; 1.374; for bags, 1.87; coppicing, 2.197; management methods, 2.190; in technology, 1.369, 370, 374, 374 willow, Sitka, 1.342, 343, 368, 370 willow bark, 2.66 willows: archaeological record, 1.58, 102, 109; in belief systems, 2.309; distribution, 1.154; as early food plants, 1.68; for fire making, 1.349; harvest quantities, 2.175; as healing plants, 1.72, 423, 425, 429; languages recording their names, 1.154, 177; management methods, 2.191; name reflecting use, 1.131; naming frequency, 1.161; in narratives, 2.243; resprouting, 2.160; in technology, 1.72; 1.342, 343, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369, 370; trade and exchange, 2.124 winter, seasonal rounds and resources, 2.44–5 winter villages, 2.54 wolf willow. See silverberry women: archaeological record, 1.28–9, 113; 2.58; belief systems for plant resources, 2.225; berry picking, 1.97; ceremonies, 2.25, 62; as chiefs and matriarchs, 2.89–91; digging sticks, 2.57–8; early contact period, 1.202, 211; in ethnographic record, 1.28–9, 195, 264, 265; food plants, work related to, 1.265, 333; gynaecological medicines, 1.426, 446; harvesting, 1.263–4, 333; 2.58–9, 62, 90–1, 363–4, 367; Indian status removal, 1.239; knowledge, 2.59, 80–2, 388–9; landscape burning, 2.216–17; lodges, 1.391; management of resources, 2.90–1; and men’s role, 2.61–2, 367–8; origin story, 2.263; participation in colonial economy, 1.194–5; role and tasks, 2.55–6, 57–62, 372, 416n6; technologies using plants, 1.413; widows, 2.205, 349 wood, characteristics, 1.352–4 wood fern, spiny, 1.294; in “actor” role, 2.260; cooking, 1.293; as crest, 2.86;

distribution, 1.152; as famine food, 1.330; as food plant, 1.61, 270; harvest, 2.34, 172; management methods, 2.183; names in Indigenous languages, 1.152, 175, 317, 318, 476–9; in narratives, 2.239, 260, 268; supernatural qualities, 2.268 woodframe lodges, 1.390–1 woodworking and woods: archaeological record, 1.84, 108–9; flourishing and peak of technology, 1.363, 389–90; 2.365–6; for food processing, 1.355; Late Holocene, 1.90–1, 355; steaming, bending, and moulding, 1.358–61; wood and bark characteristics, 1.352–4; wooden implements and tools, 1.361–3, 364–7; woodworking tools, 1.355–8; 2.366 “words of praise,” 2.298, 327–8 worldviews: as conservation and sustainability ethic, 2.347–50; definition and universality, 2.298; humans as strand in universe, 2.351–2; as lines of evidence, 1.33–5; about other life forms and entities, 2.300, 310–14, 324–6, 378–9; respect for all things created, 2.297–300, 325–6, 383–4. See also belief systems; kincentric ecology wormwood, 1.248, 422, 424, 428; 2.304 wormwood, northern, 1.178; 2.304 wormwood, Tilesius’, 1.63, 424, 452 wormwoods, general, 1.71; 1.422, 428 Xaxl’ip (Xaxl’ep), 2.101–2 xylem, 1.352–3 Yakima, 2.331 yampah, 1.252, 283, 329; 2.189 yarrow, common, 1.416; as descriptive name, 1.128; distribution, 1.152, 417; as healing plant, 1.415–17, 422, 423, 426, 428; management methods, 2.185; names in Indigenous languages, 1.152, 175; for smudging, 2.335; in technology, 1.344, 366 yarrow, false, 1.422 yellow-cedar: in “actor” role, 2.259, 261; archaeological record, 1.102; in belief systems, 2.302; characteristics, 2.259, 263; clothing, 1.411; cooking and smoking, 1.351; harvest, 2.259, 263; management methods, 2.184; in narratives, 2.239, 259, 261; Proto-Salish/Wakashan name, 1.185; in technology, 1.340, 342, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369, 373; trade and exchange, 2.121;

General Index | 551

uses, 1.355; for woodworking, 1.90. See also cedars, general yew, Pacific (yew, western): archaeological record, 1.108–9, 347; in belief systems, 2.303; commercialization, 2.395; digging sticks, 1.347; 1.348; management methods, 2.184; name reflecting use, 1.130, 348; names in Indigenous languages, 1.479–82; in narratives, 2.239, 272; snowshoes, 1.362, 362; supernatural qualities, 2.272; in technology, 1.340, 356, 357, 364, 365, 366, 367, 450; 2.195; trade and exchange, 2.121; uses, 1.347

552 | General Index

York, Annie: bitterroot and Indian-hemp trade, 2.126–7; equivalencies in value, 2.126; famine foods, 1.329–30; herbal healing, 1.441, 449; 2.133; root vegetables, 1.283; on scent masking, 1.454; on trade and exchange, 2.134; transplanting plants, 1.245; weather beliefs, 2.316 Young, George, 1.118 youth. See adolescents; children ʔEniyud, 2.310