Traditional Sustainable Use

August-September 2003

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Russel Barsh

This Songhees wooden feast bowl from the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC, exemplifies Coast Salish conceptions of the equivalence of humans and other animals, as predators and as prey.

He’s coming - my elder brother! Welcome, my elder brother! Julius Charles’ reef-net chant, recorded in 1942

We call the Pacific Northwest inland sea—at whose heart lies Orca Pass— the ‘Salish Sea’ because it coincides with a language family and a culture: Coast Salish. Compared to the Pacific Coast, the Salish Sea is both sheltered and topographically complex, with hundreds of rivers, bays, fiords, and islands. A vast amount of shoreline, with productive freshwater, tidal, and nearshore habitat is packed and folded within a small space accessible by water over relatively short distances. This has made the Salish Sea ideal for fish and marine mammals, and ideal for human sailors and fishers.

More than 10,000 years ago, glaciers erased any evidence of human activity in the Salish Sea. By 6,000 BP (Before Present), the ancestors of Coast Salish people were well established as hunters of land and sea mammals; and by 2,500 BP they enjoyed a regional economy that included fishing, shellfish gathering, hunting, cultivation of the blue camas lily (Camassia quamash), cedar architecture and basketry, and flocks of dogs for weaving blankets of dog-hair yarn. The stability and persistence of the Coast Salish world was based on sustainable use of the living resources of the Salish Sea. There appears to have been little change in Coast Salish diets or technology for millennia, while European settlers devastated the forests and fisheries of the Salish Sea in little more than 150 years.

RICH IN RELATIVES

An elegant, traditional halibut hook made of mixed woods and nettle twine was effective—and biodegradable! From the collection of the National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC.

Early European explorers, such as the naval officers of the 1841 US Exploring Expedition that prepared the first nautical charts of Puget Sound, took a rather different view of Coast Salish life. Compared to the big houses and material wealth of the Nuu-chanulth of Nootka Sound and other North Pacific Coast peoples, Coast Salish seemed contentedly poor. Their wealth consisted of their blankets and woolly dogs, which were easily transported by canoe. Even their houses, unlike the grandly carved clan houses of the outer coast, were mere postand- beam frames, covered with lashed cedar boards that could simply be untied, stowed aboard canoes, and re-used elsewhere. While the people of the Pacific Coast potlatched with coppers and slaves, Coast Salish feasted with salmon and clams, and considered a person great (sye’m) if s/hehad ‘under the water power’ and could fill their nets each summer with sockeye.

The relative poverty of Coast Salish people in European eyes suggests the source of social and ecological sustainability in the Salish Sea. All the people of the Salish Sea seem to have been so connected by marriage and resource-sharing, that it was misleading to describe them as different tribes Traditional Sustainable Use Russel Barsh or First Nations. Before the establishment of Indian reservations or reserves, and the organization of scores of local Indian governments in the Salish Sea by US and Canadian authorities, all Coast Salish people considered themselves related to varying degrees—a ‘Coast Salish continuum’. Wellto- do families went to great lengths to marry their children off to other prosperous families as far away as possible. For example, families living where I make my home today, on Samish Island, would send their children off to longhouses at Saanich Inlet, Musqueam (Vancouver), the Snohomish River, and other distant corners of the Salish Sea. Each additional link a family made ‘raised up its name’, making it richer in relatives, and in access to their far-flung relatives’ fishing grounds and other resources.

In a regional ecosystem characterized by annual and seasonal climatic vagaries, in which local stocks of fish and wildlife could fluctuate dramatically and unpredictably, an extensive regional- scale kinship network was a ‘diversified portfolio’, by analogy to the present-day stock market. If the Samish Island family’s horse-clam beds failed one year, they could go fish sockeye and sturgeon with their Musqueam in-laws, or harvest chinook and butter clams with their Snohomish in-laws. Prestige and influence were asserted and ratified in the feast hall, furthermore, and families with more extensive kin networks were better able to amass great feasts—even in relatively poor years.

My historical research on Coast Salish family ties used a database of several thousand individuals from the 1880 to 1920 US censuses. It showed that every ‘Indian reservation’ and off-reservation Coast Salish community still had multiple marriage ties with the others. The difference, of course, was that by the 1880s, Coast Salish resources included wages paid by logging camps, sawmills, and canneries; and feasts included the distribution of money and canned goods. These new resources were shared the old way.

A social system of sharing wealth implies the existence of some kind of property rights. Coast Salish traditional law recognized inherited privileges, such as family names and songs, and ‘power’ conferred by the spirit world on worthy individuals. Proprietary fishing and shellfish gathering grounds could be a bit of both: a worthy individual within the family would inherit the place, as opposed to simple lineal descent. Worthiness was a test of humility, effort, and results: young men and women sought by fasting, diving, and bathing to make themselves spiritually clean, and attract the attention of powerful beings in the invisible world. But they also had to deliver. Young men or women who claimed to have the gift of under-the-water power were watched to see if their nets filled with fish.

People of good family who worked hard and demonstrated their powers or talents could claim legacies in reef-net sites, clam beds, and other productive resources, but this was not ‘ownership’ in the European legal sense. Boston Tom, the last traditional owner of the Point Doughty reef-nets, simply lived there and “had a lot of friends”, according to his descendants. He had a lot of friends because he took good care of the fishing grounds and always had plenty to share with his in-laws. And his in-laws kept their privileges by accepting his guidance and advice while they fished there.

Traditional names for some of the islands of Orca Pass..

Anchor stones like this are still found throughout the archipelago, sometimes in heaps where reef net gears were anchored for centuries (courtesy Orcas Island Historical Society Museum).

MAINTAINING THE BALANCE

What does all of this have to do with conservation ecology? It’s about incentives. Coast Salish social organization rewarded long-term stewardship by individuals and their families. Good stewards nearly always had plenty of fish to share and to hold feasts, and many friends. On the rare occasion that they did suffer a loss, their ‘friends’ were happy to repay them. By comparison, ‘modern’ societies typically treat fish as public property and create perverse incentives for fishermen to compete with each other to catch as many fish as possible, as quickly as possible. We have bureaucracies to protect fish stocks, but no ‘one’ is personally responsible for any habitat or stock. No one’s personal status and prestige depends directly on maintaining habitat quality or perpetuating fish stocks.

Fish were protected by a system of social status and property that created strong incentives to conserve the productivity of important habitats and valuable species. At the same time, Coast Salish culture created strong incentives to share food. These two forces maintained a balance of ecological and social sustainability (social security). Great environmental stewards grew rich in relatives, and no respectable family was in danger of going hungry. Coast Salish people not only harvested fish sustainably; there is growing evidence that they literally grew fish. Like the widespread prairies and oak savannas admired by early European explorers, the abundance of salmon and herring was an artifact of human cultural practices. My research program is focusing on the extensive burning and tilling of hillsides for camas along the coasts of the Salish Sea, which would have sped the flow of terrestrial nutrients (carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus) into nearshore habitats such as eelgrass meadows. In the San Juan and Gulf Islands, Coast Salish people processed fish and shellfish on the beaches where they were harvested, returning the bones, skins, shells, and charcoal directly to the sea. Intensely harvested bays were thus also intensely fertilized.

To be sure, there was also an important philosophical and spiritual dimension to Coast Salish stewardship. Consider the Samish story of Kwa’ulut, who is memorialized today as the ‘maiden of Deception Pass’ in a carved cedar story pole at Rosario Beach, a few miles from the city of Anacortes, Washington. Kwa’ulut was gathering shellfish on the rocks at Rosario Beach, where there was a Samish longhouse many centuries ago. A handsome young man emerged from the sea and flirted with her. She was very shy, but he returned day after day, until she finally agreed to introduce him to her parents. When he came to visit the longhouse, he explained that his people were very wealthy, and had a big feast hall in the sea. They would make excellent relatives. And Kwa’ulut could comehome each year to see her family. The marriage was arranged, and the young couple was feasted before they returned to the sea. Each summer, Kwa’ulut came home to visit. The first year, her mother noticed a few fish scales on her legs. The next year, she had some little fins sprouting on her arms. When Kwa’ulut came home the third year, she had grown kelp for hair. The fourth year, Kwa’ulut looked exactly like a salmon, because that is exactly what she was. Kwa’ulut had married into a house of salmon people, and every year she came back with all of her children to feast in the house of her human relatives.

This is the Samish story behind the ‘first salmon’ ceremony. It also tells us that Samish people have the right to harvest and eat salmon because they are relatives. With the right to sustain ourselves from our salmon relatives, comes the responsibility to treat them with the same measure of respect that we owe our human kin: to feed them, as they feed us, and to protect them from abuse or injustice. If we allow the salmon to be abused, they will behave just like human relatives and no longer come to our house. This feeling, this certainty, is also reflected in the fishing chant that opened my article. Salmon is not a mere animal, but an elder member of our family with authority and wisdom. We must be humble and appreciative. If we are cruel and arrogant, our elder will not come.

Today, the Salish Sea is divided by an international border and ‘managed’ by the bureaucrats of two nation-states under two systems of law. The international border falls precisely along the mainmigration route for sockeye salmon and killer whales, where the need for a high level of consistent protection is greatest. The border makes no ecological sense. It also makes no cultural sense. It divides the Coast Salish continuum, divorcing the people from the ecosystem their culture built. It also divides non-aboriginal people in the Salish Sea, who think and feel more alike than their respective national governments. The lesson of Coast Salish history for 21st Century inhabitants of the Salish Sea is clear if we hope to survive another 2,500 years: one ecosystem, one family.

© Russel Barsh is director of the Samish Indian Nation’s Center for the Study of Coast Salish Environments, which is an endorser of Orca Pass. He studied human ecology and law at Harvard, taught for many years at the University of Washington, and was science adviser to the Indigenous Peoples Commission at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. For more information: rbarsh@samishtribe.nsn.us. Samish Indian Nation: www.samishtribe.nsn.us. Photos from Russel Barsh. Anchor stones like this are still found throughout the archipelago, sometimes in heaps where reef net gears were anchored for centuries (courtesy Orcas Island Historical Society Museum).

Editor’s Note: The logo of the Orca Pass project, designed by artist Jim Morris, incorporates a traditional and a modern whale in a spiralling dance—reflecting the ongoing cultural and natural relationship in the area.