This is a time when the bountiful crops of the year (including the sweet camas bulbs and clams) have been gathered from choice, often family owned sites, and are waiting to be properly prepared for winter.

The fall harvests for shellfish and chum salmon have already begun. Though before turning attention wholly to this work, the land will be fired to cleanse and clear it for winter’s sleep.

The broad scale fires are purposely lit near the water and allowed to burn toward the hills. The flames move rapidly consuming only the driest and finest of fuels, dancing in eddies behind oaks and crackling through the open, wind-swept prairies. The blackened earth captures the sun’s rays during the day and keeps the soil warm. Together with the fall rains, the underground world of roots, bulbs, and seeds begin to reallocate their reserves and renew their structures. The earth is reclaiming the impacts of intensive human efforts. [continue]

Along a spit of sand on Sidney Island, archeologists are racing rising tides and the wear of the modern world to peer into the lives of Coast Salish people who built their homes there 1,500 years before the time of Socrates.

Late Wednesday morning, Erin Gregg shaved fine layers of black and tan soil from a square hole in the beach. The fourth-year University of Victoria student sat under a baking sun, her eyes fixed on the surface of the finger-length-deep excavation.

It took more than a day’s work to get this deep, to uncover what looks like a millenniums-old hearth. The painstaking work moves by millimetres to protect each ancient detail. (…)

What the team knows so far is that radio imaging has turned up the rectangular imprint of at least five longhouses that were built partially into the ground to stave off drafts for the 100 to 150 people they housed in this winter village. [continue]

Link found at Northwest Coast Archaeology, which is one of my very favourite blogs.

The Snuneymuxw First Nation hopes to conduct aerial surveys that could provide more insight on ancient clam gardens that have been uncovered in the region.

First Nations people all along the coast used these structures to harvest seafood more efficiently. These long mounds of rocks may not seem like much to the layman, but for ancient aboriginals, they were a vital resource in gathering food. The garden are fenced in with rings of rocks around the tide line to increase the intertidal area. This prevents sand from eroding away and creates a garden for such seafood to flourish.

Clam gardens on Gabriola Island near Gabriola Passage were discovered about a month ago, while other clam gardens were previously found in the Dodd Narrows area. However, archeologists suspect that there are far more along the Nanaimo coastline that haven’t been documented. [continue]

Twine made from the bark of nettle stems was used extensively in the manufacture of items requiring strength through a firm, sturdy warp strand. Dried nettles were damped to make the bark sufficiently flexible, while the pith of the stem remained dry and brittle. By splitting the stem and rubbing it over a blunt edge, the bark would separate from the pith. This bark was then beaten and combed, or carded into a soft tissue which could be spun with the use of a spindle similar to the spinning of wool. Twine produced from nettle fiber was of great strength and utilized in the making of nets and fishing line, as well as for a warp in weaving.

Did you know the Salish weavers also made twine from milkweed fibre, and blankets from a mixture of milkweed fluff, dog hair, and wool from mountain goats? Such creative people, and I bet the objects they made from these materials were both beautiful and functional.

For Cheryl Bryce, the month of June has become a time to interact closely with her ancestral lands. She spends many of her early summer days kneeling on cool black soil, surrounded by a picturesque carpet of wildflowers and shaded under a canopy of craggy Garry oak branches.

She uses her hands to pull the round bulb from the native purple lily and turns the soil over itself, replanting the loosened seeds for the following year’s harvest. The edible bulb of a camas plant resembles an onion but tastes like a potato, becoming sweeter as it cooks slowly in a traditional earth oven or over a modern stove.

As lands manager for the Songhees First Nations, an urban band in British Columbia, Bryce is encouraging a revitalization of traditional food-gathering practices and a return to relating more closely with the landscape. [continue]

(The Songhees First Nation are in the Victoria area, so not too far from Gabriola.)

Garry Oak meadows were once common throughout southeastern Vancouver Island. They take the form of open stands of stately gnarled oak trees, often carpeted with billowing drifts of wildflowers. This natural parkland enthralled European colonists, and in part led Sir James Douglas to choose Victoria Harbour as the main port for the new city, in 1843. What the Europeans may not have understood is that many of these meadows were not altogether natural. Rather, the Vancouver Island Coast Salish people deliberately managed the land and periodically used prescribed burning to keep the meadows clear of underbrush, so as to cultivate Camas. This beautiful blue wildflower grows from bulbs that provided a most important food staple rich in carbohydrates. Bulbs were cooked in large steaming pits and eaten soon after for feasts, or dried for trade or storage.

Prescribed fire was necessary to prevent the encroachment of shrubs and other large trees, in areas with deep soil. However, in sites with shallow soil, such as among rocky outcroppings, Garry Oak meadows can dominate without human assistance. Natural forest fires were also an important part of these ecosystems, as oak trees are resistant to damage by fire and the herbaceous plants quickly re-sprout in burned areas. [continue]

The area comprising the lower mainland of British Columbia, Washington State and Oregon, and Vancouver Island, along with the islands of what is now called the Salish Sea, is one of the most linguistically diverse places on our planet. The various reasons for this might be discussed at another time, but for now consider the apparent conjunction of human ethnic and linguistic diversity with natural biodiversity. Compare the great diversity of animal and plant life—both on the land and in the sea—in this coastal rainforest region with the corresponding concentration of different native peoples and languages, and contrast with the relatively sparse distribution of both across the great prairies. This is dramatically illustrated in this map, which shows the distribution of native peoples in Canada, c.1823, categorised by linguistic family.

The Coast Salish peoples who live around the Salish Sea, and in-land from it, occupy a geographic region that straddles today’s international border. Coast Salish is primarily a linguistic identification, and the native languages of this region form a subgroup of Salishan (exceptionally, the Nuxalk people of Bella Coola are geographically and ethnographically Coast Salish but speak a distinct Salishan language closer to Interior Salish). There are more than fifty Coast Salish tribes or nations. Their languages are all related but in various ways distinct and not mutually intelligible.

The Snuneymuxw First Nation are reckoned to have lived along the east coast of central Vancouver Island for about five thousand years, and are now concentrated around the Nanaimo area, including a small reserve on Gabriola, near Degnen Bay. Their native language is Hul’q’umín’um’ (sometimes written Hul’q’umi’num’ or Hul’qumi’num), part of a language group with Halq’eméylem, spoken on the mainland in the upper reaches of the Fraser River near Harrison Lake, and Hǝn̓q̓ǝmin̓ǝm̓ (or Hun’qumi’num’), spoken around the mouth of the Fraser. Together, these dialects are sometimes known by the anglicised name Halkomelem. Like thousands of minority languages around the world, Halkomelem is considered close to extinction.

When I think about the extinction of languages, I’m reminded of two things. One is a statement by Rush Rhees, the Welsh philosopher and student of Wittgenstein, who wrote in his book Without Answers (1969), ‘We speak as others have spoken before us. And a sense of language is also a feeling for ways of living that have meant something.’

The other is a poem by John Burnside about the death of Tevfik Esenç, ‘the last man to speak Ubykh’, and the linguist Ole Stig Andersen who arrived just a few hours too late to record this lonely speaker’s words.

Traditional means of passing culture and language from one generation to the next tend to break down under the financial and social pressures of dominant regional cultures, modern media and imposed educational programmes. The residential school programme had a particularly devastating effect on the aboriginal languages of Canada. ‘Ways of living’ that have been sufficient to transmit and preserve language and literature in an oral medium over thousands of years are found to be fragile and capable of falling apart within just a couple of generations. In their place, writing provides one of the few means to safeguard the living legacy of language or, at least, to record how a particular group of people have thought about themselves and the world they inhabit. Along with sound recordings, writing is a key tool of language preservation and revitalisation.

Prior to European contact, none of the aboriginal languages of Canada were written, so all the alphabets and other writing systems now in use were later introductions, many devised by missionaries or by linguists. The history of some of these writing systems is fascinating and, despite in various ways being ‘imposed’ on the languages, they have often been wholeheartedly embraced by the speakers and become a distinctive aspect of their culture. The writing of aboriginal languages tends to be very systematic, with much more regular correspondence of symbols to sounds than has evolved in the long and messy history of written English. Some aboriginal writing systems, notably those developed in the 19th Century for Ojibwe, Cree and Inuktitut, represent complete syllables with individual signs, while others are alphabets, representing individual phonemes with letters or combinations of letters. The writing of Hul’q’umín’um’ is alphabetic, and is based on an extension of the Roman alphabet used to write English and other western and central European languages.

The image below shows the opening of passage from ‘Seagull steals the sun’, a Hul’q’umín’um’ story. This is set in typeface called Huronia, a pan-Canadian aboriginal font designed by my colleague Ross Mills.

Compared to many aboriginal orthographies, the writing of Hul’q’umín’um’ is typographically simple, using combinations of letters (digraphs, trigraphs, etc.) to indicate distinct sounds rather than diacritic letters. Contrast an example of a much more complex sign system, this piece of text in Hǝn̓q̓ǝmin̓ǝm̓.

A language is considered dead if it has no native speakers; that is, if people are not learning the language as their mother tongue. Some dead languages actually have quite large numbers of ‘users’, and may even be official languages in some capacities—the use of Latin in the Roman Catholic Church is an obvious example—, but none of those users have learned the dead language as their native tongue, as infants and young children. I would say that a language is truly extinct if it lacks even the social prestige, cultural significance or institutional recognition to support continuous study and the creation of new utterances, new statements in that language about those ‘ways of living that have meant something’. This is the fate of many of the world’s languages, known only, if at all, to a handful of specialised linguists who have made a study of them, and who may be more interested in the structural characteristics of languages—their phonology, morphology, syntax—than what they have to report of the human beings who once spoke them.

Can a language be rescued from the brink of extinction? Can a language be brought back from the dead? Demonstrably, yes. The most famous case of a dead language being resurrected is probably that of Hebrew: a long dead language of religion and study being brought back to life as one of the official and everyday languages of a modern state. In the UK, efforts are underway to revive Cornish, a Celtic language only recently dead and whose local cultural importance was suddenly felt by its absence. I grew up in south Wales, and have seen on visits over the past thirty years, how a long neglected language has gained rather than lost speakers through education programmes, bilingual sign laws, and other regional government action.

I don’t know enough about the circumstances of Hul’q’umín’um’ language use among the Snuneymuxw First Nation to comment on its likely future, whether it will become extinct with the death of its last, older native speakers, or will see a resurgence among younger people. In 2000, it was estimated that fewer than a dozen speakers of Halkomelem may be fluent, yet it remains culturally important as a language of ceremony. Like many other aboriginal groups around the world, the Snuneymuxw are making an effort to encourage use of their native language, including using the Internet to create online language courses, dictionaries and other tools. In these efforts, they are assisted by linguists and anthropoligists at local universities.

Links

Gulf of Georgia language map
Map showing distribution of aboriginal languages in the northern part of the Salish Sea; language names presented in native orthographies.

Halkomelem language
Better than average Wikipedia page about the language, including basic discussion of aspects of morphology, syntax, etc.

Hul’q’umi’num’—Hǝn̓q̓ǝmin̓ǝm̓—Halq’eméylem (Halkomelem)
Good introduction to Halkomelem orthographies, from the excellent Language Geek website.

Halkomelem
Basic introduction to Halkomelem language and dialects from the UBC Language Education Research Centre.

Visual dictionaries
Interactive visual introduction to some basic Hul’q’umín’um’ vocabulary. [Snuneymuxw First Nation website.]

Introduction to Hul’q’umi’num’
Beginner language learning materials, arranged in nine lessons with vocabulary and grammar.

Hul’qumi’num language revitalisation
Paper recording ‘themes, thoughts, and theories on strategic planning’ for language revitalisation. [University of Victoria and Hul'qumi'num Treaty Group.]

Bibliography of materials on the Halkomelem language
General bibliography of Halkomelem lniguistics.

Halkomelem links and references
Bibliographical information on books and journal articles relating to Halkomelem, usefully categorised by dialect and by subject.

Halkomelem educational materials
A bibliography of mostly print materials relating to Halkomelem vocabulary, phonic, etc.

Coast Salish bibliography
Extensive bibliography of Coast Salish language, culture, stories, etc.. Not organised by language or nation.

Almost everywhere along the British Columbia coast where herring are known to spawn — from Coast Tsimshian territory in the north to the Nuu-chah-nulth territory on the coast of Vancouver Island, hemlock boughs, or sometimes entire trees, are immersed in the waters of inlets and river estuaries, or tied onto floating logs anchored close to the shore, to collect herring spawn, which was and still is a valued food. The herring spawning season is usually around April. Certain marine algae, such as giant kelp, eelgrass, and the boughs of some other evergreen trees, were also employed to collect the spawn, but hemlock was considered one of the best matrials because it has flexible, easily handled boughs and the needles impart a mild, pleasantly resinous flavour to the spawn. They are not actully eaten with the spawn, but the spawn was often cooked still attached to the needles and these were then removed by the people eating it. The spawn was also dried while attached to the boughs; today it is perserved by drying, salting, or freezing.

That’s from Traditional plant foods of Canadian indigenous peoples: nutrition, botany and use, by Harriet V. Kuhnlein and Nancy J. Turner.

One recent M.A. thesis I was really looking forward to reading is by Amanda Adams entitled Visions cast on stone : a stylistic analysis of the petroglyphs of Gabriola Island, B.C., from UBC Anthropology 2003, and available for free download here.

I was particularly interested to read the instructions she received on proper deportment when visiting the rock art:

Sites were visited in a manner and with a personal code of conduct adhering to Snuneymuxw wishes. Petroglyph sites were not visited at either dawn or dusk. A respectful demeanor was expected as was an open heart and mind (Bill Seward, Snuneymuxw elder, personal communication 2002). I was asked to give my full attention to the petroglyphs and their sacredness, not allowing daily distractions to interfere with my concentration on the ancient imagery. These expectations were met to the best of my ability. (18-19)

While many archaeologists are under the impression that there is little to no ethnographic information about petroglyphs, I have long felt that more likely such knowledge is private or highly privileged and not readily shareable. In this self-serving sense, it was gratifying to see that Adams was able to record some such information: [continue]

I’ll try to post more petroglyph photos soon, as well as blog entries for all the things I’ve been meaning to tell you or ask you.

It looks like a cheery dog to me, and I know that the Snuneymuxw did keep dogs… so?

On the other hand, it’s not like I know much about Snuneymuxw rock art, so somebody else is bound to have a better answer.

Among First Nations on southern Vancouver Island and throughout the U.S. Pacific Northwest, women traditionally cared for the camas fields. Harvested bulbs were steamed in pits between layers of plants like salal, skunk cabbage and ferns. The bulbs could also be dried, pounded into flour and mixed with other foods, such as black tree lichen.

The longer you cook it, the better it is and the sweeter it gets, explains Sinclair Philip of the Sooke Harbour House, where camas bulbs sometimes feature on the menu. Camas bulbs, like onions, contain inulin fibres, so that they sweeten with cooking but have a minimal impact on blood sugar levels. Pit cooking adds a smoked flavour, and is especially good if you add salal and fern. No matter what you do in the kitchen, you’ll never achieve the same results as with pit cooking.

Camas are found only in the extreme coastal southwest of the province and southern Columbia Valley. There are two varieties, each with pale to dark blue, star-shaped flowers: common camas (Camassia quamash), and the great camas (Camassia Leichtlinii), which is a deep-soil variety. Then there is the meadow death-camas, a lethally poisonous plant that is easy to tell from the others when in bloom — it has white, clustered flowers — but has bulbs virtually identical to those of edible camas. Harvesting is recommended only when the plants are in flower. [continue]

White said Dec. 23 marks the 155th anniversary of the Snuneymuxw signing the Douglas Treaty, but many of the agreements, including guarantees of native governance rights and aboriginal title to lands, have never been adhered to, despite decades of negotiations.

The Snuneymuxw, the province and Ottawa have been unsuccessfully negotiating a final treaty for the band for years, with no substantial talks since 2003.

It’s important for the Crown and all Canadians to understand that the Snuneymuxw and all First Nations have real rights and they need to be recognized, White said from his new Nanaimo office on Wednesday.

We seem to be in a constant battle with the government and nothing meaningful has yet to develop, and that has led to deep frustrations among many First Nations, including the Snuneymuxw. [continue]

Rose hips are useful as food, too. They’re very high in vitamin C, and can be used in all kinds of recipes.

Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples notes that the Vancouver Island Salish ate the outer rind of rose hips. Edible and Medicinal Plants of Canada points out that

The hips remain on the branches throughout winter, so they are available when most other fruits are gone. Hips can be eaten fresh or dried or used in tea, jam, jelly, syrup, and wine.

Almost every source I consulted has a warning about the seeds in the middle of rose hips. From Edible and Medicinal Plants of Canada:

The dry inner seeds (achenes) are not palatable, and their silver-like hairs can irritate the digestive tract and cause itchy bum. All members of the Rosa genus have cyanide-like compounds in their seeds that can be destroyed by drying or cooking.

Well. That’s good to know.

More about rose hips

• Rose hip – Wikipedia
• Rose-hip ‘remedy’ for arthritis – BBC
• Rosehip ‘better than glucosamine’ for osteoarthritis – Telegraph
• Antioxidant and antimicrobial activities of native Rosa sp. from British Columbia, Canada – informahealthcare.com

I’m glad we have all those petroglyph reproductions at the Gabriola Museum, but it’s way more fun to come across a real petroglyph in the middle of the forest somewhere.

Pre-contact West Coast aboriginal peoples are commonly categorized in anthropological literature as hunter-gatherers. Author, coastal traveller and historical researcher Judith Williams proposes that they cultivated butter clams in a walled sea gardens that may be unique in the world.

Wow. (Were there clam gardens on Gabriola beaches?)

Here’s more from the Tyee: BC’s Garden of Eden.

Williams tells the story as a quest for something hidden in plain sight. While doing research for another project in the early 1990s, she’d learned about rock walls erected in Waiatt Bay on Quadra Island. Her sources were modern Sliammon who still harvest the butter clams grown inside those walls.

Having seen the walls, Williams began a years-long investigation. Similar walls can be found in bays and coves all over the central coast — more than 350 clam gardens in the Broughton Archipelago alone. Many are still in use, and kept in repair. Others simply mark long-abandoned village sites.

Williams tried to interest the archeologists at the B.C. Heritage Conservation Department. They told her no evidence existed for an aboriginal mariculture; the Waiatt Bay wall didn’t exist — and if it did, it was a salmon trap.

Persisting, Williams explored the central coast and found supporters as well as more walls. People who live on the central coast know about the clam gardens. [continue]

Related Links

• The Clam Gardens of the Broughton Archipelago: a case for pre-contact, large-scale mariculture in Queen Charlotte Strait – Geological Survey of Canada
• Native ingenuity: first nations groups knew not only how to harvest but also how to plant the sea – thefreelibrary.com
• A prehistoric clam garden – ChrisCorrigan.com