6:30 p.m. Snuneymuxw Chief Doug White will be discussing the Douglas Treaty of 1854 at the Nanaimo Harbourfront Library, 90 Commercial St. Prior to his discussion the Snuneymuxw dancers will perform in Diana Krall Square and then dance up to the mezzanine level of the library to start off the discussion. For information, call Quinn Fletcher 250-753-1154.

Source: this list of upcoming events in the Nanaimo Daily News.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Snuneymuxw First Nation chief Doug White fears for the First Nations and other people along B.C.’s coast if the proposed Enbridge Gateway pipeline proceeds.(…)

White said the possibility of a dramatic increase of an activity in the area that could have devastating environmental consequences is a serious concern for everyone connected to the coast, including the Snuneymuxw.[continue]

Is there anybody who lives on the coast who isn’t worried about this? I haven’t met anybody on Gabriola who thinks the pipeline is a great idea, but maybe I just don’t get out enough.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Researchers from the University of York have produced the first clear evidence that textiles made by the indigenous population of the Pacific coast of North America contained dog hair.

In recent years, scientists have hotly debated whether textiles such as blankets and robes made by the skilful Coast Salish weavers before contact with Europeans were made of dog hair as oral histories have claimed.

Coast Salish oral tradition refers to a special dog which was bred locally until the mid 19th century for its woolly hair or fleece for use in the textile industry.

Yes, the little wooly dog. I blogged about Snuneymuxw dogs a couple of years ago.

Using highly sensitive equipment at the University’s Centre for Excellence in Mass Spectrometry, York researchers from BioArCh (Departments of Biology, Archaeology and Chemistry) analysed the protein composition of 11 textiles in different locations, representing 25 samples in total.

The samples were taken from artefacts in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and National Museum of the American Indian collections and included blankets, a sash and a robe of fur. Some of the textiles were collected during the American expeditions to the West Coast, including the Lewis and Clark (1803-1806) and Wilkes (1838-1842) expeditions. The samples dated mainly from early to mid 19th century.

Researchers found evidence of dog hair in the robe of fur and six of the woven textiles, primarily in a blend with goat hair.

However, the results published in the journal Antiquity, show there is no real proof of a preference for dog hair in high status fabrics and the researchers did not find any textiles made entirely of dog hair. Instead, researchers conclude that dog hair appears to have been used to supplement mountain goat hair, possibly as a bulking material. [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

A group of geocachers found more than they were searching for on the weekend.

Nanaimo RCMP confirmed Monday that a group of people on an afternoon geocaching foray discovered what appears to be a First Nation burial site. [continue]

There are (at least) several burial sites on Gabriola; I wonder how similar the Nanaimo one is to the ones here.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

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.

[The article quoted above is no longer available on the newspaper's website.]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

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.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

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.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Well, Gabriola, where could this be? The image label says near Descanso Bay. I’d say Malaspina Galleries, but I don’t think there is any rock art there. Was there, once? Or might this depict a different place along the Gabriola shore – somewhere near Descanso? Does anything come to mind as a likely location? Or is it just that the rock art shown in the engraving used to be at the Malaspina Galleries, but has faded away over the last 200 years?

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

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.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

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]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

I must comment on the destructive practice of rubbing, not so much through cloth but the scraping of the lines to remove weathering patina and lichen in order to take clearer photographs. This is a very unfortunate practice which hastens the disintegration of the rock art. [continue]

Well, that’s good to know.

In another post, Petroglyphs are not lifestyle amenities, the writer has some strong things to say about the Legends of Spirit Rock development:

This is so crass I can’t even begin to express it. Desecrating one of the most significant rock art sites in the Province does not allow you to claim there is significant spiritual, healing energy of the First Nations history. Have you no shame, Legends at Spirit Rock developers? [read the whole post, and comments]

I like bloggers who express strong views (and righteous anger!) when they judge that to be appropriate. What a refreshing read.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

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

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

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.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

You know that BC First Nations people used cedar for all sort of things: canoes, housing, masks, clothing, blankets, baskets, totem poles, and probably lots of other purposes as well. The Snuneymuxw (Nanaimo Coast Salish) on Gabriola were no exception. Sometimes they took an entire cedar tree, but other times they just took part of a cedar tree. The evidence of their cedar-harvesting remains in our forests, and you can see it on Gabriola once you know what to look for.

Have you ever come across a cedar tree that’s mostly normal, except that the bark is missing on one section of the tree? Or maybe it looks like there’s a bark-free gouge running way up the tree. You could be looking at a tree that the Snuneymuxw used: they harvested bark from that tree, and now you’re seeing the scar.

These trees are called culturally modified trees, and they’re used by archaeologists to show that an area was inhabited by First Nations people during a certain time frame. The tree can be dated (tree rings, remember?) so it’s possible to tell when the bark was taken, and then see the pattern of growth after that. (This article says that culturally modified trees on the BC coast have been dated back to the year 1137 AD.)

Since I learned about this topic, I have a hard time getting anywhere on this island. I want to walk around every tall cedar I see to check its bark. This means I make tons of side-trips and I’m late for lunch, but I’ve found dozens and dozens of these culturally modified trees. They’re everywhere!

Here are some fascinating diagrams showing what happens to culturally modified trees over time. If you’re interested in culturally modified cedars, read this .pdf file from the David Suzuki Foundation: Sacred Cedar: The Cultural and Archaeological Significance of Culturally Modified Trees. It’s amazing.

Related

• Culturally modified trees of British Columbia: version 2.0 – gov.bc.ca
• A Reconnaisance of Satchie Creek’s Hesquiaht Culturally Modified Trees (pdf) – hooksumschool.com

(Thanks to the Gabriola Museum for telling me about culturally modified trees.)

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

The Salish used the same technique to spin all fibres. While spinning the spindle whorl is pointed upwards and the fibres are drawn down onto it. As the spindle rotates, it creates tension and a twist in the fibres, producing yarn. When the spindle is full, yarn is removed from the spindle and wound into a ball. Dog wool, nettles and mountain goat wool were the most common fibres. The disk, or whorl, was often made of a heaveier hardwood and actedas aa flyweel, smoothing the rotation of the spindle. A design was often incised into both surfaces.

Did you notice that bit about the nettles? I’m going to see what I can make out of nettle fibres this spring.

See also: Snuneymuxw dogs

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Nick Doe wants to record as much information as he can about the remaining petrogylphs on Gabriola Island.

"We’ve already lost some," said the amateur archeologist, the only person now actively researching the ancient sites. "In 10 years they will be quite depleted and by 20 there will be very few left."

A proper survey of the roughly 120 petroglyphs on the island needs to be completed, he said, but little work has been done by professional archeologists on this Island in the last 20 years. And these artifacts won’t wait around forever. In the 1980s, people peeled away thick cushions of moss shielding the relics from the elements, and they have been steadily eroding every since.

"It’s a little bit overwhelming for me. What really needs to be done in my mind is to record these things properly," said the Gabriola resident, a retired engineer. "That’s a lot of work . . . it’s just me and my dog."

He doesn’t think that the general public’s interest in archeology is strong enough to ensure the artifacts are properly recorded before they disappear.

"I’ve been talking about this for a while, but I haven’t been able to arouse any particular reaction to it," he said. "Personally, I think it’s a tragedy because they haven’t been very well documented. We’re talking about the history of the province." [continue].

Nick’s comments are on page 2 of the article.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

The Snuneymuxw had a small breed of dog whose fur was spun and woven into fabric. Through trade, they also aquired wool from mountain goats and later, sheep. As with spinners and weavers everywhere, the wool was cleaned and carded to remove debris and to separate the wool into strands. It was then woven, using the spindle whorl, into thread.

I had no idea! I came home wondering about those dogs: where’d they come from, and what happened to them? What did they look like?

(One of the illustrations in the exhibit includes a dog, and it’s that dog you see here. I’ve got to go back to the museum to see where the illustration comes from; I want to know if the representation of the dog is likely to be accurate, or if it’s based on what somebody imagined.)

So I’ve been musing about these dogs, and wondering where I might find out about them. Then today, the Tyee published an article about the canine history of Nanaimo, which includes this:

It was on some of these little islands that the Coast Salish women protected and tended the "little wooly dog," the only breed indigenous to this part of the world, now extinct. For a little over five decades, these dogs flit through the historical record, then are gone. First noted by George Vancouver at Restoration Point in May of 1792, and described in the same year by a crewman of the Spanish Sutil-Mexicana expedition then anchored off Gabriola Island (near Nanaimo):

The Indians also offered new blankets which we afterward concluded were of dog’s hair, partly because when the woven hair was compared with that of those animals there was no apparent difference, and partly from the great number of dogs they keep in those villages, most of them being shorn. These animals are of moderate size, resembling those of English breed, with very thick coats, and usually white: among other things they differ from those of Europe in their manner of barking, which is simply a miserable howl.

The dogs were kept on islands to prevent them from breeding with or being harmed by the bigger, meaner hunting dogs; they were fed and watered by boats dispatched daily, and shorn of their thick, water-resistant coats twice a year. The resulting cloth, often made by interweaving with cedar, was an important source of clothing and blankets, and dog ownership was a measure of social status among Salish women. [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

The history of the Snuneymuxw First Nation will come alive this weekend during the newest exhibit opening at the Nanaimo District Museum.

The exhibit focuses on the traditional lifestyles of the Snuneymuxw people over the last 1,500 years.

It’s an entirely new exhibit and it’s looking at the Snuneymuxw from pre-contact right through to the present day, said David Hill-Turner, museum curator.

It’s telling a more complete story — there’s more interpretation, things have been brought down so people can see easily and we’re going to have some hands-on components to the exhibit as well.

Museum staff and representatives from the Snuneymuxw worked on the exhibit for several months, though it was in the planning stage for more than a year.

[Sorry, full article no longer available on the newspaper's website.]

I’ve never been to the Nanaimo Museum, but this’ll get me there. Now that the museum has moved, they’re just a short walk from the Quinsam’s dock in Nanaimo Harbour.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)