Northwest Coast cultural area (Native American history)

Category: Culture area

Language groups: Athapaskan, Chinook, Penutian, Salish

Tribes: Alsea, Bella Bella, Bella Coola, Chehalis, Chinook, Coast Salish, Coos, Eyak, Gitksan, Haida, Klamath, Klikitat, Kwakiutl, Nootka (Nuu-Chah-Nulth), Quileute, Quinault, Siuslaw, Takelma, Tillamook, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Umpqua

The Northwest Coast culture area extends from the modern regions of Yakutat Bay in southern Alaska south to Cape Mendocino in northern California. The temperate-zone rain-forest ecology and abundant resources contributed much to the diverse cultures which developed in the area.

Natural History

Until about thirteen thousand years ago, much of the Northwest Coast area was covered with the ice of the Pleistocene Ice Age. When the ice began to melt, new vistas opened for the spread of plant, animal, and human populations. The once-white land was covered with a blanket of verdure so lush that one can hardly imagine it today.

There has been considerable debate regarding when humans first entered the area. Estimates range from about twelve thousand years ago to about fifty-five hundred years ago. Probably most arrived overland on foot, but quite possibly some came by boat as well. By the time of the first contact with Europeans there were more than 100,000 people populating the Northwest Coast area.

After the glaciers retreated but before human populations filled the environmental niches, the lushness of the land increased. Vegetation spread, and the animals followed; then came humans. Probably they came from Siberia over the so-called Bering Strait land bridge (Beringia).

Cultural Geography

The diversity of physical types, languages, and cultures suggests multiple maritime origins. The coastal inhabitants appear unrelated to the Athapaskan stock said to have migrated overland from Eurasia, for example, and peoples north of the Columbia River are markedly different from those to the south. There is no consensus regarding the character of human penetration into the coastal ecosystem. Migratory groups appear to have settled gradually into their chosen coastal environments and developed into the cultures of the Northwest Coast culture area undisturbed over a period ranging from roughly twelve thousand to fifty-five hundred years ago.

Coastal cultures were originally river or river-mouth cultures, later beach cultures, and only finally (and only in part) seagoing cultures. They are said to have remained centered on the riverine and estuarine environments. Only some peoples took to sea. Among those who did not become maritime, such as the tribes south of the Columbia River, skills in canoe building were never as highly elaborated, nor was ceremonial life as complex, as among more northern groups.

Fishing and sea-mammal hunting were the most profitable activities. Harvesting maritime resources required tools that would allow hunters to use the available natural resources to the fullest extent, and most of the peoples of the coast developed such tools. Their lives moved with the rhythms of nature’s cycles. Their needs were supplied by the forest and the sea. The materials needed for the construction of most of their material culture was readily available and at hand, yet they still engaged in widespread trade with other groups.

They used the moderate climate and wealth of resources well, creating bone fishhooks, harpoons, nets, and other hunting and gathering tools. They developed elaborate communities with ceremonial practices and intricate arts of a highly symbolic and abstract nature centuries before European peoples had laid the foundations of Western civilization. Their material culture was remarkable in its beauty, quality, and diversity.

Population density was influenced directly by the forest and the sea. Moreover, in richly provided areas, efficient food gathering and preservation created a large surplus of time that shaped community life and influenced the development of art and ceremonialism. The terrain was rough, a fact which discouraged farming and animal domestication. The fact that local stone was hard to work prevented the development of more advanced tools, and the absence of significant agricultural surpluses influenced trade patterns.

Village Life, Travel, and Trade

The Northwest Coast cultures lived peaceably for the most part, except for occasional slave raids or skirmishes over territorial boundaries. This condition led to the development of cultures with roomy, solid houses, seaworthy boats and canoes, elaborate art, intricate rituals and ceremonies, and a generally affluent and highly complex society. People lived in kinship groups, or clan units that were small and autonomous while being highly integrated into the overall cultural pattern of their area. Thus the village and the community it contained were of great significance in the social structure.

Peoples to the north were seagoing peoples and had an abundant surplus of resources. Peoples south of the Columbia River depended on the bays and the rivers for most of their livelihood; they had no need to look further. The sophistication of coastal peoples suggests that they had reached dynamic equilibrium with their environment and learned to maintain it long before Europeans came.

People of the Northwest Coast area probably arrived with their maritime adaptations intact and fully developed. Migration routes were coastal as well as interior. People from the Athapaskan language family from Asia represent a later intrusion into a previously established cultural environment. There most likely were a number of basal cultures, or stable cultural traditions, in place by ten thousand years ago, and each culture was characterized by slightly different sets of tools and slightly different ways of life. Early cultural traditions gradually became more consistent throughout the area because of the increasing similarity of the postglacial environment.

Adaptation to Nature

Natural events such as glacial retreat, opening of new land and migration routes, changes in sea levels, stabilization of the climate, the consistent spread of plants and animals into available niches, and ongoing episodic volcanism throughout the inland ranges of the Cascades (from Northern California northward into Canada) had a profound influence on the evolving cultural systems along the coast. When sea levels changed, for example, there was a corresponding change in the technology of coastal cultures that gave rise to cultures more easily recognizable as the ancestors of those later subjected to ethnographic study. These cultures’ status systems were based on wealth and craft. The diffusion of technological innovations and new ideas, which led to even greater wealth among members of Northwest Coast culture area communities, was hastened by rapidly developing lines of trade; they were extensive and widespread, connecting distant groups.

Few generalizations regarding human origins are definitive. The Northwest Coast area has been habitable for more than forty to fifty thousand years and has probably been occupied continuously for the last seven thousand years at least. Stable cultural patterns probably have existed for more than five thousand years. The sources and processes of development of early culture on the coast are shrouded in mystery and myth. It is known that they had ceremonies, mythologies, rock art, and tooth pendants. Shamanic animism and the beliefs and practices associated with the power of guardian spirit entities were widespread. They smoked cultivated tobacco and used plants for healing rituals, in ceremonials associated with fertility, and in burials.

Status and Wealth

Wealth and status were interrelated in Northwest Coast cultures. Leaders had to be wealthy, a situation which led to ostentatious displays of rank and even to the ritualized destruction of wealth in the grand potlatches of the northern groups. Gift giving in these Native American cultures was a highly developed social practice. Some tribes, mostly to the south, appear to have practiced a less destructive form of potlatch in which wealth was displayed, then given away. In such cases the ceremony acted as a means of redistribution of wealth and an affirmation of status. Lineage granted hereditary family privileges and rights to those associated with certain family symbols, crests, or signs. The leadership system, then, was both a means of concentrating surpluses and of redistributing wealth among the general population.

Although the Northwest Coast is often regarded as a single culture area, this may or may not be the case. The great consistency among the material remains of early cultures in the forms of canoes, houses, clothing, basketry and weaving, carving in wood and stone, crafts, and technologies suggests a single areal culture. Yet it is clear that in spite of certain cultural consistencies (that may be attributed to the environment) coastal cultures were remarkably different from one another in important ways.

Some scholars therefore question the validity of the contention that this vast area is host to a single culture complex. The people from the Salish language family north of the Columbia River and the people from the Penutian language family to the south are not so alike as they might at first appear to be, and the ways of life of estuarine and riverine peoples are very different from those of seagoing maritime peoples.

Modern History

In the mid-1700’s the Eurasian and European immigrants arrived: the Russians in 1741, the Spaniards in 1774, and the English in 1778. With these intrusions the prehistoric period came to an end and modern history began.

The fur trade emerged as a dominant influence, quickly drawing the indigenous communities into a growing world economy and giving them rapid access to luxury goods and metal-based technology. Yet social disintegration (as sources and concentrations of wealth changed), erosion of community identities in the face of decimating diseases, forced relocation to reservations, cultural decline because of the transformation of belief systems brought about by missionary activity, and loss of languages were widespread.

Colonization resulted in the loss of indigenous control over the environment and the eventual extinction of many smaller communities. Until European contact, Northwest Coast cultures were supported by a subsistence base distributed throughout a uniform, temperate, rain-forest environment. They were hunter-gatherers of the most advanced sort. In an environment of great abundance, diverse cultures developed that were highly civilized and comparable with civilizations elsewhere based upon agriculture and animal domestication. Their self-sufficient technologies were remarkably advanced.

This culture area contains the oldest and most variable evidence for flaked stone technological traditions in North America. It also contains the largest number of Native American languages and language families. Evidence suggests that many populations have lived at their present locations for long periods of time. Technological and linguistic diversity diffused rapidly as the historical period began, however, making it difficult to determine exactly how long cultures have been in residence.

Bibliography

Borden, Charles E. Origins and Development of Early Northwest Coast Culture to About 3000 B.C. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975. This is a complete archaeological survey of the data on the area.

Drucker, Phillip. Indians of the Northwest Coast. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1963. The author notes in this comprehensive survey that there is little physical data on where the first Northwest people originated and how they got to the Northwest.

Fladmark, Knut R. “The Feasibility of the Northwest as a Migration Route for Early Man.” In Early Man from a Circum-Pacific Perspective, edited by Alan Bryan. University of Alberta Department of Anthropology Occasional Papers 1. Edmonton, Alberta: Archaeological Researchers International, 1978. Fladmark suggests there may be a variety of origins for the peoples who populated the area and suggests that the people of the Northwest are descendants of long-established Eskimo-Aleut culture area inhabitants.

Ruby, Robert H., and John A. Brown. A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. This book gives an excellent, updated listing of sources regarding the general history and current status of these tribes.

Waldman, Carl. Atlas of the North American Indian. New York: Facts on File, 1985. An excellent summary description, with maps, of the Northwest Coast culture area.