Coast Salish Essays

Ethnography and culture of the Coast Salish Indians.

The Coast Salish peoples of western Washington and British Columbia have never been subjected to the same concerted anthropological scrutiny as have their Northwest Coast counterparts. For a long time they were viewed simply as a subset of the Northwest Coast culture area, and because they underwent assimilative pressures early on it was thought that little of their culture remained to be preserved. In the early 1950s, however, anthropologist Wayne Suttles was among the first to publish pioneering and sustained research about the Coast Salish, contending that they were worthy of study in their own right. Be of Good Mind is a necessary follow-up to Suttles’ seminal work. This is the first book-length effort to incorporate Aboriginal perspectives directly. It offers a broad interdisciplinary approach, bringing together the views of Aboriginal leaders, anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and linguists. Be of Good Mind reveals how Coast Salish lives and identities have been reshaped by two colonizing nations and by networks of kinfolk, spiritual practices, and ways of understanding landscape. Contributors point to the continual transformation of Coast Salish identities through litigation and language revitalization and to community efforts to reclaim long-held cultural connections with the environment. Equally important is the development of detailed local and regional history and archaeology. Seamlessly edited by Bruce Granville Miller, this collection teases apart the received wisdom of earlier studies and brings the scholarship on the Coast Salish up to date. Readers interested in First Nations history and contemporary issues in Canada and Aboriginal-academic relations will find this essential reading, as will scholars interested in ethnographic methods and interdisciplinary inquiry.

In this book, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, and Aboriginal leaders focus on how Coast Salish lives and identities have been influenced by the two colonizing nations (Canada and the US) and by shifting Aboriginal circumstances. Contributors point to the continual reshaping of Coast Salish identities and our understandings of them through litigation and language revitalization, as well as community efforts to reclaim their connections with the environment. They point to significant continuity of networks of kinfolk, spiritual practices, and understandings of landscape. This is the first book-length effort to directly incorporate Aboriginal perspectives and a broad interdisciplinary approach to research about the Coast Salish.

An Indigenous artist blends the aesthetics of punk rock with the traditional spiritual practices of the women in her lineage in this bold, contemporary journey to reclaim her heritage and unleash her power and voice while searching for a permanent home Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe has always longed for a sense of home. When she was a child, her family moved around frequently, often staying in barely habitable church attics and trailers, dangerous places for young Sasha. With little more to guide her than a passion for the thriving punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and a desire to live up to the responsibility of being the namesake of her beloved great-grandmother—a linguist who helped preserve her Indigenous language of Lushootseed—Sasha throws herself headlong into the world, determined to build a better future for herself and her people. Set against a backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Coast Salish ancestral land and imbued with the universal spirit of punk, Red Paint is ultimately a story of the ways we learn to find our true selves while fighting for our right to claim a place of our own. Examining what it means to be vulnerable in love and in art, Sasha offers up an unblinking reckoning with personal traumas amplified by the collective historical traumas of colonialism and genocide that continue to haunt native peoples. Red Paint is an intersectional autobiography of lineage, resilience, and, above all, the ability to heal.

In these essays Bruce Granville Miller addresses critical issues facing contemporary Coast Salish people and communities. Building on his own fieldwork, on the salvage ethnography of an earlier generation, and the work of present-day anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Miller describes current-day tribes and bands as composed of family corporate groups and details their role in the transformations of gender and political systems. Miller examines tribal codes and courts, historical concepts and practices of justice, and the relations between the mainstream populations of British Columbia and Washington and the Coast Salish themselves, including the circumstances of non-recognized tribes among the Coast Salish and world wide, the efforts to use oral traditions and the language of sacredness in court, and in media reporting. Engaging theories of borderlands and globalization, Miller writes that studies of Coast Salish are constrained by the international border as are the people themselves, especially post-9/11.

A gravestone, a mention in local archives, stories still handed down around Oyster Bay: the outline of a woman begins to emerge and with her the world she inhabited, so rich in tradition and shaken by violent change. Katie Kettle Gale was born into a Salish community in Puget Sound in the 1850s, just as settlers were migrating into what would become Washington State. With her people forced out of their traditional hunting and fishing grounds into ill-provisioned island camps and reservations, Katie Gale sought her fortune in Oyster Bay. In that early outpost of multiculturalism--where Native Americans and immigrants from the eastern United States, Europe, and Asia vied for economic, social, political, and legal power--a woman like Gale could make her way. As LLyn De Danaan mines the historical record, we begin to see Gale, a strong-willed Native woman who cofounded a successful oyster business, then won the legal rights from her Euro-American husband, a man with whom she had raised children but who ultimately made her life unbearable. Steeped in sadness--with a lost home and a broken marriage, children dying in their teens, and tuberculosis claiming her at forty-three--Katie Gale's story is also one of remarkable pluck, a tale of hard work and ingenuity, gritty initiative and bad luck that is, ultimately, essentially American.

JONA Volume 50 Number 1 - Spring 2016 Tales from the River Bank: An In Situ Stone Bowl Found along the Shores of the Salish Sea on the Southern Northwest Coast of British Columbia - Rudy Reimer, Pierre Freile, Kenneth Fath, and John Clague Localized Rituals and Individual Spirit Powers: Discerning Regional Autonomy through Religious Practices in the Coast Salish Past - Bill Angelbeck Assessing the Nutritional Value of Freshwater Mussels on the Western Snake River - Jeremy W. Johnson and Mark G. Plew Snoqualmie Falls: The First Traditional Cultural Property in Washington State Listed in the National Register of Historic Places - Jay Miller with Kenneth Tollefson The Archaeology of Obsidian Occurrence in Stone Tool Manufacture and Use along Two Reaches of the Northern Mid-Columbia River, Washington - Sonja C. Kassa and Patrick T. McCutcheon The Right Tool for the Job: Screen Size and Sample Size in Site Detection - Bradley Bowden Alphonse Louis Pinart among the Natives of Alaska - Richard L. Bland