Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest: An Introduction

Essay by David M. Buerge

Near the northwest corner of the continent, the ice of the St. Elias Range leaves its high birthing fields and flows nearly
four miles down to the ocean shore. In this cloud-shrouded refuge, ice and sea continue to sculpt the land as they have for
untold thousands of years. The mark of their ancient work extends more than a thousand miles to the south: in the tangle of
fjords and islands of the Alaskan panhandle, in the wide turbulent ocean entrances, teeming with life, separating the Queen
Charlotte Islands, the Haida Gwaii, from the rain-lashed coast, and in the sinuous route of the Inside Passage between Vancouver
Island and the rugged mainland. This is the world of Raven, powerful and immense, resplendent in sunlight, but more often hidden
in mist and shadowed by gigantic forests.

To the south, where the Fraser River surges into the Gulf of Georgia, the land assumes a gentler cast. Strong rivers exit their
mountain fastnesses and wind through a lowland plain before emptying into the great, rich estuary known as Puget Sound. Here it only
seems to be as rainy as it is further north: the Olympic rampart catches most of the precipitation on its western slope, leaving the
country in its shadow relatively dry. Before they were cut away, the lowland forests were also immense, but intermingled with them were
open areas covered with ferns and grasses and spangled with wildflowers. This is the land of the Changer, the Star Child who descended
from the heavens to the fertile earth and, as Moon, married a daughter of the Salmon people, ensuring his human kin happiness and plenty
if they would respect the family of his bride.

Guarding the eastern margin of this country are the huge Cascade volcanoes, wrapped in snowy blankets the year around, beautiful
but ominous. And bounding it on the south is the great river of many names: Wauna, Nchi’wana, Oregon, the River of Kings, the River of
the West, the Columbia. It rises from the ice fields of the distant Rockies, and winds its way through high-shouldered mountains and
broad grasslands, accepting tributaries from pine-scented plateaus as it enters a gaunt volcanic waste carpeted with sagebrush. The
basalt cliffs hemming its powerful current here are broken by the empty mouths of canyons, dry coulees, gouged into the rock by terrible
floods that once scoured the land. Leaving the desert, the broad river cuts west through the Cascades in a spectacular gorge hung with
gossamer waterfalls before it reaches the sea with one last mighty show of turbulence. This is the world of Coyote, heroic in scale,
bearing the marks of chaos but offering abundant riches.

The people were here when the Pacific Northwest emerged from its icy womb and donned its forest raiment. Raven, Changer and Coyote,
the demiurges of the myth-time, tamed its monsters, made it habitable for humankind and taught people how to live well in it. For 500
generations they flourished until newcomers came and transformed it yet again. In this new dispensation much was lost; much was devalued,
but much was also hidden away in the hearts of the dispossessed. In time, part of this found its way into print, into the records of
those patient and interested enough to write down what the elders remembered. Artists and photographers preserved images of a changing
world.

To the surprise of many, the people, the Native Americans, survived the transformation, and in our own day they have reclaimed a place
of honor in the civic household, restored vitality to many of their ancient traditions and crafted new ones adapted to novel conditions.
Their voices insist upon a hearing and the cumulative wisdom of their long residence in this land offers rich insights to those willing to
listen. The challenge now is to find a way to make knowledge of the ancient traditions, the experience of change and the living reality
accessible and available.

In 1998, the University of Washington Libraries received a grant with the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Grant
Competition to create a digital collection of writing and photographs dealing with Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest that would
be available to students and researchers using the Internet. In collaboration with the Chaney Cowles Museum/Eastern Washington State
Historical Society in Spokane and the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle, the UW Libraries created a collection of some 2,300
photographs and 7,700 pages of text as well as metadata (captioning).

It is part of the Library of Congress American Memory site, the goal of which is to create digital collections of primary sources
relating to the history and cultural development of the United States. To adapt a technical term, it creates a meta-library that gives
users access to information scattered around the country simply by typing in a web site address and clicking an icon. Made available
are historical photographs recording aspects of native life along the Northwest Coast and on the Plateau east of the Cascade Mountains,
selected pages from the Annual Reports of the Indian Commissioner, selected articles from the University of Washington Publications in
Anthropology and the Pacific Northwest Quarterly, copies of several treaties with tribes in Washington and Oregon and a series of essays
authored specifically for the collection that describe and interpret selected topics.

The key word is selection. Although the number of items in the collection is considerable, they represent only a fraction of what
exists. For example, only certain groups: the Tlingit and Tsimshian of the Alaskan Panhandle, the Coast Salish of Puget Sound, the
Makah and Nootkan peoples of the outer coast, the Nez Perce and the Coeur d’Alene of the interior plateau, are highlighted. This
reflects the limitations of the collection itself as well as of the expertise of the scholars whose works appear in the project or
are cited. The photo collection also shows the effects of selective winnowing. It is a fact that early photographers thought certain
native groups were more attractive than others. As a result, the dramatic art of the Alaskan and British Columbian coasts is better
documented than the less spectacular forms common to the Puget Sound region, and scenes of picturesque encampments sold better than
more humble depictions of everyday life. The thoughtful observer will also notice that most of the photographs were taken before the
1930s. It is not because people stopped taking pictures or that native culture stopped developing after that period, but rather because
those selecting the photos were bound to respect copyright law whose protections extend back 75 years.

An intellectual selectivity also slants the collection’s writings. The theses requirements of social science graduate programs
insured that the history, anthropology and languages of native groups would be examined in detail. Economists rarely ventured into the
area, nor sociologists. Occasionally researchers took the opportunity to propose theories about how human society operated or where
they thought native people originated, and some of these ideas, rendered quaint by passing time and increased knowledge, appear in the
collection. Thus, native groups are generally described in the past tense, the object being to preserve or clarify the record of passing
cultures, a thoroughly laudable goal, but one that necessarily ignored more contemporary issues which often had political overtones. At
the other end of the spectrum, the reports of Indian commissioners are often highly political documents penned by individuals employed
to remove groups to reservations and Americanize them, forcibly if necessary. Their perceptions, while more immediate, reflect the
demands of federal bureaucracy and the prevailing national ethos.

The images of Native Americans made by outsiders often tell us as much about the people making them as they do their subjects. Even
photographs, which presume to capture reality, disclose by choice of subject and its portrayal a photographer’s preconceptions which must
inevitably influence our perception. Photographs, like the drawings and paintings of native people made by westerners since the first
encounter, may more usefully be considered art, and all representations must be examined closely to separate what may be considered real
from a pervasive bias.

It must also be understood that the collection with all its limitations seeks to describe the lifeways of a host of groups scattered
over the Northwest Coast and the Plateau, a vast area encompassing southeastern Alaska, coastal British Columbia, the State of Washington,
northern Oregon, northern Idaho and western Montana. The very terms Northwest Coast and Plateau exercise severe limitations on our
imaginations by inviting us to lump extraordinarily diverse groups into two broad categories. The similarities that enable ethnographers
to identity the Makahs of the outer coast, hunting grey whales out in the Pacific in splendid cedar dugouts, and Nisquallies at the head
of Puget Sound, who cultivated root crops and later raised horses on their broad prairie, as belonging to the Northwest Coast culture
area tend to obscure the differences between them. It has also led to the very mistaken practice of labeling all Northwest Coast groups
as “totem pole Indians’. The same indistinction blurs our view of those groups we identify as Plateau, among whom the Coeur d’Alene,
fishing their great blue lake in pine bark canoes, differed markedly from the Nez Perce riding to buffalo country on gaily caparisoned
apaloosas. Throughout this vast region each native group possessed a unique and enduring culture whose oral history and mythology reached
back to the beginning of time.

At best, 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text can serve only to introduce an extraordinary cultural mosaic of profound complexity
and antiquity. Indeed, that is the collection’s purpose, but it also provides important primary materials to students and scholars and
points them toward other sources of information. To facilitate this, several regional authors have written essays on topics that focus
on specific cultural groups and pertinent cross-cultural topics.

Alaskan Tlinigit and Tsimshian – Dr. Jay Miller of the University of Washington examines the Tlingit of the Alaskan panhandle and neighboring Tsimshian of the British
Columbia coast. The large number of photographs of these groups owes to the historical circumstance of the Yukon and Alaskan gold rushes
at the turn of the century that sent thousands of prospectors into their homelands and whetted an appetite for pictures of exotic scenes
encountered along the way. Miller introduces us to the potlatch, probably the most widely known institution of the Northwest coast, and
to the conflict of values that led to its being outlawed by disapproving white authorities in the 1880s.

Totem Poles: Heraldic Columns of the Northwest – Of all native art forms from the Northwest Coast, the most distinctive is the totem pole, misnamed but appreciated and duplicated with
considerably liberty worldwide. In her essay about them, Dr. Robin K. Wright, curator of Native American art at the University of
Washington’s Burke Museum, looks to folklore for clues to the origin of their form and examines the impact of western influence upon its
development. Because they were raised during potlatches, the ban on the latter seriously curtailed their creation, but the demands of
tourists and museums created a market for them and for imitations. The irony highlights the peculiar ambivalence that has marked the
relationship between native and non-native.

The Makah Tribe: People of the Sea and Forest – Its effects are a focus of the essay on the Makah by Dr. Ann M. Renker who serves as the bilingual education coordinator for the Cape
Flattery School District. “One common misunderstanding about the Makah people,” she writes, “is that the culture has
stayed exactly the same for thousands of years.” As it did throughout the Pacific Northwest and, indeed throughout the New World,
western trade goods and diseases profoundly changed traditional Makah life and culture. The change continued as invading newcomers forced
their beliefs and ways of life upon them, often in the name of progress, ratified by treaty and law and backed up with the threat of
force.

Assimilation through Education: Indian Boarding Schools in the Pacific Northwest – One of the more effective means government officials used in their attempt to eradicate traditional native institutions was to remove
children from their families and enroll them in schools run by the government or by religious groups. Carolyn J. Marr , Librarian at
the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle, examines the operation of northwestern Indian schools in her essay and even provides a
daily schedule from the Cushman Indian School in Tacoma as an example of the degree to which students’ lives were regimented. Although
training in manual and domestic skills was often valuable, forbidding the use of native languages and strict limitations on visits home
came fearfully close to realizing the goal of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of Pennsylvania’s Carlisle School, to “Kill the Indian
and save the man.”

The Lushootseed Peoples of Puget Sound Country – That any native traditions survived this onslaught owed to their resilience, the tenacity of their adherents and the willingness
of individuals to impart their knowledge to linguists and ethnographers. The meaning and value of some of these traditions are described
in the essay written by Coll-Peter Thrush, an historian at the University of Washington, on the Lushootseed peoples of Puget Sound, the
native speakers of the Lushootseed language. By examining their culture, “through the lens of the Huchoosedah,” a Lushootseed
term meaning cultural and self knowledge, he provides an overview not commonly encountered in the scholarly research on Native Americans –
one based upon the peoples’ own perceptions of themselves.

Coeur d’Alene (Schitsu ‘ umsh) – It is a view re-emphasized in the essay on the Coeur d’Alene of eastern Washington, northern Idaho and western Montana, written by
Dr. Rodney Frey, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Idaho. Where ethnographies typically follow the pattern of
describing a group’s territory, environment, culture and history, isolating religion and mythology as sub-units within culture, Frey
begins with mythology and religious teachings, and reiterates their importance throughout the narrative to modern times. “We
survive by our oral traditions,” he quotes contemporary elder, Henry SiJohn, “which are our basic truths, our basic facts,
handed down from our elders.”

The Nez Perce – Revival of traditional culture has marked the recent history of the Nez Perce, described in the essay co-authored by Dr. Deward E.
Walker, Jr. and Peter Jones, of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. One would be hard-pressed to
find another group in the record of Northwestern history whose relations with the invading western peoples once promised so much, were
played out as dramatically, or whose subsequent losses were as wrenching. Treaties, federal dicta and legal maneuvering reduced their
holdings from 13,000,000 acres to 80,000 at one point, but they, too, have refused to disappear.

Chief Seattle and Chief Joseph: From Indians to Icons – My own essay on Chief Seattle and Chief Joseph examines the impact of western history on the lives of two prominent native
leaders – and their impact upon it. Seattle went out of his way to befriend Americans and recruited entrepreneurs among them in hopes
of creating a community where native and newcomer could share its prosperity. Joseph used every skill at his command to preserve his
people’s freedom and secure their return to their homeland. Neither succeeded, and their ironic, tragic words continue to haunt our
public conscience.

Salmon, the Lifegiving Gift – The impact of their words is heightened by the unsettling understanding that, as Seattle suggested, “we may be brothers after
all;” that the fate meted out to native people may redound upon their dispossessors. The historic development of the Pacific
Northwest that began with the alienation of its aboriginal inhabitants came with a price that must be paid, and Dr. Jay Miller’s second
essay examines the salmon, once the daily bread of groups throughout the region, but now an endangered resource and an icon of
environmental fragility. The miraculous reappearance of the fish in the rivers year after year evoked a sense of awe and reverence
from the native people who managed this resource with intelligence and care. Two salmon stories, one from the coast and another from
the interior, capture the sense of mystery surrounding the fishes’ nature as well as the epic quality of its return and the hope it
inspired, a hope now threatened.

Our fascination with the diverse, complex and unique native cultures of the Pacific Northwest is a measure of how satisfying they
were to the people who created them. The progress of these ancient cultures was rudely interrupted by contact with the West and the
forcible inclusion of their members into the social systems of expanding nation-states. The fact that the inclusion may at times have
been directed by a spirit of sincere idealism cannot obscure the reality that it was often cruel and destructive. At the time of the
treaties, most Americans assumed the native peoples would vanish like the frontier itself. In most cases, however, neither the people
nor their cultures disappeared entirely, and today many are experiencing a revival. This reassertion of identity has led to a salutary
change in attitude of many non-Indians who are less likely to perceive native people to be anachronisms, irrelevant or Hollywood
stereotypes.

The authors of the essays divide this ongoing saga into ancient, historic and contemporary periods. The division between ancient and
historic is determined by the year during which a given group first appeared in written records. This varies. If Juan de Fuca’s voyage
is to be credited, then people living along the strait now bearing his name were first described in 1591, whereas the Nez Perce do not
appear in the written record until 1805. What separates historic from contemporary is more difficult to define, but the consensus of
opinion appears to be that contemporary history commenced when modern native groups succeeded in re-forming meaningful self governments.
In the United States, this generally begins with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

The importance of this legislation underscores the extraordinary degree to which the lives of Native Americans and even their identities
are defined by law and governmental decree. What is the legal definition of a Native American? Which law governs their actions? What
rights do they have that are different from those of other Americans? The treaties stand as fundamental, often defining documents for
native groups in the United States, as much or more than the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The Makah even get their
name, incorrectly, from
the treaty they signed in 1855.
A common misconception about the treaties is that the rights and reservations defined in them were granted to the native people by
the government. In fact, they were reserved by the native people for themselves, while they still had the capacity to do so, out of
the enormous cessions of land and resources they yielded, often under the threat of violence. While many citizens regard the treaties
as hindering anachronisms, most Native Americans do not. The important 1970 court decision rendered by Judge Boldt, for example,
reiterating the right of native fishers to a specific percentage of the annual salmon catch, was based on a careful reading of
treaty provisions.

So how are we to deal with the information in this collection? Because it is organized as an online resource, it is much easier to
access and cross-reference material and to have more facts at hand than before. The authors of the essays have included glossaries to
explain uncommon terms and bibliographies to direct readers to other sources of information, and they have also included study questions
that teachers may wish to use as they develop curricula in their schools. We would also strongly encourage you to visit tribal centers
and reservations with respect and patience and to talk to Native Americans and others familiar with them.

The vast amount of data available at our fingertips can be misused, however. Dr. Ann M. Renker tells the story about a New York
teacher who invited an Iroquois elder into her classroom to observe her students make copies of masks from the Iroquois False Face
Society. The students enjoyed the activity and had fun putting the masks on and scaring each other, and the elder sat through it all
good-naturedly. When she asked him how he thought it went, he suggested that perhaps he could return the favor by directing an exercise
in which the students could pretend they were Episcopalian or Roman Catholic priests consecrating communion wafers that they could
distribute to their classmates. The masks, he reminded her gently, were sacred objects, to be used in a sacred manner, and playing at
using them was tantamount to sacrilege, just as pretending to consecrate and distribute hosts would be.

This collection deals with people past and present, not abstract subjects. What we learn about them and what we do with it should
not come at their expense. Ultimately, we should ask why we want to learn about Native Americans anyway. Is it because they are a
handy way to begin a class on Washington State History? Is it because they are cool and all Indians are environmental saints? Why
are they in such demand as topics for research papers? Because of a long history of suppression, devaluation and alienation and the
manner in which Native Americans have historically been demonized and romanticized, the ways in which their experience has been
understood and taught is fraught with misunderstanding and ignorance. As we strive to learn more about them, we can hope for a better
understanding of ourselves. The collection has been put together in hopes of clarifying misunderstanding and reducing ignorance, but
it is only a tool. We offer it to you with the hope that it will be effective.

David M. Buerge was born in Oakland, California, in 1945. He has published several books and numerous articles dealing
with the social and religious history of the Northwest in general and of Native Americans in the Seattle area in particular.
He is currently writing a biography of Chief Seattle. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Mary Anne, and their children and
teaches at a private school.