Deeply Embedded: Cartoes as

74
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tow,Fafl
2003,
vol.42, No.4
Anour rHE WESr
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Sarvis: Deeply Embedded: Canoes As an Enduring Manifustation
Racing canoes on Guemes Channel (northern Puget Sound), in the early 20th century; the championship canoe, 'Telegraph," in the foreground,
is now housed at the lsland County Historical Museum.
Anacones Museum Collection, Anacortes, WA
Deeply Embedded:
Cartoes as
an Eruduring Manifestation of
Sp iritualism o,nd Communalism
among the Coast Salish
Will Sarvis
OR many centuries, aborigines of the southern
Pacific Northwest Coast developed profound
utilitarian and religious associations with dugout
canoes that made these vessels one of the central features of their entire culture. The Swinomish, Samish,
Twana, Lummi, and many other tribes of the Coast
Salish cultural region relied on canoes for transportation, gathering food, and waging war. Before the arrival
of Euro-Americans during the 18th century Pacific
Northwest Native Americans developed dugout canoes
into one of the most sophisticated forms in world history. This highly honed technical ability, however, led
many subsequent writers and scholars to emphasize
physical construction while neglecting the profound
spiritual components of canoe creation and use.'
Traditionally,
in
pre-contact and immediate post-
contact times, gifted Indian canoe builders practiced a
highly spiritual approach to tree selection and subsequent canoe construction. During the late 19th and early
20th centuries, a concerted white effort at forced cultural assimilation, white seizure of Indian lands and trees,
and increased industrial logging of old-growth cedar all
eventually contributed to a tragic decline in canoe construction and the traditional spiritualism that permeated
every aspect of this practice. All of these tribulations,
however, could not and did not destroy native peoples'
fundamental spiritual instinct, nor ultimately their
propensity to exercise this spirituality in their work with
wood and canoes. The late 20th century witnessed the
beginning of a cultural renaissance among Pacific
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James G. Swan illustratlon from the 1850s in the Willapa Bay region
of western Washington.
builder or his tools.l2 Whatever the specific ritualistic details may have been, all Coast Salish peoples took their
practices and observances quite seriously, for canoes
represented an even deeper entity in their spiritual
worldview. Like the practices of other ancient cultures,
such as various Egyptian and Nordic peoples, Coast
Salish used boats as coffins so that the dead could travel to the spiritual world.
A number of early Euro-American travelers and visitors to the Northwest Coast observed the practice of interring the dead in canoes. Aborigines sometimes suspended the vessel-sepulchers from trees. In some cases,
only the honored higher class peoples enjoyed the right
of canoe burial; lower-status people were buried in baskets.l3 A further indication of the role boats played in the
invisible world included specific spirits that lived or
traveled in canoes. In the Puget Sound region, such spirits included ones who healed injured warriors or bestowed power in specific matters such as gathering
clams, or of acquiring wealth in general.,o The most profound and mystical expression of canoe-associated spiritualism arose through the "soul recovery,oritual, which
Coast Salish Indians developed to its most sophisticated
form along the Northwest Coast.rs
Unlike personal guardian spirit power, such as that
in canoe construction or basket making, the soulrecovery ceremony required the expertise of a shaman
and his more powerful, mystical, and potentially dangerous form of spiritual power. The Coast Salish be_
lieved that people sometimes lost their souls to the land
of the dead, which misfortune would be manifested in a
serious illness. The only cure entailed a shaman and his
used
helpers to board a symbolic, spiritual canoe and travel to
the land of the dead in order to retrieve the lost soul.,6
The soul-recovery ceremony expressed both the centrality of the canoe in Coast Salish culture as well as the
deeply religious nature of these Native Americans. It
was this religiosity that survived 19th- and 20th-century
Caucasian attempts at forced cultural assimilation.
Despite the flaws in perspective that the late 19thcentury missionary Myron Eells had in his observations
of Coast Salish spiritualism, he probably capfured a fun-
damental element of truth when he observed, ,.the Indian
Coast Salish lndians understood the spirits of cedar trees, whicfr
communicated in particular ways with canoe builders.
Author's collectiotl
is a religious being. He must have some religion. When
he gives up one he must have another.",' In one of the
more ironic twists in Native American history, the Coast
Salish circumvented white missionaries' admonitions
to abandon their traditional religious beliefs, and instead adopted and incorporated elements of Catholicism
and Protestantism into their religious worldview, most
notably through the noted Indian Shaker Church (a Native American invention not associated with the Eastem
United States Shakers). John Slocum, a Squaxin Indian
of Puget Sound, began the Shaker Church movement in
1881.'8 It became perhaps the penultimate phenomenon
of Coast Salish religiosity in the post-contact period, and
has thrived ever since. The Indian Shaker Church
allowed Coast Salish to continue their propensity toward
spiritualism, retain aspects of their traditional beliefsand appease potentially oppressive whites who thought
they were practicing some form of Christianity.'e But
there were many other indications that instinctive, tradi-
tional Coast Salish spirituality, though subdued, never
approached disappearance.
Like the Indian Shaker Church, the l9th-century
revival of the First Salmon Ceremony interwove both
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78
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Fall 2003, vol. 42, No. 4
Aeour rHn Wssr
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Sarvis: Deeply Embedded: Canoes As an Enduring Manifestation
guage, and just basically share a lot
culture, and start bringing it back.3'
The Port Gamble S'klallam tribe built this canoe in 1989. Since then
it has taken tribe members on paddles to British Columbia and
elsewhere. ln the summer of 2002 they paddled around the Olympic
Author's collection
Peninsula to Taholah.
encouraged the revival of canoe building. And the retum
of canoes to cultural centrality has featured journeys
(called "paddles") over long distances between points in
Puget Sound and coastal British Columbia.2n
While paddles foster stronger communal ties among
tribes, the canoe occupants themselves experience a
more microcosmic, but equally important, spiritud and
communal experience while engaged in travel. Mary
McQuillen (Kwe-de-che-autlh), a rare female canoe
builder ofthe 1950s, observed,
The canoe feels everything; the water feels everything, my grandfather used to say. The discipline
and the prayer were very important. We took care
of each other like a family. We made sure that for
each one that travelled with us, our spiritual life
was intact. We prayed for everyone even if we
were upset; in this way we could travel in a good
way.'o
Linda Day, Swinomish cultural resource coordinator
and granddaughter of the famed Samish canoe builder
Charlie Edwards, described contemporary paddles and
modern canoe culture:
Canoes have their own ceremonies, their own stories, songs that are used while pulling twenty-five
to thirty miles a day. Lots of times, it helps to have
a canoe song, and it brings more strength to the
paddlers when they sing the canoe songs' They
also have songs when they arrive at another reservation, another tribe, another territory. They pull
up close to the shore and sing their song, and ask
for permission to come ashore, stating that they are
coming peacefully. They'd like to share food and
cultural ways. And the host tribe invites, sings
their songs, a welcome song, and invites them to
come ashore. When they do come ashore, the host
tribe shares food with them after the welcome ceremony. They have speeches, share stories; canoe
stories, share songs, dances, talk in the Indian lan-
of the canoe
During the 1950s, various Coast Salish Indians vis- "
ited each other all along the coast of western Washington and British Columbia to practice winter ceremonies
under the pretense of celebrating birthdays or other
occasions acceptable to whites. The revived phenomenon of post-World War II intertribal canoe racing gave
further expression to ancient social practices once manifested in traditional potlatches.3'z With the late 20th'
century revival in canoe building and intertribal paddles
has come a full range of spiritualism, including prayers
in 1og felling, blessing of the fallen 1og, recognition and
appreciation for the unique spirit of each canoe, spiritual communication between wood and human, the
sacredness of canoe travel as "moving over water and
through time," and a stress on the importance of person-
al purity.33 The latter point is, tragically, especially
pertinent in relation to alcohol abuse, which remains a
problem as Coast Salish and other Native Americans
continue to cope with the profound disruptions of their
traditional lifeways that began more than two centuries
ago. But here again, the canoe culture revival offers
great hope in the recovery of spiritual and communal
harmony. Linda Day recalled,
I was amazed a few years ago when I worked for
the Samish Tribe as a cultural resources coordinawho in this
tor. We had a carving class, and two
world now are very dysfunctional people into alcohol a lot, and don't really contribute a whole lot to
they came to the carving class.
the community
-
- they just sat down and they
was amazed;
started carving. It was like a part of them that
nobody knew was there. So lots of times our distant talents come through our ancestors. I
would never have guessed that fthose two people)
had that talent. It was just amazing. As soon as
they sat down and they got that knife in their
hands, and the wood, and they started carving, it
was like the figure just came right out of the
And
I
wood.'o
More than simply carving, and more than achieving
personal spiritual health, the carvers that Day described
obviously found and created communal harmony within
their particular Native American group. The revived
canoe culture is centrally important in this regard.
Swinomish mental health counselor Diane Vendiola
remarked,
"I think that is what is going to save our youth
and our culture, are the ceremonies . . that's why
they're trying to bring the canoe culture back-""
The revived canoe culture is but one aspect of a
greater Pacific Northwest Native American renaissance
that has increased since the 1960s, a renaissance that
includes reclaimed fishing rights, rituals, the return of
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80
-
Aeour rHE WESr
Jow, Fall 2003, vol.42, No.4
-
Sarvis: Deeply Embedded: Canoes As an Enduring Manifustation
a Skagit Elder, rev.
translated by Vi Hilbert and Jay
Miller, recorded by Leon Metcalf (Seattle, WA: Lushootseed
Press, 1997), 328-329; June M. Collins, "A Study of Religious
Change among the Skagit Indians, Westem Washington," Dec.
1946,
Coast Salish and Western Washington Indians, Yol. 4
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1974), 19,78, 80-111; Diane
Vendiola, interview by the author, Sept. 10, 2001 (tapes and transcript deposited in the Anacortes Museum, Anacortes, WA), transcript pages 6, 17, 18, 24.
22. For insightful observations on the persistence of Coast Salish and
other Native American spiritual inclinations, see Swinomish Tribal Mental Health Project, A Gathering of Wisdoms: Tribal Mental Health: A Cultural Perspective (LaConner, WA: Swinomish
Tribal community, 1991), 32, 126-128,'1.31, 133-135,138, 170,
183, 188, 190-192.
23. Public Law 383, 73rd Cong., 2nd Sess., June 18, 1934, United
States Statutes at Large, 1933-1934. Also see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian (New York: Vintage Books,
1978), 176-186; Scudder MeKeel, "An Appraisal of the Indian
Reorganization Act," American Anthropologrsr, 46 (Apr.-June
1944): 209-217; Michael T. Smith, "The Wheeler-Howard Act
of 1934: The Indian New Deal," Journal of the West, 10, 3 (July
l97l): 521-534; and S. Lyman Tyler, A History of Indian Policy
(Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1973), ch. 6.
24. House Concurrent Resolution 108, 83rd Cong., lst Sess., Aug. 1,
1953, United States Statutes at I'arge. Also see, Berl,hofer, The
White Man's Indian, 186-194: La Veme Madigan, The American
21. Aunt Susie Sampson Peter; The Wisdom of
ed., transcribed by
Vi Hilbert,
n
Brown, Myron Eells and the Puget Sound Indians,44; Chtef
Martin J. Sampson, Indians of Skagit County (Mount Vemon,
WA: Skagit County Historical Society, 1972),29.
29.For a recent example of the Swinomish ceremony welcoming a
group of paddlers to their reservation, see the Skagit Yalley Her-
ald,I,,iy 21,2001.
30. Mary McQuillen, in Neel, The Great Canoes, 15.
31. Linda Day, Interview by Garry Cline, Ian. 27, 1999 (tape and
transcript deposited in the Anacortes Museum, Anacortes, WA),
transcript page 2.
32.Kew, "Coast Salish Ceremonial Life," 277; Emmett Oliver,
"Reminiscences of a Canoe Puller," in Wright, ed., A Time of
Gathering,248 Wayne P. Suttles, Coast Salish -Essays (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1987), 228; Seaman, Indian
Relics of the Pacific Northwest, M;Diane Vendiola communication to the author. Also see Wayne Suttles, 'The Persistence of
Intervillage Ties Among the Coast Salish," Ethnology,2, 4 (Oct.
1963):512.
33. The foregoing aspects of canoe culture are reflected in the numerous oral histories from different Pacific Northwest tribes found in
Neel, The Great Canoes,5, 6, 18, 36,45,47,50, 92. Also see the
quotes of Kevin Paul, noted Swinomish carver, in the Skagit
Yalley Herald, June 19, 1997, and Aug. 16, 1999.
34. Linda Day, Interview, 8; also see NeeI,The Great Canoes,36,40,
45,
47,98.
35. Diane Vendiola communication to the author.
Will
Indian Relocation Program (New York: Association on American Indian Affairs, 1956), and Elaine M. Neils, Reserttation to
City: Indian Migration and Federal Relocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); and Tyler, A History of Indian
Policy, ch.8 and 9.
25. For an excellent work on the Banks and Means trials, see John
Sayer, Ghost Dancing the Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997). Also see Rex Weyler, Blood of the Innd
(New York: Everest House, 1982). For advocacy pieces sympathetic with Native Americans, see Ward Churchill and Jim
Vander Wall, Agmts of Repression (Boston, MA: South End
Press, 1988), and Peter Matthiessen, ft the Spirit of Cra4t Horse
(New York: Viking Press, 1983).
26. Wolfgang G. Jilek, Indian Healing: Shamanic Ceremonialism in
the Pacific Northwest Today (Blaine WA: Hancock House
Publishers, 1982), 158.
27.Durham, Indian Canoes of the Northwest Coast,78.
28. Ibid.; Kew, "Coast Salish Ceremonial Life," 277; Roberts, "A
History of the Swinomish Tribal Community," 50; Ruby and
history from Virginia Tech,
Blacksburg, and has published short stories and history articles in a variety of
periodicals. The author
would like to thank Jewell
Praying WolfJames and
Ramona James (both Lummi); Diane Vendiola, Linda
Day, and Larry Wanaseah
Campbell (all Swinomish);
Jake Jones and Marie Herbert (both S'ktallam); Ester
Noyes, Terry Slotemaker, Coll-Peter Thrush, and
Theresa Trebon.
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Sarvis received
B.A. and M.A. degrees in
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