area by giving names and stories to otherwise anonymous terrain.
“The Coast Salish have participated in the renaissance of Northwest Coast carving.” (B.C. Prov. Mus. photo)
In the weekly meetings at Coqualeetza, the process still goes on: reminiscences are cast in Halkomelem speech; place-names and ancestors are recalled and recorded; long unused turns of phrase and thought are brought back into consciousness. This is probably the place to correct Hill-Tout in another regard. How could he anticipate that the “sadly diminished” tribes that he saw, whose villages had a “general air of dilapidation,” would in our own time recover much of their tribal integrity? He gives, on the whole, a gloomy picture; but he did anticipate the new trend somewhat. “There seems to be a spirit of discontent and dissatisfaction abroad among the Indians,” he states in his 1904 report, below. “Some of the bolder and more resolute of them openly declare that the only remedy is a return to the ways of their forefathers.” By 1950 Bob Joe knew of four spirit dancers around Chilliwack, ten more at Seabird Island, Scowlitz and Chehalis, “and many down-river at Musqueam” (Duff, p. 108). The spectacular rise of spirit dancing in the sixties and seventies has been documented by Wolfgang G. Jilek and Pamela Amoss, and the significance in terms of personal pride and group autonomy is clear.26 Traditional Salish weaving has flourished since 1961.27 On a modest scale, the Coast Salish have participated in the renaissance of Northwest Coast carving and other art forms.28 The survival of Halkomelem as a language of certain occasions and functions can now be seen as a distinct possibility.29
To stress language, weaving, spirit dancing, and art is not to underestimate the more formal political movements within Native populations. If politics, as we can assume, needs its enriching past, Hill-Tout’s reports in this and the other volumes of The Salish People may prove to be important in a way he would never have expected.
Ralph Maud
Cultus Lake, B.C.
December, 1978
1 Delbert Guerin reported in “Musqueams claim endowment lands as part of aboriginal rights” Vancouver Sun (24 January 1977) p. 54 (clipping seen at Vancouver City Archives).
2 Franz Boas “Zur Ethnologie Britisch-Kolombiens” Petermanns Mitteilungen 30 (1887) pp. 129–133. I am indebted to Wayne Suttles for drawing my attention to this map.
3 Hill-Tout in the Squamish report (1900) in volume II of the present edition; and Willson Duff Upper Stalo Indians (1952) p. 27. Duff quotes the Fort Langley Journal for 1828 on the passage downstream of two hundred canoes of the “Whooms” tribe on their way to “their lands up Burrard’s canal” for the winter (pp. 25–26). Hill-Tout, in the Archaeology section of the 1902 report below, notes extensive and ancient armories of stone projectiles – probably not Squamish — in that area.
4 Matthews Conversations with Khahtsahlano (1969) p. 204. He was asking about the lake above Belcarra. Andrew Paull had “never heard it called ‘Sasaamat’”; August Jack on the same question: “Don’t know what Sasamat means, not same language. We never finished the place names up the Inlet” (p. 30). Hill-Tout’s informant (Squamish report, 1900) could not remember the names of “long abandoned” villages at the upper end of Burrard Inlet. The “Wildman Story” (in volume II of the present edition) could be read as a mythologizing of the former inhabitants of the Sasamat Lake area. Katzie Indians knew the inhabitants of loco, near Port Moody, as “tributary to the Squamish” – Diamond Jenness Faith of a Coast Salish (1955) p. 86.
5 On 28 June 1934 T. P. O. Menzies and others talked to Chief George of the Burrard Reserve and in a typescript in the B.C. Provincial Archives recorded his claim to belong to an old Belcarra tribe, “the same tribe of Indians, as the Musqueams of Point Grey.” Anthony Carter received similar information more recently; see his Abundant Rivers (1972) p. 44: “The Tsla-a-wat tribe, now living on the north shore of Burrard Inlet was once large and powerful. . . . Their language or dialect was distinctly different from their neighbors, the Squamish and Musqueam.”
6 Wayne Suttles in his article “The ‘Middle Fraser’ and ‘Foothill’ Cultures: A Criticism” (1957) considers this an “artificial” problem: “the truth is the two divisions have never been separated” (p. 168).
7 Franz Boas “Notes on the Snanaimuq [Nanaimo] ” (1889) p. 325; see also the “Cowichan Account of a Great Fight Between the Salish Tribes and their Hereditary Enemies the Kwakiutl” in volume IV of the present edition.
8 Duff’s survey of Fraser River fishing is on pp. 62–71 of Upper Stalo Indians (1952); on “Summer Visitors” see p. 25; also p. 27 “A Katzie View”; “Part of Kwantlen territory on the South Arm was held in common by several Cowichan villages across the strait. The area . . . extended from Woodward’s Landing to Ewens Cannery, some mile and a half. The Cowichans came in summer for fish and berries, and some stayed the year around.”
9 Suttles “The Persistence of Intervillage Ties among the Coast Salish” Ethnology 2 (1963) p. 514. See also his “Affinal Ties, Subsistence, and Prestige among the Coast Salish” American Anthropologist 62 (1970), where he states: “for a population to have survived in a given environment for any length of time, its subsistence activities and prestige-gaining activities are likely to form a single integrated system by which that population has adapted to its environment” (p. 296). Suttles shows how the potlatch among the Coast Salish serves as “a regulating mechanism within the total socio-economic system” (p. 303).
10 In 1936, Barnett found that his Musqueam informant was always quite busy “and we worked under difficulties” – The Coast Salish of British Columbia (1955) pp. 9–10. Wayne Suttles reports having found “an excellent informant for the Musqueam dialect” and three Musqueam informants have supplied him with some forty-two texts of myths, folktales, narratives of recent events, ethnographic descriptions, and speeches, in five hundred dictated pages – “Linguistic Means for Anthropological Ends” Canadian Journal of Linguistics 10 (1965) pp. 157, 163.
11 “The Great Fraser Midden” Museum and Art Notes 5 (September 1930) p. 78. In revising this account as An address given at Marpole in the formal presentation of the Midden Cairn to the City by His Honour Judge Howay in 1938, Hill-Tout identified the road as Marine Drive and updated the time to “some 45 years ago” (first page of the unpaginated pamphlet). When The Great Fraser Midden was to be reprinted in 1948 after Hill-Tout’s death, an error crept in, which has caused some confusion. The phrase “the Spring of 1902” was substituted by someone who was patently in error. Since this version was reprinted several times at least until 1955, the error has had wide circulation. Charles Borden describes the midden in “An Ancient Coast Indian Village in South British Columbia” Indian Time (1955).
12 “The Great Fraser Midden” (1930) p. 78. H. St. G. Hamersely presented to the Vancouver Museum a small stone image dug up from the Marpole midden “about 1895”: “As a boy I went with Professor Hill-Tout to dig. It was beside a skull. The skull had a slate or shale spearhead in it.” (Caption to photograph dated 29 May 1955 in City Archives.)
13 Harlan I. Smith Archaeology of Lytton (1899) p. 130. Smith was Boas’ choice for the archaeologist of the Jesup Expedition. He later had a long career with the National Museum of Canada.
14 Harlan I. Smith Shell-heaps of the Lower Fraser River (1903) pp. 188–189: “There are, however, some points of difference between the people of the past and those of the present. First of all, the physical type of part of these people differed very much from that of the modern Indians, while
