Misconceptions about pre-Columbian Coast Salish

Were the Coast Salish people primitive and few as commonly believed? Maybe not.

Posted October 19, 2008 Noon
Updated October 20, 2008 10:30 a.m.

A nice article about Coast Salish culture in today's Seattle Times promotes an interesting event but perpetuates what may turn out to be a long-standing error:

About the Coast Salish: Population: Roughly 27,000 in British Columbia and 15,000 in Washington. — Show signals cultural renaissance for Coast Salish, By Sheila Farr, Seattle Times, Sunday, October 19, 2008

The problem with this is that historical records and a little simple math suggest that the pre-contact population of the Coast Salish may have numbered in the millions.

Did millions die?

The first official census of what is now western Washington State was conducted at a time when less than 1,000 whites lived here. The federal agents counted approximately 10,000 indigenous natives in western Washington.

This was after the apocalyptic epidemics had wiped out at least 90% of the natives indigenous to the area. That's all the information we need to estimate the pre-apocalyptic population.

It's simple elementary school math. The mortality rate from the epidemics was at least 90%, and the remnant population of our local indigenous ancestors just in Western Washington was 10,000. If 10,000 = 10%, then 100% = 10,000 divided by 10%, or 100,000 in Western Washington alone.

But between 1492 and 1865 the cumulative mortality rate may have been much higher, and the death toll could have numbered in the millions.

Superbugs

"Doomsday" scenarios today warn that a new "superbug" could kill as many as 1/3rd of the population worldwide. Imagine that: 1 out of every 3 people you know suddenly gone: killed by a plague so powerful that no drug can touch it. The Center for Disease Control says it's very possible.

Bad as that would be, what happened to my ancestors was proportionately worse. Entire communities were wiped out by the flu, measles, smallpox and other diseases. And evidence shows that the process may have started as early as the 1600s, long before whites came to our shores.

Killer pigs: vectors of destruction

In Charles Mann's book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Chapter 4 describes how pigs accompanying Spanish explorers carried diseases that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people. Animal vectors of disease transmission are commonly discussed and a big concern today, yet the impact this had on American Indian populations, particularly on the Pacific Coast has been virtually ignored.

That means the apocalyptic devastation wreaked by the epidemics was never intentional, at least not as portrayed by the perennial complaints about smallpox infected blankets. Certainly many early American settlers wished they could be rid of my inconvenient ancestors, just as today certain entrenched elites wish they could be rid of my tribe.

Some wanted my ancestors dead, some tried to kill them, and some succeeded. What's more, Field Marshal Jeffery Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst of Montreal actively speculated about using smallpox infected blankets against Indians in Delaware. But there is no evidence that it succeeded. Some have suggested there was evidence but it was destroyed out of shame. That requires a sensibility of recent vintage: in the 18th century it would have been widely hailed as a smart victory. So the probability is small that it ever happened.

Wallowing in the horror

What did happen, however, was bad enough. Settlers committed plenty of atrocities and we do well to condemn them. Apologists for the settlers rightly point out that Indians committed atrocities, too; but we ought not to ignore the difference: Indian atrocities were committed by native victims of injustice against members of an invading horde.

An atrocity is an atrocity, no matter the motive, but we can understand why somebody whose homeland is invaded would take it out on the invaders, even individuals who have committed no other trespass, while we can but condemn without mitigation the atrocities committed by the more rapacious members of the invading hordes.

There is a natural tendency for us to wallow in the horrors committed in the invasion of this land. But it does nobody good. History is what it is and none of us are responsible or reprehensible for it. Our past matters, certainly; history tells us who we are as a people, but it ought not to limit us or predestinate our future.

Yet, history has value for us today.

The value of yesterday

Knowing that at least 100,000 Salish people, and possibly millions, once lived in western Washington tells us that they could not have survived without sophisticated management of the resources, and trade. Given what we know about cultivation, here, there were simply not the resources to sustain a large population. So how did they survive?

I don't know, but it's easy to speculate. First, even though they all grow here, now, and were historically cultivated as far north as Boston, Salish people in Western Washington did not grow corn, beans and squash.

What we know of ancient agriculture in western Washington points to fishing and hunting as the primary source of food. Camas, an onion-like plant, was cultivated, as was wapato. Berries were gathered. But together they would have been insufficient to sustain a relatively large population. The game would have been hunted close to extinction.

Corn, beans and squash grow in an almost symbiotic state, and can grow in the same patch of land for hundreds of years without rotation or fertilization. Together they provide all the nutrition necessary to sustain life. They could have been grown here and would have been enough to sustain a large population. But they were not.

When something commonly used elsewhere is available to supply abundant food, but is not used, then either the population was as small as is currently believed or, given evidence to suggest a much larger population was probable, food must have been gotten some other way.

The Spice Trade

The trade routes from east to west and north to south were well established. They were so heavily travelled that in Pox Americana, Elizabeth Fenn's book on Smallpox she argues that it got to the west coast via these trade routes.

The journals of the trappers, traders and explorers, like the Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery, indicate that they relied on these trade routes. And it must have been through trade that the Salish of western Washington survived and thrived. But what did they have to trade?

Camas, for one. Camas was used as a sweetener and would have been considered a spice. Other consumables would have included dried seafood, seaweeds, shells, cedar products, and other transportable products.

That's all speculation. It's reasonable, but reason and culture are quarrelsome companions at best. We can't know for sure how they lived.

What we can and do know is that life here was very different from what is commonly believed, and that from the lands and waters of the Coast Salish in the north to the lands and rivers of the Chehalis and Cowlitz Salish tribes south to the Columbia River, our ancestors were far more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than we are taught.