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Introduction

One way to get at the meaning of the tribal name “Halkomelem” is to take Vancouver as a case in point. Halkomelem people would not live up Indian Arm or in Burrard Inlet; they would not really want to settle at Jericho Beach. Coming round Point Grey they would begin to feel at home, and would build along the Southlands and Langara. Halkomelem are a river people or, more precisely in the case of the Musqueam, an estuary people. A map published by the Musqueam band to support aboriginal land claims shows no village sites on Indian Arm. The band chief said in a newspaper interview that the settlements on the North Shore were held jointly “with the Burrard Indians.”¹ This Burrard tribe has made practically no appearance in recorded history. Franz Boas knew this area only as Squamish, and his earliest map shows the boundary with the Musqueam as a skewer through the middle of the Vancouver peninsula.² Hill-Tout, however, picked up a report that “English Bay, Burrard Inlet, and False Creek were not originally true Squamish”; and Simon Pierre told Wilson Duff that the “Squamish did not move into Burrard Inlet until the time of white settlement.”³ Both of J. S. Matthews’ Squamish informants were ignorant of the name “Sasamat,” which is supposedly what the early Spanish explorers heard the natives here call the territory.⁴ These hints, plus a few others,⁵ seem to be our only present evidence for the Musqueam’s northern neighbours before the Squamish. But it makes sense that there would be a fiord people in Indian Arm. There is a fundamental difference between Deep Cove and the Southlands, and one chooses by temperamental preference. If you are Halkomelem, you choose the Stalo, the Fraser River.

That the Cowichan and Nanaimo on Vancouver Island are also Halkomelem is a curiosity. On the map it looks as though they came down the Fraser full tilt, fanned out across the Strait of Georgia, and settled where they hit the Island. But this Island-Mainland pattern is not unique; the Straits Salish group to the south have it, as do the Comox to the north, and the Kwakiutl further north still. Your neighbour up or down the coast speaks an incomprehensible language, but there is no language barrier when you take the canoe lanes across the water. Musqueam cannot speak to Squamish, but shares the Halkomelem tongue with Cowichan and Nanaimo. And nobody is sure on which side of the water the language was established first.⁶

Whatever the origin, these Island-Mainland ties have been maintained in various ways. In their wars with the Kwakiutl, the Cowichan “sent word to the tribes on the Fraser River, and summoned them to come to the island. . . . They obeyed.”⁷ The Cowichan and Nanaimo kept several summer villages on the South Arm of the Fraser, and some of these operated the year round. The attraction was the unmatched salmon run, and from July on, hundreds of Vancouver Island people would catch and dry salmon on the Fraser, as far up river as the canyon above Yale, where the crowded fish could be taken in quantity by dipnets, and the continuous wind reduced drying time from three weeks to one.⁸ Ties of marriage bound many villages, and required much visiting among in-laws. If potlatching was originally economic, as Wayne Suttles persuasively suggests, “a means of converting a temporary surplus of perishable food into nonperishable wealth,”⁹ the aspect which comes down to the present time is the social; which Suttles also amply demonstrates, and which Cultus Lake on the 3rd of June of this year also amply demonstrated, up to twenty long canoes competing in some of the races, and the drumming of the international slahal games going on in the background.

Of the Mainland Halkomelem, Hill-Tout chose to study the Kwantlen and tribes further up the river rather than the Musqueam. Perhaps no congenial informant could be found close to the burgeoning city in the 1890’s.¹⁰ What he did do in regard to the Musqueam, however, was to examine their prehistory in “the Great Fraser Midden,” a site at the foot of Granville Street near the present Fraser Arms Hotel in Marpole. How far back, archaeologically, does the Musqueam settlement go, and, if there were previous occupants, who were they?

The road to connect Vancouver with Sea Island (the present International Airport) had already opened up part of the midden in 1889, two years before Hill-Tout’s arrival. He got into it right away; in 1930, he spoke of being directed to the midden “some thirty-eight years ago, when a road was being cut through it.”¹¹ He surveyed the area with Mr. F. Monkton, “a mining engineer well-known in Vancouver early days and one of the founders of the Art, Historical and Scientific Association.”¹² By 1895 Hill-Tout was able to write an extensive report to the Royal Society of Canada under the title “Later Prehistoric Man in British Columbia” (included below), which, in the words of Harlan I. Smith, constituted “the first resume of British Columbia archaeology.”¹³

The problem is that Hill-Tout found two types of skulls, one similar to the modern Salish inhabitants of the area and the other very different, “too decidedly dolichocephalic to be classified among any of the typical groups of this region.” But he does not say exactly where and how these two types were found in the midden. Harlan Smith also seems to have been careless about stratification when he dug the midden in 1898. He reported more of the two types of skulls, without assessing their age relative to each other.¹⁴ After his dig at North Saanich, he could report some skulls “of a narrow type, resembling those found at Eburne [Marpole], and they were rather deep in the heap, and never found among the upper or more recent layers . . . suggesting at least that the people having skulls of the narrow type were the older to the whole region.”¹⁵ However, this conclusion, which supports Hill-Tout’s feeling that a very different race of men occupied this coast two thousand years ago, is rather offset by Smith’s finding in other Fraser Delta shell-heaps “two distinct types of men . . . apparently co-existent, as the bones are found in the same layers.”¹⁶ In 1930 the Vancouver Museum staff tried again on the untouched parts of the Marpole midden. They unearthed sixty-five skulls; the narrow skulls were reported to be in the lower layers, the broad-headed in the upper;¹⁷ but this report has not received attention, e.g., Donald H. Mitchell in his monograph said Hill-Tout’s hypothesis had not been supported by later excavations, “except possibly at North Saanich.”¹⁸ The word “possibly” here is hardly fair, since Smith definitely corroborated Hill-Tout at that point. And when we look at the cairn burials, the second part of Hill-Tout’s “Later Prehistoric Man” article, we note another tantalizing connection with North Saanich. Smith’s cairns there are remarkably similar to Hill-Tout’s at Hatzic on the Fraser; both contained the same sort of copper ornaments.¹⁹ Cairn burial is, on the face of it, not Salish at all, but recent archaeological opinion has not made any response to this supposition and its implications. The prevailing view seems to be that there existed a continuity of culture in the Fraser area from at least 1000 B.C., and that nothing proves the inhabitants were radically different before that date.²⁰ However, archaeology in British Columbia is still at the stage where surprises can be expected.

In turning to Hill-Tout’s ethnological descriptions of the Mainland Halkomelem, we find that, until Wilson Duff’s work in 1949–50, they constituted practically our only information on these tribes. Boas spent a week with Chief George of the Chehalis, who was living in New Westminster at the time, and out of that rather limited experience wrote his 1894 report on “The Indian Tribes of the Lower Fraser River.”²¹ For his 1902 report Hill-Tout used seven named informants from three different Halkomelem tribes, and for the 1904 report five named informants from two additional tribes. He talked to them in their own villages, and quite probably on several occasions. He has stated that his study of the local languages “extended more or less over the whole period of my residence in these parts.” By mid-1898 he could report to the British Association that he had “in hand” field notes on the Squamish, Matsqui, Yale, and Chilliwack tribes. Having moved his family to a homestead in Abbotsford by 1897, he was only about twenty miles from Chilliwack and even closer to the Kwantlen at Fort Langley; he never had to work, like Boas, at long distances from home.

As far as the stories in this volume are concerned, it would be invidious to compare Boas’ Captain George Chehalis as a story-teller with Hill-Tout’s Chehalis informants, Francois and Mary Anne; so much depends on the listener and the occasion. Boas was not satisfied with what he was getting; the tales as we read them seem rather inhibited.²² Hill-Tout, on the other hand, was proud enough to say that his texts “are as perfect as they can well be written.” When he read them to different members of the Chehalis band, “all expressed themselves as satisfied with their correctness.” When he comes to the Scowlitz stories, however, he is slightly apologetic. The four tales lacklustre, but he asks us not to misplace our scorn: “Although nothing is more wearisome than consecutive reading of collections of Indian texts, there is nothing wearisome in listening to the recital of these by the Indian himself.” And in the same passage, below, he goes on to describe the Indian’s “natural dramatic powers.” It is obvious that Hill-Tout relished his field work for more than the scientific results.

If Hill-Tout found the Chilliwack tribe disappointing in that they “seem to possess but few folk-tales, or else they have forgotten them,” the fault must lie largely with Hill-Tout himself. He would certainly be surprised at how much has come to light in the last two decades. For instance, on tapes made by Oliver Wells in the 1960’s, Dan Milo tells stories that Hill-Tout heard at the beginning of the century, plus additional stories, some of them in Halkomelem as well as in English.²³ Hill-Tout expressed chagrin at missing “a noted old shaman” of the Kwantlen: “With him passed the opportunity of acquiring first hand information on many of their old customs, practices, and beliefs, thus affording another illustration of the need there is to push our inquiries and observations without loss of time.” Yet, just across the river at Port Hammond, if Hill-Tout had only known, a man called Pierre, a hearty, robust man in mid-life, could have told him a great deal on the subject, having been a medicine-man from his earliest youth. He was there in 1936 to tell Diamond Jenness his very compelling life story. His religious beliefs constitute a cosmology of substance, published in 1955 as The Faith of a Coast Salish. The photograph on the cover of that publication shows him as Hill-Tout could have seen him in the 1890’s. Likewise with the Chilliwack area, where Hill-Tout drew a relative blank, an M.A. student from the University of Washington, Norman Lerman, could still in Sardis in 1950 collect an amazing number of stories, which have recently been made available as Legends of the River People (1976).²⁴ Wilson Duffs The Upper Stalo Indians (1952) is a model of ethnographic reporting in its accuracy, scope, and richness of detail. While giving respectful attention to Hill-Tout, Duff was able, coming into the Chilliwack area fifty years after, to discover significantly more about tribal history and customs.

The trouble was that Hill-Tout had limited himself, for whatever reasons, to informants from only one family, that of Captain John of Soowahlie, the most notable Chilliwack man of his time, but not necessarily the best informant. By the time Hill-Tout came upon him he had been an aislesman in Rev. Crosby’s church, and at times a substitute preacher, for over thirty years, and was perhaps not too eager to discuss the pagan doings of the olden days.²⁵ In any case, we are grateful to Bob Joe, Mrs. August Jim, and Mr. and Mrs. Edmond Lorenzetto, who were Wilson Duff’s informants, and who were also prominent among those whom Oliver Wells, having the benefit of even greater localness than Hill-Tout, recorded on tape through a number of years. They have enriched life in the Chilliwack 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 another part seems to have been of the same type.” Smith had submitted the skulls to Boas for measurement; his statistics and commentary refer to a narrow type and a broad type, again without any speculation about relative age of the two types.

15 Harlan I. Smith Archaeology of the Gulf of Georgia (1907) pp. 354–355. The quotation continues: “Evidently in this region a peculiar type of culture existed. The significance of this fact will be discussed more fully in the conclusion of this paper.” I have failed to find such a discussion at the end of his paper.

16 Smith Archaeology of the Gulf of Georgia (1907) p. 436. Boas in the “Conclusion” to Teit’s The Thompson Indians (1900) writes: “We find in the earlier period, which is indicated by the lower strata of the shell-heaps, interspersed among the broad-headed type, a peculiar type of narrow face and narrow head, which has no analogue on the coast. These finds indicate a period of mixture of two distinct tribes” (p. 388). Ellen W. Robinson’s article “Harlan I. Smith, Boas, and the Salish: Unweaving Archaeological Hypotheses” (1976) puts the matter into historical perspective; the long-headed skulls could be due to “a variety of styles of head deformation, even styles not known recently” (p. 195).

17 T. P. O. Menzies “Northwest Coast Middens” in The Great Fraser Midden (1948) pp. 16–17. Dr. George E. Kidd listed the measurements of the Vancouver Museum holdings in “Report on a Collection of Skulls” Museum and Art Notes (June 1933 Supplement). Cybulski Skeletal Variability in British Columbia Coastal Populations (1975) uses only the skulls in the Field Museum, Chicago, for his Coast Salish sample (p. 34).

18 Donald H. Mitchell Archaeology of the Gulf of Georgia Area, Supplement 1 to Vol. 4 ofSyesis (B.C. Provincial Museum, 1971) p. 69.

19 See Hill-Tout “Later Prehistoric Man”; and Smith in Cairns of British Columbia (1901) p. 65.

20 Mitchell Archaeology of the Gulf of Georgia Area p. 64, figure 17, and p. 72: “The gaps in our knowledge of spatial and temporal distributions are still to be measured in the hundreds of miles and thousands of years; and it is clear that before adequate descriptions of the culture types are possible, and before the processes of culture-type formation can be offered with confidence, many more sites will have to be examined.”

21 Rohner’s The Ethnology of Franz Boas (1969) pp. 125–128 covers Boas’ Fraser River work of 1890, conducted entirely in New Westminster, except for a day trip by boat to Mission to take measurements of Indian schoolchildren. Wayne Suttles remarks in Katzie Ethnographic Notes (1955) that the Stalo region “has been rather neglected” (p. 6): “Boas’ brief paper of 1894 and Hill-Tout’s of 1902 and 1904 are all that we have until very recently on the native tribes of the Lower Fraser Valley. Barnett’s paper of 1938 and unpublished material touch the Musqueam of the mouth of the Fraser but ascend it no farther.” Wilson Duff’s statement in The Upper Stalo Indians (1952) that Hill-Tout “has done the only published work of any significance on the language” (p. 11) has stood unchallenged almost to the present. The work of the modern linguists, as summarized by Laurence C. Thompson in Native Languages of the Americas (1976) pp. 391392, has yet to reach general circulation in print. Oliver Wells’ contribution, though not mentioned by Thompson, is not negligible, and will be discussed below.

22 Rohner The Ethnology of Franz Boas (1969) p. 127: after a week with George Chehalis, Boas wrote to his wife, “At times I feel like giving up the whole trip and letting all the Indians run off.” His portrait of his informant is not flattering. Of the Chehalis stories in Indianische Sagen (1977, pp. 19–14) several are also told by Hill-Tout’s informants, and provide a basis for comparison.

23 Oliver Wells’ tapes amount to over twenty hours of conversation with the older Indians of the Chilliwack area, mainly between 1962 and 1965. Although Wells was not a linguist, he was extremely interested in Halkomelem vocabulary and place-names, and the tapes include much discussion of native words, and a few fine performances of Halkomelem story-telling. One gets a sense of the richness of this material in Wells’ publications, A Vocabulary of Native Words (1965; second edition 1969), Squamish Legends (1966), and Myths and Legends of the Staw-loh Indians (1970).

24 Norman Lerman’s thesis, An Analysis of Folktales of Lower Fraser Indians (University of Washington 1952) should be consulted, not only for the additional stories to be found there, but also for the different versions offered of the same story, and pertinent commentary. At the same time, Legends of the River People edited by Betty Keller from Lerman’s field notes, contains stories, albeit rewritten by the editor, not included in the thesis. Additional stories, not included in either of the above, may be found in Once Upon an Indian Tale, which Lerman published in 1968 in collaboration with Helen S. Carkin.

25 See Rev. Thomas Crosby Among the An-ko-me-hums (Toronto 1907) pp.187–188. The ms. “The Conversion of Capt. John” as narrated by himself and translated by Rev. W. H. Barraclough may be consulted at the Chilliwack Museum.

26 Dr. Jilek in his Salish Indian Mental Health and Culture Change: Psychohygienic and Therapeutic Aspects of the Guardian Spirit Ceremonial (1974) p. 1 gives the figures for new initiations per season as: 1967–68 one; 1968–69 three; 1969–70 four; 1970–71 sixteen; 1971–72 ten. “The drop in initiations during the 1971–72 season was not due to a lack of candidates, as we could verify, but rather to a deliberate effort on the part of the new initiator to limit the number of novices” (pp. 11–12). See also Pamela Amoss Coast Salish Spirit Dancing (1978).

27 See Oliver N. Wells “Return of the Salish Loom” The Beaver Vol. 296, No. 4 (Spring 1966) pp. 40–45, reprinted with additional materials in his Salish Weaving Primitive and Modern (1969). See also Elizabeth Hawkins Indian Weaving Knitting Basketry of the Northwest (1978) p. 8: “In 1961 the late Oliver Wells became vitally interested in the revival of Salish weaving techniques. His research led to the discovery of Mary Peters who was engaged in twine weaving with rags in her home. Through Mr. Wells’ help and encouragement Adeline Lorenzetto and many others learned to twill stitch. Today the Salish Weavers of Coqualeetza near Chilliwack, B.C. have achieved a high degree of excellence and their works of art are again coveted not only by handicraft enthusiasts but by professional designers, architects and collectors.”

28 A profusely illustrated guide to the practising carvers and artists of the Halkomelem area is Reg Ash well’s Coast Salish Their Art, Culture and Legends (1978).

29 I attended as an observer a planning meeting of the Chehalis Reserve School where it was decided that Halkomelem words would be used as often as was reasonably possible, not only in formal language tuition, but in nature study, geography, history and other classes. I am indebted to Dr. Brent Galloway, linguist at the Coqualeetza Indian Education Centre, for sharing with me some of his insights in the area of his expertise.