Kwakwakaʼwakw

Like, even on the island here, there's, like, Coast Salish people are on the, like, southeastern part of the island.

The west coast of the island is Kwakwaka'w or, sorry, Nuu-chah-neth people.

And then on the northeastern part of the island is Kwakwaka'w people.

And then in Vancouver, all around Vancouver area, is Coast Salish all the way down into like Seattle kind of area too.

So it's like a real like Coast Salish sport, the war canoe.

So in exploring kind of a subtle state, I find there's something very, very impactful of being able to tap into geologic time.

And so it's something that I do when I'm taking guests on trips in the Brown Archipelago is is I speak to the fact that Europeans first, George Vancouver traveled through there about 300 years ago, but the Kwakwaka people have been there probably 13,000.

The reason it's such a rich country air rich area for marine life is because it's such deep glacier carved channels which was carved over between 12 000 and and 2 million years ago and then you kind of speak to the evolutionary history of orcas you know evolutionary developing five million years ago and and having the brain capacity to work together in um in coordination versus you know humpback whales developing 10 million years ago and evolving to take in large amounts of low trophic level feed.

And there's something, you know, so powerful at being able to visualize longer timescales in that because previously 300 years, you know, it's 300 years a long time ago.

We are recording today on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish and Kwakwaka'wakw peoples, including Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, Musqueam, and Komoq's First Nations.

[singing] Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

Da.

I played on it myself as a child, when my family would visit Hornby in the summer months, as tourists.

Hornby Island, or by its traditional Ayuttham name, Jatayich, sits approximately in the middle of a vast archipelago in the Salish Sea, set between two bodies of land commonly known as Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, and at a traditional meeting point between the Kwakwaka'wakw people to the north and Coast Salish people to the south.

To the east of Hornby is Tekseda, or Siyuyin Island, located on the traditional territory of the Tla'amin, Shishah, Comox, and Wewakam nations, and Laskiti, or Hwa'aitai Island, part of Qualicum, Halalt, Tla'amin, and Tsunamook territory.

And to Hornby's west is Denman Island, or Sladaich, and a bit north, Courtney Comox, all of which, along with Hornby Island, Jadaich, form part of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Comox First Nation.

The villages are more prominent and stable than among the central Californians.

The village communities might be said to represent clans, but as there is nothing resembling a totemic or gentile name, and no requirement of exogamy, and as the numerous local legends refer not to the ancestors of the people of that place, but to the place itself, and moreover are known to the entire group or stock, and not only to the inhabitants of one village, it must be recognized that these village communities are quite different from clans such as are found among the Haida or Iroquois, or Pueblos, or even the Kwakiutl or the Blackfeet.

It is very probable that the same type of social organization prevailed along the coast northward for some distance, and that the jientes of the Atabaskans of Oregon described by J. O. Dorsey are nothing more or less than village communities.

There is in this region a reminiscence of the North Pacific coast in the importance of wealth as a factor in society.

And this is where I want to bring up a real practice, because I don't want this to feel theoretical.

The Kwakwaka'wakw, Haida, and Tlingit peoples of the Pacific Northwest had a ceremony called the Potlatch.

You've probably heard the word.

Finally, big feasts giving stuff away.

The obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to repay.

And Mauss studied the Kwakwaka'wakw potluck as his central example.

This is the ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.

and in the potlatch.