The Terror of the Coast. Chris Arnett
10 Upon completion of his work, Heel’s left the earth and, over time, with the retreat of the glaciers and the stabilization of the present land mass, the seasonal cycles of resource extraction by Hul’qumi’num First Nations became established.
Nowhere else, in what is now British Columbia, was food procurable in such variety and abundance. People accessed these resources throughout the year. As elder Henry Edwards explains:
Some things are ready at a certain time of year and that’s when you go and get them. It was like that on Salt Spring Island. People would go when that food was ready. They went in the springtime and the summer, even winter. That’s where they got their groceries. 11
The preservation of large quantities of food during the bountiful months of summer, supplemented by localized resources, allowed the occupation of year-round village sites and the development, over at least 5,000 years, of a complex society. 12
The ancestor Syalutsa’ and other first people established villages on the Cowichan River and its delta. 13 They called themselves Cowichan after the mountain which looms to the east of the river delta and resembles a great frog “basking in the sun,” or squw’utsun’. 14 House sites on the delta fluctuated with the changes in the river but by the time of first contact with Hwunitum, over a dozen villages and house sites including the major settlements of Clemclemalits, Taitka, Comiaken, Quamichan, Khenipsen and Somenos, occupied the shores of Cowichan Bay or the banks of the Cowichan River. 15 Individual families owned fish weirs on the river but hunting and food-gathering on the delta was accessible to all.
Beyond the river and the delta, individual Cowichan families owned land and resources on the south end of Salt Spring Island from Hwaaqwum to Tsuween and on various Gulf Islands at Hwes’hwum, Sqtheq and elsewhere. 16 Food and other resource gathering sites extended across the Gulf of Georgia to such places as Theethuts’ton on the lower Fraser River where the majority of Cowichan people migrated every summer, to fish the great runs of sockeye salmon. 17
To the north of the Cowichan, a closely-related group of people occupy villages on the east coast of Vancouver Island and the adjacent Gulf Islands of Kuper, Galiano and Valdez. These people claim descent from Stutsun and other ancestors who fell from the sky onto the mountain Skwaakwnus overlooking the Chemainus River delta. 18 The Hwunitum call them “Chemainus,” but the people refer to themselves individually by the names of their winter villages—Halalt, Chemainus, Sickameen, Taitka (Lyacksen), Penelakut, Yuhwula’us or Lamalcha. Families from these villages at one time controlled various lands and resources on the east coast of Vancouver Island from Sthihum to Kwhwuyt and throughout the Gulf Islands. 19 Just as the Cowichan River was the focus of much economic activity for the Cowichan people, the smaller Chemainus River (Silaqwa’l) was a focus for food and other resource gathering for Hul’qumi’num First Nations. Families from Penelakut owned aerial duck nets and fish sites on Bonsall Creek, but the tidal flats and resources at the mouth of the river were shared by all. Upriver, resources and hunting grounds were said to be used exclusively by Halalt, Sickameen, and Chemainus families only. 20 On the islands, Lamalcha and Penelakut families controlled access to certain lands and resources on both sides of Trincomali Channel from Sqthaqa’l to Kulman, including the north end of Salt Spring Island from stulan on the west side to Shiyahwt on the east, and all of Galiano Island. 21 Taitka (closely related to the Cowichan village of the same name) controlled Valdez Island and shared with the Penelakut the annual sealion hunt at Porlier Pass. 22 All of these people crossed the Gulf of Georgia each summer to Hwlitsum (Canoe Pass), on the south arm of the Fraser River Delta, Tluktinus, and further up the river at Qiquyt, to fish the sockeye. 23
Ancestral Mountains Swuqus (left) and Skwaakwnus overlooking Chemainus Valley.
Photo by Barbara Arnett
Penelakut, Kuper Island, 1983, looking towards Valdez Island, Porlier Pass and Galiano Island. The old village occupied the shoreline at one end of Penelakut Spit where foundations and one longhouse remain.
Photo by Chris Arnett
Housepost at Penelakut village with carved representation of ancestor.
Photo by Elouise Street-Harises, 1924. Courtesy of Vancouver Museum, PN 12
The Hul’qumi’num First Nations of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands lived in villages ranging in size from one to fifteen large rectangular houses constructed of cedar posts and beams covered with split cedar planks. Each house contained one or more nuclear families which occupied its own section, referred to as lelum’unup, or ‘the place where you are from.” 24 Together these nuclear families of brothers, cousins and brothers-in-law living in one great house formed the hw’nuchalewum, or house group, the “highest unit of common allegiance” within the village. 25
Despite shared ancestry, name and identification with a localized territory, the village was not an isolated, self-contained social unit under a single leader, but a loose alliance of hw’nuchalewum which might co-operate in food-gathering activities, labour exchange, or mutual defence. However, as anthropologist Wayne Suttles explains, “they were not obliged to do so by any formal village organization. There was no office of village chief and no village council. Co-operation was ad hoc. Leadership was for specific purposes and was exercised by virtue of specific skills, property rights, or supposed superhuman powers.” 26
The institution of marriage connected hw’nuchalewum to house groups in other villages throughout the territories of Hul’qumi’num First Nations and beyond. As a result, “individual and family status was as dependent upon ties of marriage and kinship with other villages as upon economic rights and traditional identity with one’s own village.” 27 These intervillage ties constituted the Hwulmuhw community more so than the village itself.
Hul’qumi’num First Nations evolved a society divided into three distinct levels of status. 28 The majority of people were considered to be “high class people,” individually addressed as si’em. The si’em descended from distinguished ancestors from whom they inherited important names which came with rights and privileges, including access to certain lands and resources. The si’em greatly outnumbered the commoners, or stashum, “low class” people who had “lost their history” and “had no claim to the most productive resources of the area and no claim to recognized inherited privileges.” 29 The stashum often lived in separate houses in their own section of the village or in a different location altogether where they remained subservient to the “high class” people. 30 Slaves, or skwuyuth, persons captured in war or purchased, were few in number and lived in the houses of the wealthy where they were regarded as private property.
Si’em owned the property rights to the most productive food gathering areas in the surrounding countryside, but high status came from the sharing of food. Their rights and privileges were validated through the cultural institution of stlun’uq, or potlatch, an occasion when people from other villages were invited by a host hw’nuchalewum “to receive gifts of wealth to validate changes of status and exercise inherited privileges.” 31 Suttles writes that the stlun’uq:
... played an important part within this system of sharing access to resources. By potlatching, a group established its status vis-à-vis other groups, in effect saying “we are an extended family (or village of several extended families) with title to such-and-such a territory having such-and-such resources.” And when a leading member assumed a name that harked back to the beginning of the world when the ancestors of the group first appeared on the spot, this not only demonstrated the validity of the group’s title but perhaps also announced in effect “this is the man in charge of our resources.” 32
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