Kwakwaka'wakw

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Wawadit'la ( Mungo Martin House)

The Kwakiutl or better Kwakwaka'wakw , so the Kwak'wala speaking tribes, are a group of Indian tribes or First Nations in what is now the Canadian province of British Columbia . They live in the northern part of Vancouver Island , on Haida Gwaii and the adjacent mainland. This area is cut up by numerous fjords and is very mountainous, so that settlements could only be built in a few places, often at the mouth of a river or on one of the islands. The Kwakwaka'wakw are related to the Bella Bella (Heiltsuk) .

Your language belongs to the Wakash language family . The name Kwakiutl originally only referred to a group around Fort Rupert , but was for a long time and incorrectly extended to all Kwakwaka'wakw. The Indian agents often called the tribal group Kwakkewlths .

Of the 30 or so ethnic groups that were counted among the Kwakwaka'wakw before the Europeans, 17 still exist today, to which often sub-tribes belong (more indented):

House stake (2nd half of 19th century, Smith Inlet, 3.25 m high), taken from Charles F. Newcombe in 1905; Gift of Max Ernst to the Musée de l'Homme (1975), Louvre, Paris

During the time of the southward raids, especially the southern Kwakwaka'wakw, in the first half of the 19th century, one of the tribes of the coastal Salish , the K'ómoks , even adopted the language of its northern neighbors.

language

The Kwak'wala is one of the Wakash languages . Today there are five dialects: the most widespread is Kwak̕wala, which comes from Kwagu'l (Kwagu'ł), Mam a liliḵ a la, 'N a m g is, Lawitsis (Ławitsis) and A ' w a 'etł a la (D a 'na x da' x w), but also from the Ḵwiḵw a sut̓inu x w is spoken. The dialect is found accordingly in the First Nations of Fort Rupert, Village Island, Cheslakees, Turnour Island, Knight Inlet and Gilford Island.

The G uc̓ala dialect, on the other hand, is spoken by the G usgimukw (Quatsino) and the Gwat̕sinu x w (Winter Harbor). Liq̓ʷala is used by the Wiwēqay̓i (Cape Mudge) and the Wiwēkam (Campbell River), and finally the T̓łat̕łasik̕wala is spoken by the Tlatl a sikw a la-T̓łat̕ł a siḵw a la on Hope Island.

The number of native speakers fell from over 1,000 to around 200 between 1977 and 2007 alone. The language only appears in public at potlatches, funerals and other celebrations, mostly by older speakers. One cause is the St. Michael's Residential School in Alert Bay , which was maintained between the 1920s and the 1970s . The use of the language was strictly forbidden there, as in all residential schools in Canada . The other cause is the decline of culture and, above all, the disadvantage caused by the use of the language that has declined in reputation. However, based on previous experience with other indigenous languages, Kwak'wala can only be saved from extinction through individual efforts, regular use in a group that is unified in this regard, overcoming one's own prejudices and pointing the way back to the past (as accurate as they may be).

Culture

Totem pole owned by Kwak'wala Chief Tony Hunt

Traditionally, the Kwakwaka'wakw were divided into about thirty independent groups. Their society was organized into three classes determined by heredity: nobility, common people, and slaves. They lived mainly from fishing, while the men hunted and the women gathered wild fruits and berries. They created weaving, mainly from bast fibers and hair from mountain goats, and wood carvings. Wealth determined by slaves and material goods was prominently displayed and given away to potlatches . The customs of the Kwakwaka'wakw were studied by the ethnologist Franz Boas and were the basis of his theories on exogamy and totemism .

Ritual mask of the Kawakwaka'wakw, 19th century

The clothing consisted of fibers of the red cedar, the giant tree of life , as well as hair of the mountain goat. Men of the upper class were the only ones to wear furs; otter pelts were reserved for the most highly placed men and women, with women generally not wearing furs. Moccasins , a hat and a kind of raincoat served as protection against the frequent rain and the cold. The pointed hat was adopted by the Haida after Curtis around 1860 . The aristocratic class also wore earrings and nose rings .

The Kwakwaka'wakw lived in plank houses with large house stakes. However, these were carved much less often before about 1865 than afterwards. A characteristic of the sculpture and painting of the Kwakwaka'wakw as well as that of the neighboring peoples is the use of ovoids .

The most honorable place was at the end of the house across from the front door. Since in principle the right to log wood lay with certain families, who generally also provided the chiefs, whose position was hereditary, the latter had to be asked to provide wood when building a house. Canoes were also built from this material, and they were almost the only way to cover longer distances in the rough terrain. The trees were often not felled, but only cut out as much wood as necessary (see Culturally Modified Trees ). In addition to the canoes, a kind of catamaran was also built, with a simple sailing technique made of mats or boards. For this purpose, two canoes were connected to each other. The canoe walls were often richly carved.

The production of mats, baskets and also items of clothing was based on bast, especially the yellow cedar or Nootka false cypress . To do this, the bark was cut into strips and placed in salt water until the bark sank. After wringing out and hammering with a wooden club, the fibers were soft and could be processed. The red cedar was used more for baskets and mats because its fibers remained harder. Even harder or more elastic baskets were made from branches and roots. But mats were also exchanged or stolen from materials that only the coastal Salish could produce, or whose materials were not available from the Kwakwaka'wakw.

Chief of the Nakoaktok with copper, an extremely sought-after barter, in his arms, Edward Curtis 1914

Many villages had some kind of fortress into which the residents could retreat in the event of an attack. Their weapons consisted of bows and arrows, war clubs, slings and spears. Bear bones or elk antlers were often used as projectile tips . Armless, tanned raffia clothes served as body protection, but grizzly or puma furs were better . A kind of scale armor made of wooden shingles was also in use.

In contrast to the Nuu-chah-nulth , the Kwakwaka'wakw were less specialized in whales than in seals and fish, especially salmon , herring and candle fish . A butter-like type of fat was obtained from the latter, which lasted a long time and was transported as a commercial product over long distances. In this way, tribes who had no access to the candle fish also got hold of the coveted fat and exchanged them for salmon, furs or leather, for example. The well-known fishing spots basically belonged to certain families who could also give the fishing rights to different tribes or house groups. Halibut was one of the fish that tended to be caught on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island . When their price rose sharply (around 100 steaks per dollar around 1890, only 20 in 1910), the Quatsino in particular benefited, but other halibut hunters also benefited. Mamalilikulla and Wikeno were more likely to benefit from mussels. For the Europeans the fur trade was more productive from the beginning, whereby the Kwakwaka'wakw also hunted bears, otters, beavers, mountain goats and other fur animals. Wolves and orcas were not hunted because it was believed that hunters lived on in them.

history

Dancers with Hamatsa masks, Edward Curtis 1914
Kwakwaka'wakw figure, 19th century

With the beginning of the fur trade on the Pacific coast after James Cook's expeditions (1778), European weapons increasingly came into the hands of a few peoples. In 1843, the Hudson's Bay Company also established a trading post near the Kwakwaka'wakw. Modern weapons made it possible for the tribes to go on extensive raids in the north, during which they mainly captured slaves. Around 1850 there were about 23 tribes on the northern Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland. But illnesses, which were a further result of direct contact with European traders, dramatically reduced the number of Kwakwaka'wakw by 1900; in 1906 it was still 1,257. In 1780 around 4,500 Kwakwaka'wakw are believed to have lived. The population has only increased again since the middle of the 20th century. Today they number again around 5,000 people, of whom around 200 still speak their traditional language.

literature

  • Robert Galois: Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw settlements, 1775–1920. A geographical analysis and gazetteer (= Northwest Native Studies. 1). With contributions by Jay Powell and Gloria Cranmer Webster (on behalf of the U'mista Cultural Center, Alert Bay, British Columbia). UBC Press et al., Vancouver et al. 1994, ISBN 0-7748-0397-5 .

See also

Web links

Commons : Kwakwaka'wakw  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ After the overview on: [1] .
  2. ↑ On the importance of slavery on the North American Pacific coast between Alaska and the Columbia River cf. Leland Donald: Aboriginal slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1997, ISBN 0-520-20616-9 .
  3. ^ Edward S. Curtis : The North American Indian. Volume 10: The Kwakiutl. ES Curtis et al., Seattle WA et al. 1915, p. 5.
  4. ↑ Curtis photographed such a tree: A "begged-from" cedar.
  5. ↑ This map shows the areas of the Kwakwaka'wakw around 1850: Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw tribes: territories and villages, c. 1850.