Lower Skagit
The Lower Skagit , also called Whidbey Island Skagit or simply Skagit , are an Indian tribe living in the northwest of the US state Washington . Their traditional area was in the central part of Whidbey Island and on the northern branch of the Chehalis estuary .
Way of life and culture
Like all coastal salish , the Lower Skagit carried out seasonal migrations depending on vegetation cycles and increased numbers of salmon and game. This change of location meant that permanent houses, known as plank houses, were only moved into in winter. With their canoes they traded along the coasts, but through this trade they also brought in European diseases such as smallpox .
Before 1861, John Work, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company , describes the Skagit as being friendly, good-looking people who flatten their heads very slightly compared to the Chinooks . They were also little dressed, mostly in feather clothing or fur clothing .
Relations with the groups that lived on the upper Skagit were less close, but there were close relationships with the Noo-wha-ha , who are still not recognized as a tribe.
The traditional area of the Lower Skagit comprised around 50,000 acres on Whidbey Island and a further 6,000 acres on the mainland (together around 228 km²), more precisely at Skagit Bay from the mouth of Brown's Slough to north of the mouth of the northern arm of the Skagit .
language
The Lower Skagit speak a dialect of the southwestern coastal Salish , the Lushootseed . Two linguistic groups adjoin one another on the Skagit River, on the one hand the North Straits Salish - including the Klallam , Lummi , Samish and Semiahmoo - and on the other hand the Lushootseed , which includes the Lower Skagit, Snohomish , Snoqualmie , Swinomish and the Upper Skagit .
The Lushootseed is one of the polysynthetic languages . It is rich in consonants and has one and a half times as many sounds as a European language.
history
As early as 6500 BC Chr. Human life can be proven on the Skagit River, more precisely in today's Ross Lake National Recreation Area . In this protected area, many trees have escaped logging, so that so-called Culturally Modified Trees , i.e. trees that have been modified by human activity, can be identified that show indigenous traces of use. In 1989 IC Franck found a tree with traces of this kind dating from 1853 and a storage area at a height of approx. 1800 m.
In the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries, the Lower Skagit suffered from raids by northern tribes who came down from the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska , but also fought over land with the Klallam .
When the British founded Fort Langley on the Fraser River as a trading post in 1827 , the Lower Skagit began trading with them. In 1833 the Hudson's Bay Company founded Fort Nisqually on southern Puget Sound , which was much closer to the Lower Skagit.
In the early 1840s, Catholic priests began missionary work among the Skagit. When their chief S'neet-lum died in 1853, according to the ethnologist George Gibbs, the Skagit had lost much of their former reputation.
Given the fact that the tribe had little to counter the influx of settlers, Chief Goliah signed the Treaty of Point Elliott on January 22, 1855 . The 300 tribal members were assigned to the Tulalip Agency and had to relocate to the Swinomish reserve by executive order of September 9, 1873 . The descendants of this group merged into the Swinomish tribe.
The authorities referred to the individual local groups (villages) as tribes (tribes), although the delimitations were by no means as clear as is often assumed. On the one hand, the many villages were closely related to one another, so that individuals often belonged to two groups via their parents and correspondingly more groups via their grandparents. On the other hand, they also formed permanent alliances under a common chief. One of them, Satbabutkin, led the combined Skagit and Samish in the Concrete area . He was also the son of Noo-wha-ha chief Pateus, whose tribe was probably destroyed by the first smallpox epidemic on the Pacific coast. Pateus in turn lived at Bay View in the east of Padilla Bay opposite the city of Anacortes .
The tribe originally received only $ 25,331.50 for the land abandoned in 1855 . Its fair value at the time was estimated 120 years later at $ 100,188. The difference was paid to the Skagit following a decision by the Indian Claims Commission on October 13, 1971.
The descendants of the Lower Skagit have risen today in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community on the Swinomish Reservation in Washington State.
literature
- Hartmut Krech (ed.): The Skagit, hunters and fishermen of the northwest coast , in: IndianerLeben, Indian women and men tell their lives , Norderstedt: Books on Demand 2009, pp. 217–250. ISBN 978-3-8391-1047-8
- Robert H. Ruby / John A. Brown: A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest , Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1992, pp. 107-109, 231-233.
See also
Remarks
- ^ Ian Christian Franck, An Archeological Investigation of the Galene Lakes Area in the Skagit Range of the North Cascade Mountains, Skagit Valley Park, British Columbia, BA University of Alberta 1989, pp. 67, 78f.