The Siwash, Their Life, Legends, and Tales: Puget Sound and Pacfic Northwest

by J. A. Costello

The Indian lands are patented to him but are owned in severalty and there are many creditable places at Skokomish. There is assigned to a single Indian from 80 to 170 acres according to whether the land may be all valley or partially hills. No matter how much or how little land an Indian may possess, he seldom, if ever, gets beyond the point of a small truck farmer. If he happens to get under cultivation an area that would by a stretch of the imagination take the name of a field, he is most sure to let out the land to a white farmer on an annual cash basis. There are a few such cultivated fields at Skokomish. A farmer, whether Indian or white, whose insane desire for gambling will lead him to spend a whole night out in the woods chanting the monotonous song of the “sing-gamble” pot-latch, at harvest time is not expected to prove a howling success as a granger.

In another generation if there are any Twana Indians left they will probably rate as first-class farmers, for the government is progressing very well in the matter of training them. The children attend school ten months in the year, have good instructors chosen from the whites, and the boys have over them a special instructor whose duty it is to see that they work half of every week-day with a view of acquiring methodical and industrious habits. This is abhorrent to the tender Indian mind, but as the entire education of the Twana youth is one of the charity undertakings of the government and does not cost the old folks a cent, they seem to like it and force their youngsters to attend. The maintenance of the schools is kept up by yearly appropriations and could be cut off any time if the government cared to do so. In that case the little Twana might be permitted to spring up as unconscious of the future as the weeds that infest the door-yard and garden patch of every Indian domicile. However, among the Twanas there is already a fair standard of rudimentary education acquired, for every Indian below 30 years of age can read and write English, and all under 40 can talk the language. The true specimens of the savage ancestors are the old men and women yet living, who cannot, rather will not, admit to any knowledge of the English.

The Indian here is an obdurate, slow-moving being. He will begin a thing but complete it in a year, or ten years, or never, just as the notion takes him. At this time the residents have in mind the construction of a new church. They have gone so far in the undertaking as to have secured the lumber and floated it from the mill up the river and piled it upon the bank of the stream on the reservation.

“We got it long time ago,” said one fellow, “to build a new church, but don’t know whether we will ever build it or not.”

The vicinity of the old lumber pile now seems to be a favorite rendesvous for the inveterate “sing-gamble” players, for they ride there from all directions at night time. They light camp fires and, forming a large circle around it, go through their uncanny practices until the cocks crow for morning. All the male population of the reservation over age are voters under the constitution of the United States. They cast their first vote at the election for delegates to the state constitutional convention after the passage by Congress of the enabling act. The reservation has been set off in a precinct by itself, and by this the Indians elect their own justices of the peace and petty officers without the interference of the whites and without having anything to do themselves with the election of officers to govern the white people.

In the very nature of things the Chinook and mother tongues will, in a few years more, be unknown on the reservation. So rapidly is this coming about that at this time half the conversation of the reservation is carried on in English, even when all engaged in it are Indians. At their sing-gamble and other Indian ceremonies English is as much spoken as their own tongue. Superstition will only die out of the Indian mind when the last of the race as dead and gone. On the banks of the lovely Skokomish it would seem that superstition could have no abiding place. Yet it is there today as it probably has been in all the past thousands of years. The beneficent influence of the white man’s religion has superceded it in its outer and practical application, it is only a few years ago when the efficacy of the red and black “ta-mahn-a-wis” was thought to be greater than all the religions of the pale faces in the world.

There were four kinds of ta-mahn-a-wis, sometimes spelled ta-mahn-o-us, or spirit practices in vogue among the Twanas as there were among the great family of Selish Indians in Washington, which included most all, but not all, the tribes from the Spokane river to Cape Flattery, all understanding in part a common language. The Cape Indians and Yakimas are two of the exceptions to the above, according to some of the best informed men on the subject. The word ta-mahn-a-wis may be and was used in the sense of a noun, an adjective or a verb. As a noun it means any kind of a spirit in the spirit world from the Sahg-ha-lie Tyee, or supreme being—sahg-ha-lie meaning greatest, highest, above—to the klail ta-mahn-a-wis, or devil, literally, black spirit.

As an adjective a ta-mahn-a-wis stick, stone, person, etc., is a thing or individual with a ta-mahn-a-wis or spirit either of good or evil in it. As a verb it is used in the sense of invoking the aid of spirits, as “mah-mok ta-mahn-a-wis.”

The four kinds of ta-mahn-a-wis of the Indians of the Twana tribe at least are: The “ta-mahn-a-wis over the sick,” the incantations of the medicine men; the “red ta-mahn-a-wis,” the “black ta-mahn-a-wis,” and the “spirit land ta-mahn-a-wis.”