One time a white man from down below came along this river, asking about baskets. He wanted to know the name of everything. He was kind of crazy, that fellow. They used to call him “Häpó’o,” or “Basket-designs.” He was always asking, “What does that mean?” or “What is the name of that?” He wanted to know all about baskets. He talked to old Louisa for a day and a half about her baskets. Then he came through the fence to my house. I wouldn’t say a word to him, and he went away. My friends won’t talk to Louisa, or her friends. It will be that way forever.
It all goes back to that boy Sär. If he had not talked about Tuley-Creek Jim having only one hand, Jim’s brother-in-law would not have paddled past a house where there was a person lying dead, and his canoe would not have been seized, and there would have been no quarrel about the canoe, and Billy Brooks would not have sworn at anybody, so he would not have had to pay money, and he would not have hired out as a scout to the Government, and the fellow in Redwood Creek would not have been shot, and old Louisa would not have testified about my nephew. To make people pay is all right. That is what always happens when there is a quarrel. But to put my nephew in jail is not right.
I’ll never speak to that old lady again, and neither will any of my people.
T. T. Waterman
Sayach’apis, a Nootka Trader
Tom is a blind old man, whose staff may be heard any day stumping or splashing along the village street of his tribal reservation, or up or down the hillside that slopes to the smoke-drying huts massed by the Somass river. He is an honored member of the Ts’isha’ath, a Nootka tribe that is now permanently located a few miles up from the head of Alberni Canal, the deepest inlet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The Ts’isha’ath fishes and harpoons along the river, the length of the “Canal,” and down among the hundreds of islands that dot Barkley Sound, the first of the large bays north of Cape Beale that are carved out on the stormy coast line of the island.
Tom’s early life was passed at the now abandoned village of Hikwis, whose row of houses looked out upon the main water of the Sound, but for decades he has led an uneventful existence in his river reservation and its vicinity, old summer fishing grounds that were conquered in the first instance by his people from an alien tribe. Within convenient reach are the slowly booming white men’s towns of Alberni and Port Alberni, where one may lay in a supply of biscuits and oranges for a tribal feast, or make periodic complaint to the Indian Agent. Tom is now old and poverty-stricken, but the memory of his former wealth is with his people. The many feasts he has given and the many ceremonial dances and displays he has had performed have all had their desired effect—they have shed luster on his sons and daughters and grandchildren, they have “put his family high” among the Ts’isha’ath tribe, and they have even carried his name to other, distant Nootka tribes, and to tribes on the east coast of the island that are of alien speech. Nowadays he spends much of his time by the fireside, tapping his staff in accompaniment to old ritual tunes that he is never tired of humming.
Tom’s present name is Sayach’apis, Stands-up-high-over-all. It is an old man’s name of eight generations’ standing, that hails from the Hisawist’ath, a now extinct Nootka tribe with which Tom is connected through his father’s mother’s mother, who was herself a Hisawist’ath on her mother’s side. The tribe is extinct, but its personal names, like its songs and legends and distinctive ritualistic ceremonies, linger on among the neighboring tribes through the fine spun network of inheritance. The name “Stands-up-high-over-all,” like practically all Nootka, and indeed all West Coast names, has its legendary background, its own historical warrant. The first Nootka chief to bear the name, obtained it in a dream. He was undergoing ritualistic training in the woods in the pursuit of “power” for the attainment of wealth, and had not slept for a long time. At last he fell into a heavy slumber, and this is what he dreamed: The Sky Chief appeared to him and said, “Why are you sleeping, Stands-up-high-over-all? You are not really desirous of getting wealthy, are you? I was about to make you wealthy and to give you the name Stands-up-high-over-all.” The ironical touch is a characteristic nuance in these origin legends. And so the name, a supernatural gift, was handed down the generations, now by direct male inheritance, now as a dower to a son-in-law, resident at some village remote from its place of origin. This is the normal manner, actually or in theory, of the transmission of all privileges, and though the owner of a privilege may be a villager a hundred miles or more distant from its historical or legendary home, he has not completely established his right to its use unless he has shown himself, directly or by reference to a speaker acquainted with tribal lore, possessed of the origin legend, the local provenance, and the genealogical tree or “historical” nexus that binds him to the individual, that is believed to have been the first to enjoy the privilege.