Second in importance to fish are the various varieties of edible shellfish and other soft bodied inhabitants of the sea—mussels and clams and sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and octopuses. The flesh of the octopus or “devil-fish,” though not an important article of food, was considered quite a dainty, and feasts were often given in which it figured as a special feature, like crab apples or like the apples or oranges of present-day feasts. Far more important than these mushy foods, though probably subsidiary, on the whole, to salmon and other fish, was the flesh of sea mammals—the humpbacked whale, the California whale, the sea otter, the sea lion, and, most important of all, the hair seal.
Tom has harpooned his fill of seals in the course of his life and, like most other Nootka men of the last generation, has done a considerable amount of commercial sealing for white firms in Behring Sea. He has caught a few sea otters, which are now all but extinct, but no sea lions or whales, though he claims to have the hereditary privilege to hunt these animals, and to possess the indispensable magical knowledge without which their quest is believed by the Nootka to be doomed to failure.
Boiled whale and seal meat were highly prized and there was no more joyous event to break the monotony of tribal life than the towing to shore of a harpooned whale, or the drifting to shore of a whale carcass. In either case the flensing knives were quickly got ready, the carcass cut up, and feasts held in the village. Tom remembers how excitedly—he was then but a boy of ten or so—he once reported the appearance of a drifting whale carcass a quarter-mile from shore, how the whole village rushed into its canoes, and how they laboriously floated it on to the sandy beach, with their stout lanyards of cedar rope wound with nettle-fiber. The whale was cut up carefully, under the direction of a “measurer” into its traditionally determined portions, which were then distributed, according to hereditary right, to those entitled to receive them. Tom himself got the meat about the navel as a reward for his find. There was an unusual amount of whale oil tried out that time, and the fires at the feasts leaped higher than ever as the oil was thrown upon them, lighting up in lurid flashes the house posts carved into the likenesses of legendary ancestors.
Tom ate very little meat of land animals in his early days. Indeed, like most of the Coast people, he had a prejudice against deer meat and it was not until, as a middle-aged man, he had come into contact with some of the deer-hunting tribes of the interior of the island, that he learned to prize it, though even to this day venison has not for him the toothsome appeal of a chunk of whale meat. Fish and meat were the staples, yet not the only foods. The women dug up a variety of edible roots such as clover and fern root, which made a welcome change, while blackberries, salmon berries, soapberries, and other varieties, frequently dried and pressed for winter consumption, added a sweetening to the somewhat monotonous fare. One relish Tom has never learned to enjoy—salt. All the older Nootka Indians detest salt in their food.
As Tom grew up, he became initiated into the chief handicrafts of his tribe. He got to be rather skillful at working in wood, both the soft red cedar and the hard yew and spiræa, familiarizing himself with the various wood-working processes—felling trees with wedges and stone hammers, splitting out planks, smoothing with adzes, drilling, handling the curved knife, steaming, and bending by the “kerfing” or notching process. Even in his youngest years, iron-bladed and iron-pointed tools had almost completely replaced the aboriginal implements of stone and shell, but the forms themselves, of the manufactured objects, underwent little or no modification down to the present day. In the course of his long life Tom has made hundreds of wooden articles of use—boxes with telescoping lids, paddles, bailers, fish clubbers, adze handles, ladles, bows, arrow shafts, fire drills, latrines, root diggers, fish spears, and shafts for sealing and whaling harpoons. He has also assisted in making dugout canoes, and has often prepared and put in position the heavy posts and beams of the large quadrangular houses that were still being built in his youth. On the other hand, Tom has never developed much aptitude in the artistic decoration of objects. Such things as paintings on house boards and paddles, or realistic carvings in masks, rattles, ornamental fish clubbers and house posts, are rather beyond his power and have had to be made for him, when required, by others more clever than himself. The one thing that Tom grew to be most proficient in was the preparation of house planks of desired lengths and widths. When he was a young man, he would travel about in canoes from village to village with the stock of planks he had on hand, and trade them for blankets, strings of dentalium shells, dried fish, whale oil, and other exchangeable commodities. It was through trading, rather than through personal success in fishing or hunting, that Tom amassed in time a considerable share of wealth, and it was through his wealth and the opportunity it gave him to make lavish distributions at potlatches or feasts, rather than through nobility of blood, that he came to occupy his present honorable position among his tribesmen.
While Tom and the other men, when they were not busy “potlatching” or visiting some relative, or taking a run down to Victoria, were engaged in fishing and sea mammal hunting and wood-working, the women prepared the food, dug for edible roots, gathered clams, and spent what time they could spare from these and similar tasks in the weaving and plaiting of blankets, matting, and baskets. What receptacles were not of wood were of basketry, while mats of various sorts did duty for tables, hangings, and carpeting. The materials of these baskets and mats, the omnipresent cedar bark and the rush, frayed easily, so that the women were kept constantly busy replenishing the household stock. Even now one can hardly enter a Nootka house without seeing one or more of the women twilling mats and baskets with strips of softened cedar bark or twining the cedar-bark strands into cordage and bags, or threading a rush mat with the long needles of polished spiræa. In the old days, there was always in the house a great clatter of breaking up the raw, yellow cedar bark with the corrugated bark beaters of bone of whale, and of loosening up the hard strips of red cedar bark into fibrous masses with the half-moon shredders. The women could work up the bark into almost any degree of fineness; indeed, the cedar-bark “wool” that was used to pad the cradles is almost as soft and fluffy in feel as down or cotton batting. When Tom was a boy, the women made only plain, unornamented baskets, whether twined or twilled, and ornamented the mats with sober, but effective lines of alder-dyed red and mud-dyed black. Since then, however, they have taken to making also trinket baskets and plaques of the peculiar wrapped weave, beautifully ornamented with realistic and geometrical designs in the black and white weft of grass. This art came to Tom’s people from the Nitinats or Southern Nootka, who in turn owe it to the Makah of Cape Flattery. Trade with the whites is the chief incentive in the making of these finer specimens of basketry.
Nowadays the Nootka live in small frame houses, a family, in our narrower sense of the word, to a house. It was not so when Tom was young. The village of Hikwis, in which he was raised, consisted of a row of long plank houses, each constructed on a heavy quadrangular frame of posts, which were the trimmed trunks of cedars, and of crossbeams of circular section resting on the posts. The roofing and walls were of cedar planks, running lengthwise of the house. The floor was the bare earth, stamped smooth, and a slightly raised platform ran along the rear and the long sides of the house. On the inner floor one or more fires were built, the smoke escaping through openings in the roof, provided by merely shoving a roofing plank or two to a side. Tom early learned not to stand erect in the house any more than he could help. The smoke circulating in the upper reaches of the house, particularly in rainy weather when the smoke-hole rafters were closed, was trying to the eyes, and people found it convenient to sit or crouch on the floor as much as possible. Some of the houses, like the one in which Tom was brought up, had paintings or carvings referring to the crests or legendary escutcheons of the chief of the tribe, tribal subdivision, or house group. In Tom’s house the main escutcheons were two Thunder-birds, face to face, painted on the outside of the wall planks; a series of round holes cut in the roof, and one in front that served as a door, all representing moons; and paintings of wolves on the boards that ran below the platforms. The chief of the house group, together with his immediate family, occupied the rear of the house; other families of lesser rank, kin to the chief by junior lines of descent, occupied various positions along the sides. Slaves were also housed in the long communal dwelling. They were not, like the middle class, undistinguished relations of the chief’s families, but strangers, captured in war or bartered off like any chattels. The mat beds of the individual families were made on the platforms and were screened off from one another as required.
In such a house Tom early learned his exact relationship to all his kinsmen. He soon learned also the degree of his relationship to the neighboring house groups. He applied the terms “brother” and “sister” not only to his immediate brothers and sisters but to his cousins, near and remote, of the same generation. He distinguished, among all these remoter brothers and sisters, “older” and “younger,” not according to their actual ages in relation to his own, but according to whether they belonged to lines of descent that were senior or junior to his own. Primogeniture, he gradually learned, both of self and progenitor, meant superiority in rank and privilege. Hence the terms “older” and “younger,” almost from the beginning, took on a powerful secondary tinge of “superior” and “inferior.” The absurdity of calling some little girl cousin, perhaps ten years his junior, his “older sister” was for him immensely less evident because of his ever present consciousness of her higher rank. As Tom grew older, he became cognizant of an astonishing number of uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, of endless brothers-in-law—far and near. He was very much at home in the world. Wherever he turned, he could say, “Younger brother, come here!” or “Grandfather, let me have this.” The personal names of most of his acquaintances were hardly more than tags for calling out at a distance, or at ceremonial gatherings.
Along with his feeling of personal relationship to individuals there grew up in Tom a consciousness of the existence of tribal subdivisions in the village. The Ts’isha’ath tribe, with which he was identified by residence, kinship, and upbringing, proved really to be a cluster of various smaller tribal units, of which the Ts’isha’ath, that gave their name to the whole, were the leading group. The other subdivisions were originally independent tribes that had lost their isolated distinctness through conquest, weakening in numbers, or friendly removal and union. Each of the tribal subdivisions or “septs” had its own stock of legends, its distinctive privileges, its own houses in the village, its old village sites and distinctive fishing and hunting waters that were still remembered in detail by its members. While the septs now lived together as a single tribe, the basis of the sept division was really a traditional local one. The sept grouping was perhaps most markedly brought to light at ceremonial gatherings. Tom learned in time that of all the honored seats recognized at a feast, a certain number of contiguous seats in the rear of the house belonged to representatives of the Ts’isha’ath sept, a certain number of others at the right corner in the rear to those of another sept, and so on. Thus, the proper ranking of the septs was ever kept before the eye by the definite assignment of seats of higher and lower rank.
But it must not be supposed that Tom’s childhood and youth were spent entirely in work and in the acquirement of social and ceremonial knowledge. On the contrary, what interested him at least as much as sociology was play. He spun his tops—rather clumsy looking, two-pegged tops they were—threw his gaming spears in the spear and grass game and in the hoop-rolling game, hit feathered billets with a flat bat, threw beaver teeth dice (though this was chiefly a woman’s game), and, when he grew older, took part in the favorite game of “lehal,” the almost universal Western American guessing game, played with two or four gambling bones to the accompaniment of stirring songs. More properly belonging to the domain of sport was the somewhat dangerous game of canoe-upsetting, in which the contestants upset their canoes and quickly righted them at a hand-clap signal. This was an especially favored game of Tom’s. All through his life, up to the time that he lost his sight, he was as instinctively familiar with the run of water, the dip and lurch of a canoe, and the turn of a paddle, as with the movements of walking on the land. Indeed, for days on end, at certain seasons, his life flowed on insistently to the very rhythm of rising and falling wave.